Please allow me to follow up on my last Wesleyan post with a few more brags about the MFA program at which I teach. One metric of an MFA program is the accomplishments of its students and staff. Recently, our own Brett Gordon Bratton won Jack Wild Publishing’s 2023 Chapbook contest. Alum Gabriel Rogers won first place in Boulevard’s 2022 Nonfiction Contest for Emerging Writers with his mysteriously-titled essay “68091.”

On a faculty front, Jacinda Townsend was longlisted for the 2023 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature. Her most recent book Mother Country is also a nominee for the 2023 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Our fearless program director Doug Van Gundy recently published a powerful essay in Guernica about climate change and flooding in Appalachia. He also has a piece in the anthology What Things Cost, which focuses on labor and features writing from Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Gerald Stern, and Jericho Brown.

Faculty member Jessica Handler’s essay “Permanent Record” is a “Notable” in this year’s Best American Essays. It originally appeared in Full Grown People.

While I’m at it, I’d be remiss not to mention recent accomplishments by Wesleyan College students: my former student Joelle McDonald won a statewide writing contest judged by Ann Pancake. I recently learned that my Twitter friend James Tate Hill is a Wesleyan alum. Hill’s memoir Blind Man’s Bluff is a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a Washington Independent Review of Books Favorite Book of the year.

There’s something special about Buckhannon, which has produced writers such as Irene McKinney and Jayne Ann Phillips. In Joy Castro’s memoir “Hungry,” she mentioned visiting our campus and finding the inspiration to enroll in college and pursue a career as an academic.

Anyway, if you’d like more info, please don’t hesitate to email me or contact me on Twitter. The program’s official website is here.