Creative Writing Alumni
VCU Department of English

The MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University graduated its first class in 1985 and to date has nearly 200 alumni. Of those, eleven have gone on to earn doctorates (several more are currently enrolled in doctoral programs); one has finished law school; one is a dentist, another an MD. At last count, thirteen of the alumni are tenured faculty at such varied institutions as Eastern Michigan University, the University of Illinois, Old Dominion University, Xavier University of New Orleans, the University of Oklahoma, and VCU itself. More than thirty are teaching as full-time or adjunct faculty at community colleges, colleges, or universities. Ten more are teaching at private or public high schools. Two more run computer centers in English departments at major universities. One administers a graduate creative writing program.

It’s safe to say, then, that students leave the program prepared either to continue their education or to teach. But the greatest measure of the strength of a writing program is, and should be, the success of its writers as writers.

Among the program's poets, ten have published a total of fouteen full-length collections; several others have published chapbooks, some award winning. Poetry alumni have recently won the Crab Orchard Award Series, the Anhinga Press Poetry Prize, and National Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America. Two more have recently placed full-length collections with major presses. These and other of the program's poets have published and continue to publish their work in such venues as American Poetry Review, Cream City Review, Sonora Review, Ploughshares, Connecticut Review, Georgia Review, Chelsea, Bloomsbury Review, Shenandoah, Southern Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and others. Several have received Pushcart Prize nominations. One edits a major literary journal and is a personal assistant to Toni Morrison. Three more have edited a collection of published and unpublished works by the late poet and program faculty member Larry Levis (The Gazer Within: Selected Essays by Larry Levis, University of Michigan 2000).

Among the program's fiction writers, eleven have published a total of nineteen novels (one an Oprah Winfrey book club selection, another the basis for a BBC mini-series, and two more recently optioned for TV/movie rights). Two more have recently placed their work with well-known literary agents. These and several others have had their short stories, novel excerpts, or essays appear in such publications as Meridian, Glimmer Train, failbetter, Indiana Review, Iowa Review, Yale Review, 13th Moon, GSU Review, Quarterly West, Lynx Eye, Oyster Boy Review, and The Source. Two have won Pushcart Prizes, and one recently won Jane magazine's fiction contest. In addition, two others have placed book-length works of nonfiction with New York agents, three more have completed book-length works of nonfiction (the latest Snake Hips: Belly Dancing and How I Found True Love, Chicago Review Press 2002); another works as a columnist for a major DC newspaper, and yet another publishes a successful regional weekly in Virginia.

Finally, although playwriting is not an official track in the program, it does have a playwright on faculty, and three of its graduates have recently won prestigious honors—from the Southern Appalachian Repertory Theatre, the Actors Theatre of Louisville, and Romania’s Sibiu International Theatre Festival.