Alabama grads go on to publish well. Work by alumni has appeared in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The New Yorker, Poetry, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Paris Review, Story, and dozens of others, such as The Pinch, The Journal, Quarterly West, ESPN.com, Puerto del Sol, as well as in such anthologies as New Stories from the South, Scribner’s Best of the Writing Workshops, Starlight I, AWP Intro Awards, Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, New American Poets, and The Pushcart Prize.
They compete brilliantly for other forms of national recognition. Alumni have received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, The Wallace Stegner Fellowship, The Jacob Javits Fellowship, The Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, the John C. Zacharis Prize from Ploughshares, the Yale Younger Poets prize, the AWP Award Series in Creative Non-Fiction prize, the New Millennium Writing Award in Poetry, and the Atlantic Monthly Student Writing prizes in poetry, non-fiction and fiction.
Graduates have published books with an array of presses covering the contemporary gamut, from Graywolf Press to the University of Mississippi Press, and Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, Little, Brown, and Company, Black Lawrence Press, Yes Yes Books, Storyline Press, Cobalt Press, and Tinhouse Press. They hold important editorial positions at magazines (as of this writing, UA MFAs are at the helm of the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, the Gettysburg Review, the New Orleans Review, and the Idaho Review), major publishing houses, and on-line venues, and teach in a wide variety of private and public colleges and universities.
Regardless of what they do when they leave here, our graduates take with them a network of readers for their future productions, a finely-tuned sense of how to balance the needs of the writer with more workaday demands and, more often than not, lifelong friends.
While in the program, students are encouraged to tap the program’s resources to facilitate their artistic and professional development. Students start magazines, found presses, organize reading series, connect with community partners to teach writing to underserved populations, create radio programs, and much more, and the program does all it can to support such endeavors.
For more examples and excerpts of current and former UA MFAs, check out our Facebook page.