Graduates from our program have won many of the most prestigious awards in literature, including:

  • The Pulitzer Prize
  • The National Book Award
  • The Whiting Award
  • The O. Henry Prize
  • The Discovery/The Nation Prize
  • The PEN/Faulkner Award
  • The PEN/Hemingway Award
  • The PEN/Malamud Award
  • National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Distinction
  • The Henfield Prize
Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, which was made into a major motion picture.

Not a year goes by without several graduates of our program publishing novels, poetry collections, and books of stories, and many have had manuscripts selected as winners of nationwide contests. Some alumni have become New York Times bestselling authors and seen their work adapted for film and television. Some have also found success as screenwriters, podcasters, translators, and staff writers for major publications such as the New Yorker. Others have held editorial positions at the New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, and AGNI.

A number of our graduates have found work in teaching, some at the high school level (at institutions such as Phillips Andover, the Windsor School, and the Groton School), some as lecturers at colleges and universities (such as Boston University, Boston College, and Tufts University), and some as tenure-track professors (at universities such as Princeton University, the University of Chicago, the University of Massachusetts – Boston, and the University of Massachusetts – Lowell). Three of the finest creative writing programs in the country, those at Washington University (St. Louis), the University of Michigan, and Florida State University, have been or are currently directed by our graduates. Many alumni also choose to pursue PhDs after graduating from our program; former students of our program have recently enrolled in programs at Brown University, the University of California – Berkeley, the University of Michigan, the University of Southern California, the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, and other institutions.

Our alumni have also gone on to have careers as academic administrators, arts administrators, copywriters for internationally-renowned brands, and technical writers. Others have followed their study in our program with careers in psychology, law, and medicine.