Recent News

For Aracelis Girmay, a poet who joined the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences as a professor in the English Department and member of the Creative Writing Program in September 2023, poetry offers one way to work through these questions. Girmay maintains that poetry doesn’t just describe human experience but rather crystallizes it.

Stegner Fellow and Fresno Poet Laureate Joseph Rios has been awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. These $50,000 awards are given to honor poets of literary merit appointed to serve in civic positions and to support them in creating new work, as well as to enable them to undertake meaningful, impactful, and innovative projects that enrich the lives of their neighbors, including youth, through responsive and interactive poetry activities.

The Creative Writing Program is pleased to welcome the incoming 2024-2026 Stegner Fellow cohort in poetry and fiction.

Nicholas Jenkins, Associate Professor of English and Co-Director of the Creative Writing Program, celebrates the release of his new book The Island: War and Belonging in Auden's England. A groundbreaking reassessment of W. H. Auden’s early life and poetry, shedding new light on his artistic development as well as on his shifting beliefs about political belonging in interwar England.

We would like to extend our congratulations to Madeleine Cravens, Stegner fellow, and Zach Williams, Jones Lecturer, on their first book releases. Madeleine Cravens has debuted an astonishing collection of poems while Zach Williams debuted a striking story collection.

On Wednesday night, Stegner Fellow in Fiction Nevarez Encinias delivered an evening of movement and description in literary form. A dancer by training, Encinias’s background came through in his writing through his elaborate physical descriptions and seemingly choreographed prose.

Mohr Visiting Poet Arthur Sze shared his work alluding to nature, translation and the human condition at a public reading on Wednesday. The reading, co-sponsored by the creative writing program and the Stanford Humanities Center, was packed with visitors, faculty and students.

On Wednesday evening, audience members initially seemed to pour in gradually to author and essayist Carmen Maria Machado’s Lane Lecture series reading — that is, until suddenly, every seat was taken and the room buzzed with lively conversation.

Attention undergrads: new Creative Writing Peer Advisor position is available!