What can you expect to achieve here?  I believe workshops are valuable for writers: hearing the sustained criticism, over time, of one's peers; the exercise of that criticism, evolving into self-criticism, is part of what we try to teach.  Will teaching jobs await you?  Will you be published?  Win prizes?  There is, of course, no guarantee of any of those things.  We can say that our graduates in each genre have accomplished a good deal. Among numerous awards, our playwrights can list The Heideman Award, The Charles MacArthur Award for “Best New Play,” and six national playwriting awards from the American College Theater Festival. 

Quite recently our graduates in poetry have won the $30,000 Whiting Award, the Barnard New Women Poets Series, a grant from the NEA, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America; there have been three winners in three years of the Discovery/The Nation award, and two winners of the National Poetry Series.  In fiction, our students have also won the Whiting Award, along with an inordinate share of the nationwide Henfield Awards. Not a year goes by without a graduate of our program bringing out a novel or book of stories; remarkably, over the eighteen-month period from 2002 to spring of 2004, eleven of our fiction writers will be bringing out first books, all of them from major publishers, and several of these young writers have two book contracts to boot. Since her graduation, Sue Miller has published many such volumes and won a good deal of fame, and some fortune as well.  So has Arthur Golden, whose Memoirs of a Geisha was started in our workshops.  Two holders of our M.F.A. were on Granta's list of young writers. In 1999 our writers swept every major literary award in the country, with Ha Jin winning the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner, and Jhumpa Lahiri the PEN/Hemingway and the Pulitzer Prize.  Moreover, a number of our graduates have found work in teaching, some at schools in the area (Tufts, Emerson, M.I.T., Harvard College and Extension, Phillips Academy at Andover, Exeter, the Groton School).