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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.

This course booklet is a crucial tool in planning your Spring 2026 classes. Inside, you will find descriptions for course offerings in all English/Creative Writing graduate programs.

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).

The College of Humanities and Social Sciences is proud to honor Laura Scott, MFA Creative Writing ’93, with the 2025 Distinguished Faculty Alumni Award. Scott has spent her career shaping the next generation of storytellers at George Mason University. After earning her degree, she joined the English department as an academic coordinator and instructor, where she now teaches fiction writing and guides students as they begin their journeys as novelists.

Just over a year ago, three English Department professors—fiction writers Michael Don and Billy Howell and poet and essayist Liz Paul—joined local poet Erika Ostergaard to launch a new literary series in downtown Fairfax. Fox City Lit hosts quarterly readings as well as weekly writing get-togethers—both celebrating and encouraging literary talent from the local area and throughout the DMV region. 

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.

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.