MFA: Related Content

Lisa Brennan-Jobs MFA '09 writes about her childhood navigating between her struggling single mom and her famous father.

Bennington Writing Seminars alum Katy Simpson Smith MFA '13 has been appointed Eudora Welty Chair for Southern Literature at Millsaps College.

Lisa Ann Cockrel, a third-term MFA candidate in nonfiction, has been selected as the first Residential Teaching Fellow at the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Thanks to a generous and sustaining gift from an anonymous donor, the Bennington Writing Seminars is pleased to announce it will begin offering the Donald Hall Scholarship for Poets.

When asked why they love to write, the high school students at the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont (GIV) Young Writers Institute are quick to reply.

Donald Hall, former United States poet laureate, longtime Bennington Writing Seminars writer-in-residence, and dear friend of the College, has died at age 89.

Elisabeth Moss (The Handmaid's Tale) and Michael Stuhlbarg (Call Me By Your Name) have been cast in the feature film Shirley, adapted from the novel by Susan Scarf Merrell MFA '09.

When Morgan Jerkins MFA ’16 graduated from Princeton, she expected to get a job as an editorial assistant in New York City, be serendipitously discovered, and be launched into literary stardom.

Amber Wheeler Bacon MFA '18 is an honoree of Epiphany Lit Mag's inaugural Breakout 8 award for emerging writers. 

Poet and Bennington Writing Seminars alum Amy Gerstler MFA '00 has been awarded a prestigious 2018 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

How do we move forward when the past looms unreasonably large?

In what was called “one of the best Commencement speeches ever” at Bennington, Allan Gurganus received a standing ovation for his address to Bennington Writing Seminars graduates, “Advice for Masters of Fine Arts Entering Trump’s America.”

This Will be My Undoing, an essay collection by Morgan Jerkins MFA ’16, debuted at #7 on The New York Times bestseller list.

Shawna Kay Rodenberg MFA '12 has been awarded a $30,000 grant by The Rona Jaffe Foundation, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the country. 

Four new faculty members will join the Bennington Writing Seminars for the January residency: Claire Vaye Watkins in Fiction, Jenny Boully and Doug Bauer in Nonfiction, and Safiya Sinclair in Poetry. In addition, we’ll welcome visiting faculty members Monica Youn in Poetry and Wayne Koestenbaum in Nonfiction/Poetry. 

Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen, the debut memoir by Hannah Howard MFA '18, is forthcoming from Little A/Amazon in April 2018.

The New Yorker online featured a piece by award-winning poet Donald Hall, MFA Writer-in-Residence, called "The Poetry of Death."

Five alumni of Bennington’s MFA in Writing program were distinguished in The Best American Essays 2017 for their notable essays published in the previous year.