Our MFA Students

Our students come from all over the country and have previously attended such colleges and universities as Berry College, Bucknell, East Carolina, Eastern Michigan, Emory, Florida State, Fordham, Louisiana State, Mercer University, Mississippi State, Sarah Lawrence College, SUNY Fredonia, Tulane, UNC-Charlotte, University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin, Wake Forest, Washington University in St. Louis, West Virginia University, and many more. Most of our students range in age from their twenties to their forties, some completing other graduate degrees before joining our program.

Writers Who Publish
Although we don’t expect incoming students to have published their work, since our program began in 2001, our students have been publishing their poems, stories, and essays in many national journals. While she was a student in our program, Minal Singh (MFA 2003) was selected for the Ploughshares “Emerging Writers Issue” (winter 2003-2004) for her poem “Hunger Was Coming.”

Other GCSU students have published in such journals as Backwards City Review, Big Muddy, Bloom, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Cream City Review, Descant, Dos Passos Review, Eclipse, International Poetry Review, McSweeney’s, Meridian, Nimrod, Pebble Lake, Poet Lore, Quick Fiction, Rattle, Redivider, River Teeth, Salt Hill, Santa Clara Review, Spinning Jenny, Thema, Touchstone, and many others.

See our Alumni page for news about first book publications and other accomplishments by our graduates.

A Community
One of the highlights of our community of writers is the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) national conference. MFA students have attended conferences in New Orleans (2002), Baltimore (2003), Chicago (2004), Vancouver, British Columbia (2005), Austin (2006), Atlanta (2007), New York (2008), and Chicago (2009). In 2010 we went to Denver, where our program was again a sponsor of the AWP conference.

On campus, students gather for social events downtown or at student/faculty homes and the end-of-the-year MFA Graduation Party. Students also sponsor the Red Earth Reading series, a coffee house event featuring both MFA and senior-level undergraduate writers. Students also meet and work with many visiting writers.

Recent Accomplishments
Creative Writing students at Georgia College have won national AWP Intro Awards and, in 2005, MFA candidate Miller Oberman (2006) was awarded a $15,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry Magazine. Recently, Rachael Peckham (2004) was hired as an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Marshall University. She has published her creative nonfiction and poetry in many national journals since she graduated. Ashley Eisenger (2009) was awarded a full assistantship to work on her PhD (in fiction) at the University of Houston, starting fall 2009.

Other students have also pursued doctoral work, including Michael Fischer (Western Michigan University), Scott Sands (Southern Illinois University), Sara Hughes (Georgia State University) and Bellee Jones (University of Alabama). Several of our recent graduates have gone on to full-time teaching positions at Tusculum College, UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State, Western Carolina University, Indiana Wesleyan University, West Virginia University, St. John’s University, Penn State-the Behrend Campus, and Gardner-Webb University.

See a complete list of programs.