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"When Eloise tells Kofi she wants a divorce, he sits naked on the kitchen floor skinning an ox tongue to prepare Eloise’s favorite dish." So begins Brian Gyamfi's poem, 'The Almost Love Poem of Eloise and Kofi'.

The barn could be neither more plain nor less imposing.        Little cared for, seeming underappreciated. Unpainted wood. Board-and-batten sides, roof of tin. Long and narrow, yet, in the whole length of it, only six windows, arranged in two blocks of three each, high up on one wall. Not much light gets in except through the holes and cracks in the walls.        There probably was not much light to come through those windows anyway in the middle of the night or even in the early morning that time in 1955 when 14-year-old Emmett Till was tortured and murdered in that barn near Drew, Mississippi. But it had to be tough for a lone Black youth facing a squad of White men, in the dark, those men seeming intent on life-ending torture. 

In another life, my grandmother would have been a hairstylist. My mother told me the story once as she grew up hearing it, and it felt like legend, embedded itself in my consciousness like a bit of grit in an oyster.      I guess I’ve always mythologized my mother and her mother. Their lives as women in Japan in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s seemed to follow a Joseph Campbell-esque hero cycle with one or two major deviations, and over the years in the mantle of my brain their stories grew, nacre covered and shining.        My grandmother grew up on a tea farm in the mountains of Japan’s green tea capital, Shizuoka-ken. She was the second youngest of eight surviving siblings: six sisters, two brothers, and two “water children”, or stillbirths. The oldest brother would of course inherit the tea farm, and each of the sisters left the nest in turn to make their own way in the world. Women in those days didn’t want to be a “burden” on their families my mother says, and she uses the word again when she describes why she left home at eighteen. 

Fall for the Book will bring renowned writers Celeste Ng and Gary Larson to the George Mason University Fairfax Campus for this year's Fall for the Book festival.

George Mason University’s Creative Writing Program joins Watershed Lit and George Mason’s University Libraries in presenting the Fall 2025 Visiting Writers Series.

Washington Independent Review columnist Caroline Bock interviewed Stillhouse Press Publicist and Marketing Manager Taylor Schaefer (MFA'25) on Stillhouse Press's work as a teaching press and publisher that focuses on projects off-the beaten path.

Stillhouse Press is thrilled to announce that Amy Stuber’s debut short story collection, SAD GROWNUPS has been awarded the 2025 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Publicized at the 61st annual PEN America Literary Awards on May 8, this remarkable recognition establishes Stuber as an exciting new voice in fiction—and marks a major milestone for Stillhouse Press and the alumni, graduate, and undergraduate students, each of whom assisted in making this prodigious accolade possible.

Seven acclaimed writers judged nearly 100 fiercely competitive entries to determine the winners of Mason Creative Writing's annual Spring Writing Contests. Seven gifted Mason student-writers were awarded a total of $7000.

On May 15, 2025, the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center will return to the Arts Club of Washington to mark the ninth anniversary of the Cheuse Travel Fellowship, a program that has launched powerful literary works rooted in global research. The evening will feature readings by George Mason University MFA graduates whose Cheuse-funded international travel inspired their now-published and incoming books.

Tania James, associate professor of English at George Mason University, has been named a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in the Fiction category.