Upcoming Events
- Location:
- Wittliff Collections
- Cost:
- Free
- Contact:
- to RSVP email Bianca Alyssa Perez via mfinearts@txstate.edu
- Campus Sponsor:
- MFA Creative Writing
In honor of L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark, who devoted their lives to literature and generously supported the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University, Texas State University’s English Department has established the $25,000 Clark Fiction Prize. The prize will be awarded annually to recognize an exceptional recently-published book-length work of fiction.
Isabella Hammad's Enter Ghost has won the Clark Prize for Fiction ($25,000), which is an annual fiction competition sponsored by the MFA Program at Texas State University. Recent winners include Jamal Jan Kochai, Chia-Chia Lin, Rebecca Makkai, Colson Whitehead, and Daniel Alarcón. This year's judge was Stacey Swann, who wrote:
With Enter Ghost, Isabella Hammad has created a deeply moving, brilliantly layered novel. The narrator Sonia’s personal history, her career as an actor, her strained relationship with her sister, and her evolving relationships with the director and cast of an Arabic-language production of Hamlet all exist within the masterfully-evoked world of both Israel and the West Bank, not as news or historical context but as a lived place deeply intertwined with each of the characters’ lives. Even with these complexities, even with the way Hamlet echoes throughout the plots and subplots, the novel is elegantly seamless, an organic whole that is even more than the sum of its parts.
Event Details: 3-3:30pm: Pre-award Reception; 3:30pm-5pm: Reading/Q&A/Book Signing
Isabella Hammad's Enter Ghost has won the Clark Prize for Fiction ($25,000), which is an annual fiction competition sponsored by the MFA Program at Texas State University. Recent winners include Jamal Jan Kochai, Chia-Chia Lin, Rebecca Makkai, Colson Whitehead, and Daniel Alarcón. This year's judge was Stacey Swann, who wrote:
With Enter Ghost, Isabella Hammad has created a deeply moving, brilliantly layered novel. The narrator Sonia’s personal history, her career as an actor, her strained relationship with her sister, and her evolving relationships with the director and cast of an Arabic-language production of Hamlet all exist within the masterfully-evoked world of both Israel and the West Bank, not as news or historical context but as a lived place deeply intertwined with each of the characters’ lives. Even with these complexities, even with the way Hamlet echoes throughout the plots and subplots, the novel is elegantly seamless, an organic whole that is even more than the sum of its parts.
Event Details: 3-3:30pm: Pre-award Reception; 3:30pm-5pm: Reading/Q&A/Book Signing
- Location:
- Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center
- Cost:
- Free; only open to TXST MFA students
- Contact:
- Name: Bianca Alyssa Pérez
Email: mfinearts@txstate.edu - Campus Sponsor:
- TXST MFA in Creative Writing
Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than 30 volumes. Her books of poetry include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, A Maze Me: Poems for Girls, Red Suitcase, Words Under the Words, Fuel, and You & Yours (a best-selling poetry book of 2006). She is also the author of Mint Snowball, Never in a Hurry, I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are you Okay? Tales of Driving and Being Driven (essays); Habibi and Going Going (novels for young readers); Baby Radar, Sitti's Secrets, and Famous (picture books) and There Is No Long Distance Now (a collection of very short stories).
Other works include several prize-winning poetry anthologies for young readers, including Time You Let Me In, This Same Sky, The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems & Paintings from the Middle East, What Have You Lost?, and Transfer. Her collection of poems for young adults entitled Honeybee won the 2008 Arab American Book Award in the Children’s/Young Adult category. Her novel for children, The Turtle of Oman, was chosen both a Best Book of 2014 by The Horn Book and a 2015 Notable Children's Book by the American Library Association. The Turtle of Oman was also awarded the 2015 Middle East Book Award for Youth Literature. She was named Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation in 2019, awarded the 2019 Lon Tinkle Award by the Texas Institute of Letters, and elected into The American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2021. Her most recent books are Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018; Greenwillow Books, HarperCollins) and The Tiny Journalist (2019; BOA Editions).
Description of workshop:
A workshop led by Naomi Shihab Nye where MFA students are asked to bring poems to the session (they can be based on her prompt or not). Students will then critique and provide helpful suggestions to each other as Naomi leads and gives her insight. TXST MFA poetry and fiction students are welcome to send their poems in for consideration.
Other works include several prize-winning poetry anthologies for young readers, including Time You Let Me In, This Same Sky, The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems & Paintings from the Middle East, What Have You Lost?, and Transfer. Her collection of poems for young adults entitled Honeybee won the 2008 Arab American Book Award in the Children’s/Young Adult category. Her novel for children, The Turtle of Oman, was chosen both a Best Book of 2014 by The Horn Book and a 2015 Notable Children's Book by the American Library Association. The Turtle of Oman was also awarded the 2015 Middle East Book Award for Youth Literature. She was named Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation in 2019, awarded the 2019 Lon Tinkle Award by the Texas Institute of Letters, and elected into The American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2021. Her most recent books are Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018; Greenwillow Books, HarperCollins) and The Tiny Journalist (2019; BOA Editions).
Description of workshop:
A workshop led by Naomi Shihab Nye where MFA students are asked to bring poems to the session (they can be based on her prompt or not). Students will then critique and provide helpful suggestions to each other as Naomi leads and gives her insight. TXST MFA poetry and fiction students are welcome to send their poems in for consideration.
- Location:
- Wittliff Collections
- Cost:
- Free
- Contact:
- Bianca Alyssa Perez; mfinearts@txstate.edu
- Campus Sponsor:
- MFA Creative Writing
Each year, our University Endowed Chair in Creative Writing teaches one graduate MFA workshop in the Fall. In the Spring, The Chair also visits classes, gives one public reading, and supports a range of MFA programming.
Layli Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA with honors from Bard College. She is the author of the chapbook Chromosomory (2010) and the full-length collection, Whereas (2017), which won the National Books Critics Circle award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been a contributing editor to Drunken Boat and poetry editor at Kore Press; in 2012, her participatory installation, “Whereas We Respond”, was featured on the Pine Ridge Reservation. In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. She was awarded a Whiting Writer’s Award in 2016. Long Soldier is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Layli Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA with honors from Bard College. She is the author of the chapbook Chromosomory (2010) and the full-length collection, Whereas (2017), which won the National Books Critics Circle award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been a contributing editor to Drunken Boat and poetry editor at Kore Press; in 2012, her participatory installation, “Whereas We Respond”, was featured on the Pine Ridge Reservation. In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. She was awarded a Whiting Writer’s Award in 2016. Long Soldier is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.