The following recordings by students and alumni of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are configured to play in RealPlayer, a streaming software that is available free at http://www.real.com/. Although we have configured the audio to play acceptably in all versions of RealPlayer, we recommend that, if possible, you update your system to the most recent one.

Craig Beaven (poetry '05) reads the poem "Incidents That Prove My Theory," accepted for publication in 2005 by the Notre Dame Review. In the fall of 2005, Craig is entering the PhD program in creative writing at the University of Houston. Listen here.

Colleen Curran (fiction '01) is the executive director of James River Writers. Her fiction has appeared in JANE, Richmond Magazine, Meridian, and the anthology The Dictionary of Failed Relationships: 26 Stories of Love Gone Wrong (Three Rivers, 2003). Her first novel, Whores on the Hill, was released by Vintage on May 10, 2005. She is finishing a collection of short stories. She reads the short story "The Boss's Boyfriend" in the Fall 2003 issue of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts. Listen here.

Jamye Doerfler (fiction '02, writing as JB Shelleby) reads the short story "You But Not You," a 2000 AWP Intro Journals Project winner that appeared in the Summer/Fall 2001 issue of Shenandoah. Listen here.

Joshua Poteat (poetry '97) has recently won awards from American Literary Review, Nebraska Review, Marlboro Review, Columbia, Bellingham Review, Yemassee, Lullwater Review, and Universities West Press. In 2001 he was the Summer Writer-in-Residence at the University of Arizona's Poetry Center and, in 2002, was awarded an Individual Artist's Grant from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. His book manuscript Ornithologies has been a finalist for the 2001 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry from Truman State University Press, the 2001 and 2002 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry from California State University-Fresno, and Copper Canyon Press' 2002 Hayden Carruth Award. He reads several poems in the Spring 2003 issue of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts. Listen here.

Elizabeth Seydel Morgan (poetry '86) is the author of four books of poetry: Language, a limited edition with prints by artist Laura Pharis, and three collections from Louisiana State University Press: Parties (1988 and recently released in a new edition), The Governor of Desire (1993), and On Long Mountain (1998), a finalist for the Library of Virginia Poetry Prize. She has won the Emily Clark Balch Award from The Virginia Quarterly Review for her fiction. Her translation (with Christopher Pelling) of Euripides' Electra is included in the Penn Greek Drama Series; and her screenplay, Queen Esther, won the 1993 Governor's Award for Screenwriting at the Virginia Film Festival. She has also been the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Poems from her new manuscript have been published in The Southern Review, Five Points, Shenandoah, New Virginia Review, and The Cortland Review. She reads the poem "Drawing Lesson: Outline and Edge" in the Fall 2002 issue of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts. Listen here.

Ron Smith (poetry '85) is Writer-in-Residence at St. Christopher's School in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery, judged "a close second" for the National Poetry Series Open Competition by Margaret Atwood. The book's title poem was awarded Southern Poetry Review's Guy Owen Award by judge Linda Pastan, and the collection was subsequently published by University Presses of Florida. Smith's poems have also won Poetry Northwest's Theodore Roethke Prize, and in 2000 his poem "The Teachers Pass the Popcorn" was nominated by The Georgia Review for a Pushcart Prize. More than a hundred of his poems have appeared in periodicals, including The Nation, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, College English, and Kansas Quarterly, and in anthologies published by Wesleyan University Press, Time-Life Books, The University of Georgia Press, and University of Illinois Press. Most recently, his eighteen-piece poetic sequence "To Ithaca" appeared in the Summer 2002 issue of The Georgia Review. He reads the poem "Greece" in the Fall 2002 issue of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts. Listen here.