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“Unstoppable Stories: A Banned Book Festival” urges everyone, readers and writers especially, to recognize the value of literary citizenship, advocating for and celebrating the voices of marginalized groups whose stories are continually being silenced. “Unstoppable Stories” understands these stories to be crucial; they connect us across our differences and teach us to be better people. So, when Persky, a contributor to FCPS Pride and steadfast supporter of free literary expression received an email about the festival, she immediately volunteered to help.

The Burning of the World: The Great Chicago Fire and The War for a City’s Soul, the latest book from English Professor Scott Berg, MFA ’97, was released September 26 by Pantheon Publishing.

Applications are now being accepted for the Bill Miller BFA Scholarship for Diversity in Creative Writing, established in 2023 to provide scholarship support for students pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.

Tania James' latest novel, Loot, is one of ten contenders for the National Book Award.

The five-day Modern Language Association workshop was designed to strengthen the teaching of reading and writing at community colleges and other schools that prioritize access over selectivity in admissions.

Melanie McCabe, a Mason MFA alum, was named a finalist for the Virginia Literary Awards for her latest poetry collection, The Night Divers.

MFA poetry student Arpita Roy has been selected as the winner of the Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Contributor Award in Poetry for the 2023 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. For this highly competitive award, she was chosen out of a pool of 2,500 applicants.

MFA alumnus and former Watershed Lit GPA Tommy Sheffield (Poetry, '21) met poet Latif Askia Ba, acquired and helped develop his book project, and successfully published The Machine Code of a Bleeding Moon in 2022 under the Stillhouse Press imprint. Ba had two poems published in the June 2023 issue of Poetry Magazine.

With funds from ArtsFairfax, nonprofit Poetry Daily sends Mason MFA poetry students into the Fairfax County Juvenile Detention Center to teach poetry to incarcerated youths as part of the Poetry Alive! program. “This new program brings young poet-teachers directly into the lives of young people who want to find language for their own stories and who may want to see those stories and their connections with others in a new light as they move forward,” said Peter Streckfus, a co-director of Poetry Daily.

George Mason University’s Creative Writing Program joins Watershed Lit and Mason’s University Libraries in presenting the Fall 2023 Visiting Writers Series, including poets Shane McCrae and Dan Beachy-Quick, short story writer Ruth Joffre, and memoirist and novelist CJ Hauser.