Visitors to Our Program

MFA candidates in the program give public readings in a student-run series that features the FBI (Friskily Bogus Introduction). When we can, we integrate distinguished alumni on book tours into this reading series.

Editors and agents visit the program annually to hold manuscript conferences with students. These visits often lead to valuable professional contacts and sometimes to publication. Editors come from such publishing houses as Bloomsbury, Catapult, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Alfred A. Knopf, Overlook Press, Penguin, and W.W. Norton and such magazines as The Georgia Review, Harper’s, New England Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, Tin House, VQR, and The Yale Review. Literary agents come from such agencies as Cynthia Cannell Literary Agency, ICM, Janklow & Nesbit, Irene Skolnick Literary Agency, Elaine Markson Literary Agency, Writers House, and The Wylie Agency.

Writers who have attended our annual Writers Festival include John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Saul Bellow, Lucie Brock-Broido, Anne Carson, Henri Cole, Billy Collins, Rachel Cusk, Lydia Davis, Ellen Douglas, Richard Eberhart, Deborah Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eugenides, Carolyn Forché, Ian Frazier, Mary Gaitskill, Rivka Galchen, Lauren Groff, Allan Gurganus, Robert Hass, Barry Hannah, Seamus Heaney, Anthony Hecht, Richard Howard, Lawrence Joseph, James Lasdun, Ben Lerner, Alison Lurie, Thomas McGuane, Heather McHugh, Larry McMurtry, James Merrill, Lorrie Moore, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, Grace Paley, Marie Ponsot, D.A. Powell, Craig Raine, Claudia Rankine, Marilynne Robinson, Norman Rush, Kay Ryan, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Joanna Scott, Jim Shepard, Charles Simic, Mona Simpson, W.D. Snodgrass, Karen Solie, Robert Stone, Mark Strand, Peter Taylor, D.M. Thomas, Wells Tower, Derek Walcott, Edmund White, Richard Wilbur, C.K. Williams, Joy Williams, Kevin Wilson, Charles Wright, and Kevin Young.