Creative Writing: Alumni News

Creative Writing Alumni Accomplishments

Read about the Creative Writing program's alumni accomplishments—including awards, fellowships, publications, residencies, and employment—in our Alumni Accomplishments Booklet.

Alumni Accomplishments Booklet

2024

Ross Showalter (BFA '19) published an essay for the Modern Love column in the New York Times. He also published a short story, "I Had a Dream About You," in F(r)iction.

Jeff Alessandrelli (MA '08) published his novel, And Yet, with Future Tense Books.

Chelsea Bieker (MFA '12) published her novel, Madwoman, with Little Brown. A national bestseller, Madwoman has been longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and selected as both an Oprah’s Best Fall Book of 2024 and a Book of the Month pick, among many other recognitions. The New York Times Book Review described Bieker's writing as, "raw, breathlessly confessional, brilliant in its depiction of the long shadows cast by domestic violence, the constant tension carried by survivors."

Tom DeBeauchamp (MFA '24) published a short story, "Certain Galactic Bodies," in the December issue of the New England Review.

Karleigh Frisbie Brogan (MFA '19) received a Oregon Literary Fellowship. Her book, Holding: A Memoir about Mothers, Drugs and Other Comforts, is forthcoming with Steerforth Press in 2025.

Rosanna Nafziger (MFA '22) received an Oregon Literary Fellowship.

Jeff Allesandrelli's (MA '08) independent press, Fonograf Editions, received an Oregon Literary Fellowship.

The Arizona State University Department of English hired Mitchell Jackson (MA '02) as their John O. Whiteman Dean's Distinguished Professor.

Willamette Week hired Robin Bacior (MFA '23) as their Arts & Culture Editor.

Portland Monthly hired Matthew Trueherz (BS '23) as their Associate Editor.

Charity Yoro (MFA '21) published her debut poetry collection, Ten Cent Flower and Other Territories, with First Matter Press.

David Seung (MFA '22) will publish a poetry collection, Silkworm’s Pansori, with The Song Cave in March 2025.

Eric Larsh (MFA '24) published a poetry collection, Desert, with Cathexis Northwest Press.

2023

April Hernandez (BFA ) published her chapbook, Getting to Know the Stoveman, with Bottlecap Press.

2022

LaVonne Griffin-Valade's (MFA '17) novel Desolation Ridge, the third installment in her Maggie Blackthorne mystery series, came out from Severn River Publishing in June 2022.

Josh Pollock (MFA '21) translated Salvador Elizondo's novel The Secret Crypt (Dalkey Archive, 2022).

Karina Agbisit (MFA '22) published an essay in the anthology Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World (Woodhall Press, September 2022).

Patrick McGinty (MFA '12) published his debut novel, Test Drive (Propeller Books).

Chelsea Bieker (MFA '12) published a story collection, Heartbroke (Catapult).

Olivia German (BFA '22) won second place in Suburbia Journal's short fiction contest, and the story was published in Issue V.

Ross Showalter (BFA '19) published a short story, "Feast," about a deaf person at a hearing party, at The Rumpus.

Kaitlin Stone (MFA '22) published a short story, "Bear It," at The Gravity of the Thing.

Karina Agbisit (MFA '22) has a short story in Best Women's Erotica of the Year, Vol. 8, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel.

Tom DeBeauchamp (MFA '24) reviewed Camille Roy's Honey Mine for The Rupture.

Jennifer Cie (MFA '20) was selected as a semifinalist for the 2022-23 U.S. Student Fulbright program. She hopes to work with the ILHIA LGBT archive in the Netherlands.

2021

Mitchell Jackson (MA '02) won a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.

Rubén Gil Herrera (MFA '22) interviewed Bad Bunny for Highsnobiety.

LaVonne Griffin-Valade's (MFA '17) novel Murderers Creek, the second installment in her Maggie Blackthorne mystery series, came out from Severn River Publishing, November 2021.

Benjamin Kessler (MFA '2017) will publish his debut story collection with Game Over Books in 2022.

Emerson Henry (MFA '23) has been nominated for Best of the Net for their essay "Chesticle Festival" (Southeast Review).

Lucie Bonvalet (MFA '21) has a new story, "Silence (A Triptych)," in Juked.

Ross Showalter (BFA '19) has an essay, “Learning to Write My Truth as a Deaf Queer Writer," in the forthcoming anthology Body Language: Writers on Identity, Physicality, and Making Space for Ourselves, edited by Nicole Chung and Matt Ortile (Catapult, July 2022).

Patrick McGinty (MFA '12) will publish his first novel, Test Drive, with Propeller Books in May 2022.

Ari Rosales (MFA '21) won a 2021 Oregon Literary Fellowship.

LaVonne Griffin-Valade (MFA '17) will publish her debut novel, Dead Point, with Severn River in June 2021.

Emerson Henry (MFA '22) published the essay "Chesticle Festival" in Southeast Review.

2020

Nada Sewidan (MFA '20) published an essay, "Eid al-Adha, Festival of Sacrifice," in Oregon Humanities.

Samuel Miller (BFA '20) published a short story, "Blue."

Sarah Marshall (MFA '13) co-hosts the podcast "You're Wrong About," which was profiled in The New Yorker in October 2020.

C. R. Grimmer (MFA '14) won the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry for The Lyme Letters: Poems, published by Texas Tech University Press in October 2020.

Suman Mallick (MFA '16) published his debut novel, The Black-Marketer's Daughter, with Atmosphere Press in October 2020.

Karleigh Frisbie Brogan (MFA '19) published an essay on wildfires and the climate crisis in The Atlantic.

Cooper Lee Bombardier (MFA '14) published Pass With Care, a memoir-in-essays, with Dottir Press.

2020 (cont.)

Beth Pickard (MFA '21), a Science and Social Sciences librarian at PSU, was awarded the 2020 Kenneth W. and Elsie W. Butler Award for Library Faculty Service.

Genevieve Hudson (MFA '13) published her third book and first novel, Boys of Alabama, with Liveright | W.W. Norton.

Matt Rebholz (MFA '22) published a new story, "Me, the Consumer," in Moss vol. 5.

Ross Showalter (BFA '19) has a new story, "Night Moves," online at Black Warrior Review and published a short story, "Water Through Our Hands," in Strange Horizons.

Jessica Machado (MFA '09) is the senior identities editor at Vox. Her debut memoir, Local, is forthcoming from Little A (2022).

Susan Leslie Moore (MA '04) won the 2019 Juniper Prize in Poetry. Her first full-length collection, That Place Where You Opened Your Hands, was published by University of Massachusetts Press in April 2020.

Benjamin Kessler published a short story, “Of This World,” in Pithead Chapel.

Chelsea Bieker (MFA '12) published her first book, Godshot: A Novel, with Catapult. Godshot was long-listed for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize. She also discussed Mother Winter, the new memoir by Sophia Shalmiyev (MFA '15), in "How Could a Mother Leave Her Child?" at Electric Literature.

Joshua Pollock (MFA '20) translated José Vicente Anaya’s Híkuri (Peyote), published by The Operating System. He also has new poems in Datableed.

2019

Portland Review received a 2019 Literary Magazine Fund Grant, awarded by the Amazon Literary Partnership and CLMP.

Andrew Mitin (MFA '16) published his first novel, Time Spent Away, with Adelaide Books on October 1, 2019.

Candace Opper (MFA ’12) won the Kore Press Memoir Award for Certain and Impossible Events (2019).

David Naimon (MFA '19) has a new partnership with Tin House, which is now a co-sponsor (with KBOO 90.7FM community radio) of David's literary podcast, Between the Covers.

Cynthia Carmina Gómez (MFA '20) published an essay, "Process and Privilege," in Oregon Humanities.

Joshua Pollock (MFA '20) has new work forthcoming in Vestiges_04: Aphasia. His translation of Salvador Elizondo's The Secret Crypt was published by Dalkey Archive in May 2019.

Erin Perry (MFA '17) and Consuelo Wise (MFA '18) moderated a panel at the 2019 Gender Studies Symposium at Lewis & Clark College. The topic is “Poetic Inquiry and the Practice of Care,” a discussion of “how poetry informs the way we imagine ourselves within care practices.”

Genevieve Hudson (MFA '13) headed to The MacDowell Colony in April 2019.

Joshua James Amberson (MFA '18) has a chapbook-length essay collection, Everyday Mythologies, from Two Plum Press. Amberson published a new essay, "Captured," in Propeller.

Jacqueline Alnes (MFA '15) has a new essay, "What Remains," in Guernica. Alnes is in the PhD program at Oklahoma State University. She published a Lost & Found essay on James Galvin’s “The Meadow” in Tin House.

Kate Jayroe (MFA '17) has a story in Issue 9 of Tammy.

LaVonne Griffin-Valade (MFA '17) has a story, "Eureka," in Clackamas Literary Review.

Karleigh Frisbie Brogan (MFA '19) received a Notable Mention in Best American Sports Writing 2019 for "Two-Piece," originally published in Water-Stone Review. Brogan published a lyric essay, "Fog or a Cloud: Hawaii," in Entropy.

Samm Saxby (BFA '18) published a short story, "It's Time," in Nailed. Saxby received the Jack W. Swanson scholarship to attend the 2019 PubWest conference. She began a publishing internship at Catapult in March 2019.

Lucie Bonvalet (MFA '21) published an essay, "Inner Rivers," in Michigan Quarterly Review. Bonvalet published a new prose piece, "Josepha," in Fugue, an essay, “On Tinnitus,” in Oregon Humanities, and a story, “Florence: A Portrait,” in Cosmonauts Avenue.

Sophia Shalmiyev (MFA ’15)’s lyric memoir, Mother Winter, was published by Simon & Schuster in February 2019.

Thea Prieto (MFA '16) and Matthew Robinson (MFA '15) are co-editors of the literary magazine The Gravity of the Thing.

Thea Prieto (MFA '16) won the Red Hen Press Novella Award for From the Caves, which will be published by Red Hen. Prieto was a finalist for Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers, and her novel-in-progress was a semifinalist in the William Faulkner/William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. Her interview "The Mythology of Motherhood: Leni Zumas on Red Clocks" was recently featured at Entropy, and "A Revolution in Listening" appears in the May/June 2018 issue of Poets & Writers.

2018

Apricot Irving (MA ’04)’s memoir, A Gospel of Trees, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2018. Irving won a 2011 $25,000 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.

Chelsea Bieker (MFA '12) won a 2018 Rona Jaffe Foundation Award, published a story, "Cowboys and Angels," in Granta, and signed a two-book deal with Catapult for a novel, Godshot, and a story collection, Angels and Cowboys.

Eben Pindyck (MFA ’14) was a 2017-18 O’Brien Fellow in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University. He has published pieces in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and Vice.

Genevieve Hudson (MFA '13) published two books in 2018: Pretend We Live Here, a story collection (Future Tense Books), and A Little in Love with Everyone, a work of literary criticism and memoir (Fiction Advocate).

Julie Whipple (MFA ’13)’s book of nonfiction, Crash Course, was published in 2018.

Matthew Robinson (MFA '15) recently worked on Issue 7 of the new Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 comics series being released for free, digitally, at www.callofduty.com/comics. Robinson published his first story collection, The Horse Latitudes, with Propeller Books in October 2017. He was awarded a Leslie Bradshaw Fellowship by Literary Arts in 2016.

Jac Nelson (MFA ’16) has published poems in Fanzine (“The Sound of Music”) and Blackbox Manifold (selections from a serial poem, “EGO”).

2018 (cont.)

Katrina Carrasco (MFA ’15) published her debut novel, The Best Bad Things (MCD/FSG), in November 2018.

Stephanie Wong Ken (MFA '17) published an essay at Audiofemme: "Cat Power Was My Surrogate Community in the Canadian Wild," another, "Uncertain Frontiers: Female Identity and Rural Spaces," in Luma Quarterly, and a third essay, "How to Write about Your Ancestral Village," in Catapult (August 2017) and won the 2016 Cosmonauts Avenue Fiction Prize for her story "Face.”

Wendy Bourgeois (MFA ’10) published a book of essays, The Devil Says Maybe I Like It: Essays on Poetry and Life with Propeller Books.

Sarah Marshall (MFA ’13) was a Writer in Residence at the Black Mountain Institute in Fall 2018. She recently published an essay on Ted Bundy, “The End of Evil,” in The Believer.

Tyler Meese (MFA ’17) published a story in the Monster House Press pamphlet series.

Renee Soasey (BFA '19) celebrated her first print publication in the Fall/Winter 2018 issue of Oregon Humanities Magazine.

Kristin Kaye (MA ’04)'s second book, Tree Dreams, was published in 2018. Her first book, Iron Maidens: The Celebration of the Most Awesome Female Muscle in the World, was a finalist for the 2006 Oregon Book Award.

2017

Kellie Cook (MFA '16) published a poem in Interim.

Lynn Otto (MFA '13) published her first poetry collection, Real Daughter (Unicorn Books). Otto won Unicorn Press’s 2017 First Book Prize.

Sharla Yates (MA ’06) published a book of poems, What I Would Say If We Were To Drown Tonight, in 2017 with Stranded Oak Press.

Suman Mallick (MFA ’16)’s novella Apples and Knives was a finalist for the 2017 Dzanc/Disquiet Open Borders Prize.

Ramona DeNies (MFA ’17) published “The Lonely Beauty of the West’s Largest Unprotected Wilderness” in Outside (March 2017).

Rachel Palmer (MFA ’17) published "Dog's Search for Meaning" in Brevity (May 2017).

Devan Schwartz (MFA ’12) worked as a Writer's Assistant on the TNT show Rizzoli & Isles and is now with the FOX show Prison Break.

2016

Jenny Woodman (MFA ’17) published “The Women ‘Computers’ Who Revolutionized Astronomy” in The Atlantic, as well as numerous articles in Earthzine. She was selected by the Ocean Exploration Trust as the Science Communications Fellow for an expedition of the exploration vessel Nautilus.

Lisa Dunn (MFA ’17) has published numerous articles in Portland Monthly, including “Jessi Klein Explains Why You Might Not Grow Out of It.”

Mary Milstead (MFA '14) published an essay about her mother's kidnapping in Gay magazine. Milstead published an essay, “This Is Not a Story About a Ghost,” in The Rumpus (2016).

Lily Brooks-Dalton (MFA ’16)’s first novel, Good Morning, Midnight, was published in 2016 by Random House and has been translated into several languages. It will be adapted for the screen by director George Clooney and screenwriter Mark L. Smith. Her memoir, Motorcycles I've Loved, came out in 2015.

Michael Magnes (MFA ’12) published short fiction in Drunk Monkeys (2016) and Hobart (2012).

Rob Sullivan (MFA ’15) published a short story in The Baltimore Review.

David Naimon (MFA '19)'s essay "Third Ear" was a Best American Essays Notable 2015, Best American Travel Writing Notable 2015, and Pushcart Prize Special Mention 2016. His story "Past a Roar Completed" appeared in Fiction International and in The Best Small Fictions 2016, edited by Stuart Dybek.

2015

Christina Cooke (MFA ’11) has published work in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the New York Times (including “To Save African Penguins, Humans Set Up a Dating Service,” 2015).

Colleen Burner (MFA ’14) won the Oregon Women Writers Fellowship in 2015 and co-founded the fiction magazine Shirley.

Heather Quinn-Bork (MFA ’15) published “Memento Mori” in Under the Gum Tree, and the photo essay “Desolation is Key” in Vela.

Rachel Powers (MFA ’17) published articles in Earthzine, including “Ocean Plastic Gets Cloudy.”

Seth McBride (MFA ’13) was profiled in Portland Monthly: “The Long (Long, Long) Road South.”

Maria D'Alessandro (MFA ’14) published a short story in Post Road.

Ellie Piper (MFA ’13) published articles with Bitch Media, including “Woman, Fighter” and “‘Glena’ Raises the Bar for Films About Female Fighters.”

2014

Jeff Alessandrelli (MA ’08), published his first full poetry collection, This Last Time Will Be the First (Burnside Review Press) in 2014. He has published widely, including a “little book,” Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound (Ravenna Press 2011), and work in the American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and The Kenyon Review.

Marina Callahan (MFA ’15) has an essay in the anthology Winged: New Writing on Bees (2014).

Monique Wentzel (MFA ’11) published her first story collection, The Woods Were Never Quiet, in 2014. She was a 2012-14 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford.

Sean Warren (MFA ’13) published an essay in the New England Review.

2013

Kirsten Rian (MFA ’11) published a book of poems, Chord (Wordcraft) in 2013.

2012

Patrick McGinty (MFA ’12) published a story in ZYZZYVA.

2011

Janine Oshiro (MA ’05) won the Kundiman Prize for her first book of poems, Pier, published in 2011 by Alice James Books.