M.F.A. in Writing Program/The Faculty 
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MFA Faculty News |
 March 2013: Charles Simic has just published his New & Selected Poems. In this new volume, he distills his life’s work, combining for the first time the best of his early poems with his later works—including nearly three dozen revisions—along with seventeen new, never-before-published poems. |
| March 2013: Meredith Hall was recently named in Flavorwire's and the journal Creative Nonfiction's list, "17 Essays by Female Writers That Everyone Should Read." Her piece, "Shunned," was her first published essay, in 2003. It won the Pushcart Prize and was a Notable in Best American Essays. Here is the link to the Flavorwire list: http://flavorwire.com/370347/15-essays-by-female-writers-that-everyone-should-read Meredith also has a poem, "My Father," coming out in The Gettysburg Review this spring. |
| February 2013: Tom Haines had first written about Beatrice Munyenyezi's case in a cover story for the Boston Globe in August. This piece, for TheAtlantic.com, looks at the story a second jury heard during the retrial. You can find it here: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/02/did-this-new-hampshire-woman-take-part-in-the-rwandan-genocide/273328/ |
| January 2013: Tom Payne publishes the short story "The Hot War" in the literary magazine Zoetrope. The "College Letter" interview can be found at http://www.unh.edu/liberal-arts/thecollegeletter/2013/mar/tier2.html |
| December 2012: Tom Haines writes an essay for TheAtlantic.com about Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Essdras Suarez, a friend and former colleague of his. The piece explores Suarez's reflections on photographing scenes of grief at Columbine and Newtown. You can find it here: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/it-happened-right-in-front-of-me-a-photographer-captures-grief-at-newtown-and-columbine/266664/ |
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| May, 2012: Robert Pinsky has chosen David Rivard's poem “The Reverend Larry Love Is Dead” from The Best American Poetry 2007 for inclusion in The Best of the Best American Poetry: 1988–2012, which Scribner will publish in 2013 to celebrate the twenty-five years of the series. Of the more than two thousand poems that have appeared in The Best American Poetry since the inaugural volume in 1988 (including the poems forthcoming in the 2012 edition), only 100 made the final cut. |
 May, 2011: Ann Joslin Williams publishes her first novel. In Down from Cascom Mountain, newlywed Mary Hall brings her husband to settle in the rural New Hampshire of her youth to fix up the house she grew up in and to reconnect to the land that defined her, with all its beauty and danger. But on a mountain day hike, she watches helplessly as her husband falls to his death. As she struggles with her sudden grief, in the days and months that follow, Mary finds new friendships-with Callie and Tobin, teenagers on the mountain club's crew, and with Ben, the gentle fire watchman. All are haunted by their own losses, but they find ways to restore hope in one another, holding firmly as they navigate the rugged terrain of the unknown and unknowable, and loves lost and found. |
| Jan-Feb, 2011: Charles Simic wins Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America and the Vilcek Prize in Literature from the Vilcek Foundation. |
| Feb, 2011: David Rivard was recently awarded a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, a much-coveted honor that consists of a residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy in Summer 2012, and provides Prof. Rivard with six weeks to concentrate on his work at the Center’s 15th century castle in Umbria, in the company of other Fellows from around the world. |
 Jan, 2010: Otherwise Elsewhere (Graywolf, 2010), David Rivard's fifth collection of poetry, was recently published to great reviews, including one by Robert Pinsky in the Washington Post: "Rivard's poems move ...with an exhilarating, smart pace of association and evocation. The speed of mind, compressing details and emotions, covering the maximum distance in the least time, gives this writing its thrill....These street-wise, book-wise, eloquent poems have a bracing sureness and scope." |
 Jan, 2010: Lisa Miller's new book, Make Me a Story: Teaching Writing Through Digital Storytelling, was published in Fall 2010 by Stenhouse Publishers. |
 Meredith Hall's Without a Map was recently recommended by Oprah, who named it one of the top ten "Addictive True Stories." Learn more. |
 Associate Professor David Rivard has been awarded The Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review for "most noteworthy work published in the previous year." Read more about this prize. |
Click on a name for a faculty profile
Poetry Writing
Mekeel McBride has published six books of poetry, all from Carnegie Mellon University Press, including her latest book, Dog Star Delicatessen, New and Selected Poems 1970-2006. She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Princeton University, and the McDowell Colony, as well as being a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry Field, Seneca Review, Antioch Review, The Nation, Kayak, Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, the Georgia Review and many other places.
David Rivard is the author of five books: Otherwise Elsewhere, Sugartown, Bewitched Playground, Wise Poison, winner of the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Torque, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. His poems and essays appear regularly in the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, TriQuarterly, Poetry London, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and other magazines and anthologies. Among his many awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as the 2006 O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, in recognition of both his writing and teaching. In 2009, he was awarded the Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review.
Charles Simic is a poet, essayist and translator. He was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. His first poems were published in 1959, when he was twenty-one. In 1961 he was drafted into the U.S. Army, and in 1966 he earned his Bachelor's degree from New York University while working at night to cover the costs of tuition. Since 1967, he has published twenty books of his own poetry, seven books of essays, a memoir, and numerous of books of translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry for which he has received many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship and Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. Since 1999 he has been a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books. Simic was the Poet Laureate of the United States 2007-2008.
Fiction Writing
Thomas Payne's short story collection, Scar Vegas (Harcourt), was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Pen/Hemingway Award finalist, an ALA notable book, a Village Voice “Writer on the Verge” pick, a Barnes and Noble “Discover New Writers” pick and was featured on National Public Radio. His stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Playboy, Glimmer Train, The Boston Review, the New England Review, Zoetrope, the Oxford American, Joyland.com, FiveChapters.com, and Story as well as in the award anthologies The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize (twice), Best New Stories from the South, American Fiction X, and The KGB Bar Reader. His novel The Pearl of Kuwait (Harcourt) was featured on public radio, reviewed nationally, and recently optioned.
Ann Joslin Williams is the author of The Woman in the Woods, a collection of linked stories that won the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, and the novel Down From Cascom Mountain (Bloomsbury), winner of the NH Writers’ Project Literary Awards for Outstanding Book of Fiction, 2011. She earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and is the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her stories have appeared in The Sun, Arts and Letters, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, StoryQuarterly, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Her website can be found at www.annjoslinwilliams.com
Journalism/Nonfiction Writing
Tom Haines has reported in more than 50 countries and on five continents, on topics ranging from coal to cricket, art to revolution. His work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, The Atlantic.com, The New York Times, The Seattle Times, The Big Bend Sentinel, and elsewhere. He has three times been named Travel Journalist of the Year in North America, and his work has been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing and The Prentice Hall Reader. Editors of the Nieman Narrative Digest described Tom as “a cross-cultural guide, seeking to take his readers into foreign worlds, to help them experience another culture’s deep difference - and also its humanity.” Tom is the author of one short story, Great Rift Valley, which appeared in The Whitefish Review, and one play, Chicken?, written and staged as part of "24 Hour Plays" at The Crowley Theater, a converted feed store in the high-desert town of Marfa, TX.
Meredith Hall's first book, a memoir titled Without a Map (Beacon Press 2007) was a New York Times Bestseller, and was named Kirkus “Best Book of 2007,” BookSense “Pick of the Year,” and Elle magazine’s “Reader’s Pick for 2007.” Without a Map was also included on Oprah’s Top Ten Memoirs to Read list in 2009. Hall’s first essay won the 2005 Pushcart Prize and was a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays 2005. She was awarded the $50,000 Gift of Freedom Award from A Room of Her Own Foundation, and received the Maine Arts Commission’s Individual Artist Fellowship. Hall was honored by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and the New York Public Library as their “Emerging Writer in Nonfiction” in 2008. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Fourth Genre, Five Points and many other journals and anthologies. She also writes reviews for the Washington Post and Boston Globe.
Susan Hertz is author of Caught in the Crossfire: A Year on Abortion's Front Line and the forthcoming Write Choices: Elements of Nonfiction Storytelling. Her narratives have appeared in numerous national and regional publications, including Redbook, House Beautiful, Parenting, Boston Magazine, Boston Globe Magazine, New England Monthly, and Walking. A newspaper feature writer before she began the double life of teaching and writing, Hertz worked for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Herald in Everett, WA, and The Hartford Courant. She has appeared on various literary panels sponsored by organizations such as the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the Key West Literary Seminar.
Andrew Merton has published nonfiction in journals including The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Ms. Magazine, The Boston Globe and Boston Magazine. His poetry has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Silk Road, Paper Street, The Comstock Review, and The American Journal of Nursing. Accents Publishing released his first book of poetry, Evidence that We Are Descended from Chairs, in 2012.