Alumni News

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.

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.

Over the last decade, Ellen Weeren, BA ’90 and MFA ’19, has been run­ning the Facebook group A Reason to Write, serving a community of more than 750 writers at all stages of their careers with news, opportunities, and regular doses of motivation—and more recently, she’s taken that mission from the virtual world into the real one.

Each year, the George Mason University Alumni Association celebrates the achievements of alumni at the annual Celebration of Distinction awards program. The Alumni Association recognizes alumni for their outstanding professional achievements and service to the university, and honors the achievements of alumni from each school, college, and affinity chapter.

Mako Yoshikawa is the author of the memoir, Secrets of the Sun, published in 2024 and called “incandescent…gorgeous” by Booklist and “deeply felt, eloquent” by Michiko Kakutani.

Mason Creative Writing alum Jessica Anthony (MFA ’04) has recently been longlisted for the National Book Award for her newest novel, The Most.

MFA alum Danielle Cadena Deluen's latest poetry collection, Desire Museum, is a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry. She looks back on her time at Mason and her writing career so far.

The Kaduna Books and Arts Festival has honored Mason creative writing professor Helon Habila with the KabaFest Lifetime Achievement Award, which will be presented at the festival's opening ceremonies on Thursday, April 25.

The winner of the 2023 Grayson Books Poetry Contest is Emily Tuszynska for her collection Surfacing, judged by Brad Davis.