Nonfiction (MFAW): Related Content
By Craig Morgan Teicher
Anna Gazmarian (MFA, 鈥20, Nonfiction) began work on what would become her debut, Devout: A Memoir of Doubt (Simone & Schuster, 2024), while she was a nonfiction student in the Bennington Writing Seminars. The book chronicles her struggles with bipolar disorder as a member of the Evangelical community, where prayer was posited as the only solution to mental health distress. I talked to Anna on the heels of her book tour. Among other things, we discuss writing, publishing, and going to church at the gym.
The latest additions to Bennington鈥檚 rich literary history have hit bookstore shelves. Their authors join Bennington notables, including Donna Tartt '86, Kiran Desai '93, Michael Pollan '76, 鈥婣nn Goldstein '71, Ana茂s Duplan '14, Anne Waldman '66, Cynthia Sweeney MFA '13, Jamie Quatro MFA '09, Amy Gerstler '01, Morgan Jerkins MFA '16, and Charles Bock '97.
Bennington Writing Seminars faculty member Eula Biss has been selected as a 2023 New America National Fellow.
51成人猎奇 alum Asad J. Malik '19 and Bennington Writing Seminars alum Morgan Jerkins MFA '16 have been selected as 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 honorees.
Fran Antmann 鈥69 recently published Maya Healers: A Thousand Dreams (Nirala Publications, 2017).
NewPages.com glowingly reviewed issue three of Bennington Review, calling it "an incredibly strong issue put forth by an excellent journal."
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.
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.
Five alumni of Bennington鈥檚 MFA in Writing program were distinguished in The Best American Essays 2017 for their notable essays published in the previous year.
Andrea Jarrell MFA 鈥01 was profiled in Publishers Weekly for her 鈥渟pellbinding 鈥 gracefully written鈥 new memoir, I鈥檓 the One Who Got Away.
A book by Jeffrey Haas MFA 鈥07 on the 1969 assassination of Fred Hampton, deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party, is being developed into a movie by Antoine Fuqua, director of Training Day, The Equalizer, and The Magnificent Seven.
Suzanne Koven MFA 鈥12, a longtime physician and current writer-in-residence at Massachusetts General Hospital, penned a letter to her younger self as part of a recent orientation session for new medical interns in Boston.
The Blind Masseuse: A Traveler's Memoir from Costa Rica to Cambodia, by award-winning author Alden Jones MFA '01, will be re-released in paperback in March.
Morgan Jerkins MFA '16 was interviewed as part of the Pen Ten interview series on Pen America last month. She spoke about "the responsibility of the writer" which she sees as "to be honest and vulnerable. Jerkins is the author of a forthcoming collection of essays, This Will Be My Undoing. She is currently a contributing editor for Catapult. Her on the Colin Kaepernick controversy, "What Colin Kaepernick's National Anthem Protest Reveals About American" was published in Rolling Stone in August.
Summer Brennan '01 used tactics straight out of 12th Night in an attempt to undermine internet trolls. She told Flare Magazine about what she learned when she changed her profile picture on Twitter to one of her brother.
In its Guide to 2016鈥檚 Great Reads, NPR recommended Nitro Mountain by Lee Clay Johnson 鈥07, The Nest by Cynthia D鈥橝prix Sweeney MFAW 鈥13, Kookooland by Gloria Norris 鈥76, and The Queen of the Night by former MFAW faculty Alexander Chee.
Earlier this week, Mashable announced their long lists for several categories of the 2017 PEN Literary awards, which include a number of Bennington graduates.
Last month, Buzzfeed published a memoir-style essay by Chandra Ganguly MFAW '18 called "How They Killed My Grandmother."
MFA Writer-in-Residence Donald Hall writes a moving essay in the New Yorker in which he meditates on the role the solitude has played throughout his life. Now living alone at age eight-seven, he recalls his wife, Jane, who passed away in 1995. He writes: "In the separation of our double solitude, we each wrote poetry in the morning."
The Oyster War by Summer Brennan '01 was named as a finalist for the Orion Book Award.
A new book by Sven Birkerts, director of the MFA in Writing Program at 51成人猎奇, is receiving warm attention. Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age, published by Grey Wolf Press, which focuses on the effect of digital culture on our ability to engage with our world, and the fate of writing in such a context, has been reviewed in the Chronicle for Higher Education, New Republic, and the New York Times Book Review.
The National Endowment for the Humanities has named Fedwa Malti-Douglas (nonfiction, June 鈥11) a National Humanities Medalist for her studies of Arabic letters. Fedwa has mapped the discourse of gender and letters in the Arab Middle East and applied her insights to American culture.
Garrard Conley is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Boy Erased and the novel All the World Beside, as well as the creator and co-producer of the podcast UnErased: The History of Conversion Therapy in America.
Eula Biss is the author of four books, most recently Having and Being Had. Her book On Immunity was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review.
Lance Richardson is the author of House of Nutter (2018) and True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, which will be published internationally in October 2025.
Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections Tsim Tsum and The Babies, the story collection Wild Milk, and the essay collection Happily: A Personal History鈥攚ith Fairy Tales.
Blanchfield is the author of three books of poetry and prose, most recently Proxies. A collection of 鈥攑art cultural close reading, part dicey autobiography鈥Proxies was awarded a 2016 Whiting Award in Nonfiction, and was named a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Memoir and the PEN USA Literary Award in Nonfiction.
Sven Birkerts is author of The Gutenberg Elegies. His many books and essays examine the fraught interrelationship between reading culture and electronic culture.
Shawna Kay Rodenberg is the author of the memoir Kin. She has been the recipient of a Jean Ritchie Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award, and her essays have appeared in Salon, The Village Voice, and Elle.
Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart and the essay collection, Abandon Me, which The New Yorker called 鈥渕esmerizing,鈥 and was an Indie Next Pick and named a Best Book of 2017 by Esquire, Book Riot, The Cut, Electric Literature, The Brooklyn Rail, Bustle, Refinery29, Salon, and The Rumpus. Her second essay collection is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2019.