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George Mason University’s Creative Writing Program joins Watershed Lit and Mason’s University Libraries in presenting the Spring 2026 Visiting Writers Series.

Holly Mason Badra, MFA ’17 and now Associate Director of Women and Gender Studies, recently published Sleeping in the Courtyard: Contemporary Kurdish Writers in Diaspora (University of Arkansas Press).

BookRiot reviewer Lydia Manusos featured Stillhouse Press's Fall 2025 publication, TELL ME YOURS I'LL TELL YOU MINE by Kristina Ten, in a list of knockout horror short story collections. "I am absolutely feral for the story “The Dizzy Room,” originally published in Nightmare Magazine, but any story Ten writes is a winner. Her work is unsettling, nostalgic, elegiac, and poetic. It’s the perfect eerie read for settling in by a fire with a hot drink" said Manusos.

Three recent MFA alums—Jessika Bouvier, Kara Crawford, and Connor Harding, all class of ’25—have recently debuted an online literary journal, Chatterbox, dedicated to short fiction on the longer side.

Spanish author Marta Sanz engages audiences in the DMV through readings, panels, and workshops during her 2025 Cheuse Center residency. Spanish writer and literary critic Marta Sanz will participate in a series of literary events in the DMV area during her 2025 residency at the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center at George Mason University, in collaboration with the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain in Washington, D.C. Sanz will be in the U.S. from September 26 to October 3, beginning in Washington, DC, before continuing to New York City.

The year-long series seeks to foster cross-disciplinary AI literacy, explore how AI shapes and is shaped by culture, ethics, history, and society, and provide opportunities for research incubation and exchange.

"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.