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    • After nearly fifteen years at McNeese, Morri Creech moved on this past spring. To be closer to family, Morri accepted an excellent job at Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina. The undergraduate and graduate students there will undoubtedly benefit from his dedication, his humor, and his wisdom.

      Taking over for Morri as Poetry Coordinator at McNeese will be Amy Fleury. Amy returns to Lake Charles after teaching at Washburn University in Kansas for the past decade. Her book of poems, Beautiful Trouble, was winner of the Crab Orchard Review Poetry Prize. Amy was recently awarded an Amy Clampitt residency, which will take place in Lennox, Massachusetts in fall 2009.

    • Elizabeth Genovise's story "A Miraculous Staircase" has been accepted by Relief: A Quarterly Christian Expression.

    • Michael Shewmaker has poems forthcoming in Tar River Poetry and Asheville Poetry Review.

    • Jason Reynolds successfully launched an impressive online journal this summer. Fictionweekly.com features fresh new fiction once a week. Initial offerings came from members of the MSU MFA community and included Chris Lowe, Dan Webre, and Matt Dye.

    • Fall 2009 will bring publication of Darren Dillman's first novel. The Preacher pits a young girl who may have the ability to heal against a holy man with an evil heart.

    • Neil Connelly, McNeese Alum and current MFA Program Director, will be publishing his third novel, The Healer Boy's Sister, in fall 2010.

    • Adam Johnson, a Senior Jones Lecturer of Creative Writing at Stanford University, recently published "Hurricane Days" in Tin House. The story, which takes place in Lake Charles in the days following Hurricane Rita, follows a UPS driver as he copes with the sudden reappearance of his infant son amidst the chaos. Brad Pitt's production company has purchased the film rights and the screenwriter of Schindler's List is currently at work. Adam also found success with an innovative class last semester. He and Tom Kealy selected undergraduate writers and artists in an attempt to envision, create, and publish a graphic novel in just six weeks. The result, Shake Girl, is stunning in its success. The Stanford Graphic Novel Project independently published several hundred copies of Shake Girl to help create awareness about the issues of violence against women, and more specifically, the phenomenon of acid attacks in Cambodia. Vertigo Comics, DC comics' mature wing, has purchased the rights to mass produce this moving true story. Lastly, Adam's short story "Teen Sniper" was recently selected by Entertainment Weekly as one of ten new classic short stories. The list includes Robert Olen Butler, Tobias Wolff, and Raymond Carver. Not bad company.

    • Kudos to Billy Merck for successfully defending his dissertation and earning his PhD in English from Washington State University. Dr. Merck is now working for his alma mater. Good luck to McNeese MFA alums just now entering new graduate programs. This fall, Casie Beasley will begin work at the University of Houston and Michelle Reed will begin studies at University of Texas. Other MFAers currently attending PhD programs include Tabitha Hibbs, Wendy Whelan, John Anderson, Matt Hobson, and Jessica Pitchford, who edits the Southeastern Review at Florida State.

    • Congratulations for recent grads Josh Canipe and Dan Webre for securing teaching jobs at Labette Community College in Parsons, Kansas and Xavier University in New Orleans. Matt Dye will be teaching at Sowela Technical College in Lake Charles.

    • Congratulations to Hillary Joubert who was awarded a $5,000 Louisiana Division of the Arts grant for his poetry.

    • John Wood, founder of McNeese State's MFA program and its director for more than two decades, retired from the school in July, 2006. He and his wife Carol have moved to Vermont of all places, where they are still hard at work doing all the things they love.

      John's legacy is impossible to describe. Everything good that's ever come out of the program-or that may come out in all the years to come-can be credited to him. He built this program with wit, intelligence, fierce loyalty, and above all an unbridled belief in the power of art. The generosity he showered on those in his classes was the kind that can never be honestly reciprocated, only passed on to others.

      Both Morri and I were trained by John, and we will endeavor to carry on the traditions he established here. We miss him dearly and remain, forever, his students.

      Neil

      Article about John in The Chronicle of Higher Education
      MFA Founder Page

    • Former graduate student,Michelle Reed has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the Arkansas Review for her story, "A Single Woman's Guide to Loving your Thirties."

    • Morri Creech's new book Field Knowledge, published by Waywiser Press, has received reviews that can only be described as glowing. Take a look.

    • Former graduate fiction student, and current Instructor, Michelle Reed's short story, "Dunes" has been published in the Iron Horse Literary Review's "First Frost" issue (December 2006, Vol 8, issue 1).

    • Second year graduate poet Steven Brown's "Onward and Outward" has been accepted by The Christian Science Monitor.

    • Third year graduate poet John Anderson has two poems being published in the January issue of The Southern Review.

    • Judd McDonald's story "The Thin Ice of Modern Life" will appear in the new Chatachoochee Review. Check it out.

    • Praise for Neil Connelly's, Buddy Cooper Finds a Way . . . more

    • Morri Creech provides poetry for museum quality photography book . . . more

    • Allen Braden, MFA poetry alumni, has received a $20,000 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. . .more

    • Dr. Keagan LeJeune, MFA poetry alumni, recently hosted the Louisiana Folklore Society's annual conference at McNeese State University.

    • Dr. Jacob Blevins, MFA poetry alumni, gave a paper March 3, entitled, "Finding Fit Words:  Public Voices and the Private Self in Shakespeare's Sonnets" in Malibu, California for the South Central Renaissance Conference held at Pepperdine University.  On March 31, Dr. Blevins also presented a paper entitled, "Heroism, Humanism, and Milton's Classical Crisis:  Anxiety and the Symbolic in John Milton" at a conference in Wisconsin, Madison.

    • Amy Fleury's first book, MFA Fiction & Poetry, has won the Crab Orchard Press Award for her first book, Beautiful Trouble . . .more

     

Allen Braden was the fourth and last generation to work his family farm in White Swan, Washington, where they raised cattle, hay, grain and hundreds of barn cats. He earned a B.A. from Central Washington University and M.A. and M.F.A. degrees from McNeese State University in Lake Charles , Louisiana.  Braden has published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Seneca Review, Southern Review, Georgia Review, Threepenny Review, Shenandoah, North American Review, Bellingham Review, Poetry Northwest and The New Republic. He has been published online by Poetry Daily, Literary Salt, Arhutus, Brevity and Switched-on Gutenberg. His essay “Richard Hugo’s Marginal West,” appears in a recent issue of North Dakota Quarterly. Founder of The Gallery Reading Series, he teaches poetry and interdisciplinary writing at Tacoma Community College and lives in Puyallup, Washington.  Most recently, Braden was the recipient of a $20,000 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for excellence in writing.
A native of rural northeast Kansas, Amy Fleury earned an M.F.A. from McNeese State University and has held the Nadya Aisenberg Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous journals, including Southern Poetry Review, North American Review, 21st, Laurel Review, South Dakota Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is an associate professor of English at Washburn University and the managing editor of Woodley Memorial Press in Topeka, Kansas. Fleury's first book, Beautiful Trouble, won the Crab Orchard Press Award.
New York Times critic Michiko Kakatuni, well known for her rather biting reviews, changed her tune when it came to Adam Johnson's debut collection of short stories, Emporium: His stories, she wrote, occur "in a world located somewhere between Kurt Vonnegut's sci-fi empire and that wild and crazy land of weirdos limned in T. Coraghessan Boyle's stories."  Johnson's first book was the story collection, Emporium (2002), which was named one of the best books of that year by the San Francisco Chronicle. The stories take place in a dysfunctional future world, and most feature adolescents who long for love and connection. Teen Sniper stars an expert marksman, age 15, who is employed by the Los Angeles Police Department to hunt and kill renegade employees of Silicon Valley software companies. Trauma Plate tells the story of a heartsick teenage girl who runs a bulletproof-vest rental shop in a deserted strip mall. Several of the stories appeared previously in such magazines as Esquire, the Paris Review, and Harper's.  Adam Johnson received a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University where he now teaches. Prior to that, he studied creative writing with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana.