McNeese MFA graduates have been awarded their own reading at the upcoming Associated Writings Program Conference in New Orleans.  The AWP and its annual national conference is at the center of this country's writing community.  The AWP is to creative writing what the AMA is to medicine.  Here in Louisiana:  A Reading by McNeese University Alumni was selected from over 250 proposals.

The students and graduates of the McNeese MFA Program have published widely and in such major journals as Poetry, Commonweal, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly, The Georgia Review, The New York Times, and The Laurel Review, and they have also won prizes as distinguished as Poetry magazine's $15,000 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, for a poet still in a graduate creative writing program.  This is the most prestigious prize a young poet can win, and two separate McNeese MFA students have won this award and two others have been finalists. 

Adam Johnson signed a two book contract with Viking Press, as well as a contract with Harper's for a piece of fiction, and he has had short stories in Esquire, Paris Review, and all four issues of Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops, the anthology of the best writing from MFA Programs in the country.

Michael Kelsay won the Emily Clark Balch Award, a major national award from the Virginia Quarterly, has published his stories widely, and his novel Too Close to Call was published by the University Press of Mississippi in September 2001.  Genaro Smith won the prestigious Zora Neal Hurston/Richard Wright Award in 1999, had chapters of his novel The Land South of the Clouds published in North Ridge Review and the Amerasian Review, has had new work commissioned by Amerasian Review, and a story forthcoming in the Doubleday anthology Gumbo: Stories by Black American Writers.  Raúl Peschiera has published in a variety of French and English journals and is Editor of The Review:  An International Journal, published in London and featuring work by many of the world's most famous and acknowledged authors.  Poet Matthew Silverman won the First Place Award of The Journal of College Writing.  Fiction writer John Warner's My First Presidentiary was on the Washington Post's best seller list for weeks. 

Novelist Lisa Graley was awarded a the $5000 Louisiana Division of the Arts Fellowship Grant.  Daniel Daly has had fiction appear in MacGuffin and poetry in such distinguished journals as Poetry, The New York Times, Commonweal, North Dakota Quarterly, and Tar River Poetry.  Heather Iarusso published an interview in the distinguished Poets and Writers; Amy Fleury published a chapter from her novel in 21st, poems in Prairie Schooner and in Places of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry (Story Line Press); Allen Braden has published in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, The Clackamas Review, Zzyzzva, Literary Salt, and others; Michael McKinney's book Plateaus is forthcoming from G. T. Walker Press and he has published both poetry and fiction widely; Kevin Meaux, a winner of the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, has had poems in Poetry, the nation's most distinguished poetry journal, as well as Southern Humanities Review, Many Mountains Moving, Image, Yalobusha Review, and 21st.

We have not kept a record of every single publication of our students because they are too numerous, but the following list is a partial representation:  The Missouri Review, The Sycamore Review, The Yalobusha Review, The Review, The Burnside Reader, Threepenny Review, The MacGuffin, The Sewanee Review, Crazy Horse, Tar River Review, New Virginia Review, Cimarron Review, The Laurel Review, Plum Review, The Review, Sulphur River Literary Review, Visions International, Southern Poetry Review, Louisiana Literature, Black Bear Review, San Fernando Poetry Journal, Clackamas Review, Literary Salt, Westview, Southwestern Review, Crosstimbers, Phoenix, The Wall, American Literary Review, The New Criterion, Wayne Literary Review, Voices Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Zzyzzva, Southern Humanities Review, Many Mountains Moving, Image, Flint Hills Review, The Proceedings of the Philological Association of Louisiana, The Advocate, The Alembic, The Yalobusha Review, Daedalus, 21st, Ellipses, Fox Cry, Sou'wester, The Widener Review, Poet Lore, The MacGuffin, Epiphany, Samisdat, The St. Andrews Review, The Chaminade Literary Review, North Ridge Review, Amerasian Review, The Helderberg Review, Poet and Critic, Street Magazine, Visions, Xanadu, The North Dakota Quarterly, The West Hills Review, The Northern New England Review, Plainsongs, Nexus, The Journal of College Writing, The Delta, The Cape Rock, The Roanoke Review, Midwest Poetry Review, and Ariel.