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MFA for Poets and Writers

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Official account for the MFA for Poets and Writers at UMass Amherst. @umassenglishdept @umasshfa

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Announcing our Visiting Writers Series for Fall 2026!

This year’s lineup features Gabriel Bump, Nora Lange, Canisia Lubrin, and Juliana Spahr. Readings are free, open to the public, and held in the UMass Amherst Old Chapel’s Great Hall. Events begin at 6 p.m. and include a book signing after the reading.

Celebrating its 63rd year, the nationally renowned Visiting Writers Series at UMass Amherst presents emerging and established writers of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. This year, Juliana Spahr, recipient of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, will be the Merry and Daniel Glosband Writer in Residence. This program brings renowned poets and writers to the UMass Amherst campus to work with graduate students in a weeklong intensive featuring craft talks, readings, and classroom visits.

The Visiting Writer Series is produced by the MFA for Poets and Writers and the Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action. The series is made possible with support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the University of Massachusetts Arts Council and the English Department.

✨✨✨ taken in UMass Amherst by @umassmfa

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2 months ago

Thanks @nora__lange for a great visit! by @umassmfa

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13 days ago

📚✨ Join us on October 8th for a fantastic Mass Book Awards Longlist Reading at UMass Amherst’s Orchard Hill Pavilion! Enjoy readings from the amazing longlisted authors in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction: Laura Cresté, Patrick Donnelly, Emily Everett, Mia McKenzie, Nora Claire Miller, and Michelle Young. Plus, you can snag their books from Amherst Books!

The event is free and open to everyone, so bring your friends and get ready for a literary afternoon! Just remember to dress for the outdoors. 🌳

📍 Orchard Hill Pavilion, 154 Orchard Hill Drive, Amherst. Park in Lot 49!

🔗 Link to Register in Linktree. by @umassmfa

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a month ago

UMass MFA past and present gather at the recently completed Disquiet Literary Program in Lisbon... @disquietilp

...in front of the olive tree transplanted from Jose Saramago's hometown and below which lie his ashes after a fantastic event with @bumperg, @joaopvala, and @aliontas at @fjsaramago. taken in Lisboa, Portugal by @umassmfa

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3 months ago

Wild Invention begins next week!

Join us for this summer's Juniper Reading Series, Sunday through Thursday at the Old Chapel, and Friday at the Orchard Hill Pavilion ~ Readings start at 7:30pm. Featuring visiting writers of this summer's Juniper Summer Writing Institute.

See you there!

@junipersummer taken in University of Massachusetts Amherst by @umassmfa

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4 months ago

Today’s conversation with Jordy Rosenberg is many things but at its heart it explores the question of what it means to write revolutionary literature (or as Trotsky would call it “October literature”). Whether we are talking about trans horror or a Marxist surreal, the originating violence of early capitalism or writing toward utopian horizons; whether we are getting granular on the level of craft and form or looking more broadly at the role of art and artists, the question of how our writing can lend itself toward conjuring an elsewhere and otherwise is, I think, the animating force behind it all.

Jordy’s provocative choices in his latest novel Night Night Fawn bring these questions urgently to the fore as it centers and is narrated by someone whose worldview Jordy strongly opposes. Night Night Fawn is an opioid-addled, deathbed rant by one Barbara Rosenberg, a transphobic Zionist woman modeled after Jordy’s own mother. Barbara holds court not only on her life’s disappointments, but on Marxism and gender delivered through her cracked lens. All while her greatest disappointment, her transgender son, who may or may not want to kill her, visits her at her bedside. What opportunities, challenges and dangers does this approach create for a writer with revolutionary aims? How can looking back at originary violences, within a family or a nation or an ideology, be a liberatory act? And when confronting structural or familial violence, what is the role of humor and satire? Perhaps it is best summed up by Book Page in its starred review when they say Night Night Fawn is “comedic fiction as political firepower.” Don't miss this one! Link in my bio
#jordyrosenberg #nightnightfawn #confessionsofthefox by @umassmfa

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7 months ago

🌿 Next month! 🌿
Join us for our annual Literary Arts Festival
March 27-28, 2026
UMass Amherst Old Chapel

Two days of readings, panels, and conversations with internationally recognized authors, editors, and agents + alumni, current and prospective students

Free and open to the public

🌿 See you there! 🌿 taken in Old Chapel by @umassmfa

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8 months ago

English alum Robert Casper, MFA '04, has been named President and Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets!

Casper says, "I am eager to invite all Americans to connect to the living art of poetry, support poets as they shape the language of our time, and advocate for poetry’s critical role in our collective future."

Learn more on our website: https://www.umass.edu/english/news/academy-american-poets-names-robert-casper-mfa-04-national-leader-poetry-and-literary

#UMassEnglish #UMassHFA #UMassAmherst @umasshfa @umass @umassmfa Robert Casper. by @umassmfa

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9 months ago

☃ THIS THURSDAY ☃

Join us for the final Visiting Writers Series reading of the semester with:

Jeff Parker
Old Chapel, UMass Amherst
6pm

☃ Jeff Parker is the author of several books including Where Bears Roam the Streets: A Russian Journal, the novel Ovenman, and the short story collection The Taste of Penny. His newest novella, G v. P, was published in the collection Proper Imposters by the University Press of Florida. He teaches prose in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and he is the co-founder and director of the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal. ☃

“This brilliantly imagined tale of thorny friendship between two master storytellers is unlike anything I have ever read. A surreal road story brimming with metaphysical horrors and marvels, Jeff Parker’s G v. P gives us a darkly funny and deeply moving meditation on life, death, and art that you’ll never forget.”—Mona Awad, author of Bunny

"Jeff Parker’s 'G v. P' was the highlight of the collection. Elegant, with a magnetic narrative that begins—but absolutely does not end—with the mystery of the identities behind the titular initials, Parker’s tale is an absorbing study of a pair that are not quite friends, lovers, or enemies, but whose fates are undeniably entwined." -- Sam Spratford, The Common

☃

Reception to follow
Open to the public
See you there! taken in UMass Amherst by @umassmfa

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a year ago

🍂 THIS THURSDAY 🍂

Layli Long Soldier
Old Chapel, UMass Amherst
6pm
Q&A to follow

🍂 A co-production with Arts Sustainability Activism @artsustainabilityactivism 🍂

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.

WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. “I am,” she writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.” This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.

Reception to follow
Open to the public
See you there! taken in UMass Amherst by @umassmfa

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a year ago

🐍 THURSDAY 🐍
6pm @ the Old Chapel

Art Sustainability Activism presents a reading and Q&A with Madeline ffitch!

Madeline ffitch is the author of the short story collection Valparaiso, Round the Horn and the novel Stay and Fight, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Lamda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Washington State Book Award, the LA Times Book Award, and was the 2023 Ohio Center for the Book pick for the National Book Festival. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Award and her story "Seeing Through Maps" was chosen for the 2024 Best American Short Stories anthology. ffitch's writing has appeared in Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, Granta, Tin House, and elsewhere. Her novel about Appalachian antifascism is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She writes and organizes in Appalachian Ohio.

In partnership with the Fine Arts Center, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and School of Earth and Sustainability. taken in UMass Amherst by @umassmfa

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a year ago

📖📖 ONE WEEK FROM TODAY 📖📖
📖📖 New Location 📖📖

Join us for a reading with:

GARTH GREENWELL
Bernie Dallas Room (Goodell Hall)
UMass Amherst
October 23 @ 6pm

Reception to follow.

📖 Garth Greenwell is the inaugural Merry and Daniel Glosband Writer in Residence, a new residency program hosted by the UMass MFA. The Merry and Daniel Glosband Writer in Residence program brings renowned poets and writers to the UMass Amherst campus to work with creative writers in a weeklong intensive featuring craft talks, readings, and classroom visits. 📖

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for many other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

His second book, Cleanness, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and the Prix Sade, among others. A New York Times Notable Book, it was named a Best Book of 2020 by over thirty publications.

His new novel, Small Rain, won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

His cultural criticism has appeared widely, and he writes regularly about books, music, and film for the Substack newsletter To a Green Thought. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the 2021 Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

SEE YOU THERE! taken in University of Massachusetts Amherst by @umassmfa

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a year ago