F180.
Writing Life Post-MFA: Unearthing the Realities
Friday, February 9, 2024
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm
Is life after your MFA not what you thought it would be? Do you have nausea, heartburn, and indigestion about your future post-degree? We’re told to aim for traditional expectations. When this doesn’t happen it is easy to despair. But the truth of what success can look like after receiving your degree varies from person to person. This candid panel covers a range of perspectives on what life can offer in the next chapter. What opens up when you change your preconceptions of what’s possible?
Participants
Tyler Anne Whichard is a queer Southern writer from North Carolina. She received her MFA from UNC-Wilmington where she interned for Ecotone as a fiction reader and worked on Lookout Books' 2019 release, This Is My Body. Her writing appears in Brevity, The Rumpus, and HAD, among others.
Jessica Nirvana Ram is an Indo-Guyanese poet and essayist. She earned her MFA at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and received her BA from Susquehanna University. Jessica's full-length collection Earthly Gods will be published with Variant Lit in 2024.
Nishat Ahmed is a Bengali American poet living in Chicago. He received his MFA from Old Dominion University. His chapbooks, Field Guide for Ends Days and Brown Boy (Finishing Line Press and Porkbelly Press) blend spoken word elements with musical punk confessionalism
.
Susan Nguyen is the author of the poetry collection Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press), which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and an AAAS Outstanding Achievement Award. She is currently the senior editor of Hayden's Ferry Review.
Aurielle Marie is a Black and queer poet and essayist. Winner of the 2020 Cave Canem Poetry Award, Aurielle's debut, Gumbo Ya Ya, was selected as the 2022 Lambda Literary Award winner in Bisexual Poetry. She is the 2022 Georgia Author of the Year in poetry and writes from her hometown of Atlanta.
