MFA Faculty Publications
Announcing new publications from MFA faculty members Kwame Dawes, Joseph Millar, Jack Driscoll, and Dorianne Laux.
City of Bones: A Testament (Northwestern University Press, 2017) is the twentieth collection of poems in Kwame Dawes' hallmarked career. The lyric poems in City of Bones: A Testament constitute a restless jeremiad for our times, and Dawes’s inimitable voice peoples this collection with multitudes of souls urgently and forcefully singing, shouting, groaning, and dreaming about the African diasporic present and future.
Kwame Dawes is faculty at Pacific University's Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program. Dawes is the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner, the founding director of the African Poetry Book Fund, and the artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. Find out more about Kwame on his website.
The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot (Wayne State University Press, 2017) is the newest collection of short stories from Jack Driscoll. The ten stories are mostly set in Michigan's northern lower peninsula, a landscape as gorgeous as it is severe. If at times the situations in these stories appear hopeless, the characters nonetheless, and even against seemingly impossible odds, dare to hope. These fictional individuals are so compassionately rendered that they can hardly help but be, in the hands of this writer, not only redeemed but made universal.
Jack Driscoll is a two-time NEA Creative Writing Fellowship recipient and the author of eleven books, including the short story collections Wanting Only to Be Heard, winner of the AWP Short Fiction Award, and The World of a Few Minutes Ago (Wayne State University Press, 2012), winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award and the Michigan Notable Book award. His stories have appeared widely in journals including The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Missouri Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and New Stories from the Midwest. He currently teaches in Pacific University's Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program.
Kingdom (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2017) is the newest collection of poetry from Joseph Millar. Perhaps more fully than any recent book, this one calls to mind Dylan Thomas's assessment that the best poems show us that we are alone and not alone in the unknown world, that our bliss and suffering are forever shared, and forever all our own. Kingdom shows Millar working at the height of his powers, sifting the rag and bone shop of the heart for songs and stories.
Joseph Millar is faculty at Pacific University's Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program. His poems have won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He divides his time between Raleigh, North Carolina, and Richmond, California. Find out more about Joseph on his website.
Duet (Jacar Press, 2017) is the newest work by Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar. The two celebrated poets weave together poems about music in a chapbook that riffs on the theme of the title; the poems move forward on unnumbered pages, two voices singing.
Joseph Millar is faculty at Pacific University's Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program. His poems have won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He divides his time between Raleigh, North Carolina, and Richmond, California. Find out more about Joseph on his website.
The work of Dorianne Laux has appeared in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and has been twice included in Best American Poetry. She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches at Pacific University's Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program. Find out more about at her website.