Alumni

An MFA program is only as strong as the students that make up the experience. GMU MFA alumni have gone on to careers in publishing, teaching, higher education, media, communications, technical writing, editing, project management, government, and more. Our Alumni join us each year for alumni readings and various events and programming, such as Fall for the Book, New Leaves, and Visiting Writers public readings. If you haven't come back yet for one of these events, please check out our upcoming events because we would love to see you.

Alumni, we want to hear from you! Send us your news and updates here. We regularly publish alumni news in our department newsletters, so please keep us posted on your accomplishments. 

Alexandria Petrassi (Poetry MFA '19) served as Editor-in-Chief for So to Speak, a student-managed literary journal with an intersectional feminist outlook. After graduation, they rose to become Communications Director at Split This Rock, a D.C.-based social justice-driven literary organization.

Photo by: Ron Aira/Creative Services/George Mason University

Alumni News

Five Questions With Holly Mason Badra

Five Questions With Holly Mason Badra

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).

MFA ’25 alums debut lit journal <i>Chatterbox!</i>

MFA ’25 alums debut lit journal Chatterbox!

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.

Ellen Weeren offers A Reason To Write

Ellen Weeren offers A Reason To Write

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.