An online home for the American University Creative Writing MFA community
By Tara Campbell Welcome to American University, and welcome to the DMV (DC, Maryland, Virginia)! We know you’re still plowing through all the new information about AU, but at some point, you’re going to pop your head up and wonder what else is going […]
By Yohanca Delgado As the semester enters full swing (and everyone recovers from Saturday night’s literary sugar coma) we’ve all got another wonderful event to look forward to, our first Visiting Writers event featuring Fatimah Asghar. Asghar is a nationally touring poet, performer, educator, and writer. […]
By Tara Campbell I came, I saw, I stuffed my face. The annual Literary Dessert Party brought students and faculty of the Literature Department together this Saturday night for an evening of food, wine, and conversation, topped off with the sweetest of endings: […]
We are thrilled to welcome Tara Campbell to the Cafe MFA team! With a BA in English and an MA in German, Tara Campbell has a demonstrated aversion to money and power. Originally from Anchorage, Alaska, she has also lived in Oregon, Ohio, New York, Germany and […]
We asked our faculty what they’re reading this summer — and ended up adding to my own towering TBR list. Kyle Dargan “I’ll be looking forward to working my way through poet Greg Pardlo’s memoir Air Traffic, Hieu Minh Nguyen newest collection Not Here, Tarfia Faizullah’s Registers of […]
By K. Tyler Christensen At the 2011 Tin House Writers Workshop, Dorothy Allison delivered a talk called, “On Dialogue.” In her spirited voice, Allison asked: Shouldn’t story be something fucking happening? Without a doubt, in Philip Dean Walker’s second collection of short stories, […]
By Vince Granata Sometimes, I think of reflective thought like a muscle, like an easy to neglect part of my brain. Without exercise, without training, this thought muscle will atrophy, wither away. I worry—too often, almost constantly—that if I don’t pause to reflect, don’t work […]
By Emily Moses Leslie Pietrzyk, AU MFA alumna and local literary guru, agreed to meet with me to discuss her new novel, Silver Girl, out last month by Unnamed Press. Over a plate of charcuterie and a few glasses of wine, we talked about […]
By Yohanca Delgado This year’s issue of Folio focused on the theme of crossroads and intersections, places where “two paths, two ideas, meet, converge, collide, or divide.” In keeping with Folio tradition, 33 features award-winning pieces selected by members of our own American University faculty. As a nonfiction […]
By Yohanca Delgado Launching on May 7, Grace in Darkness celebrates the work of 25 women writers in the metro DC area. The anthology is the eighth in a series created by Gargoyle editor Richard Peabody in 2004 and passed on AU’s own Melissa Scholes Young in 2017. […]
