Creative
Writing
Florida State University
405 Williams Building
Tallahassee, Florida
32306-1580
Phone: 850 644 4230
Fax: 850 644 0811
Florida State University is in the heart of Tallahassee: a capital city with Southern charm, where the roads are lined with live oaks, where the world’s best oysters are shucked fresh from the Gulf and where the English Department is not your usual snakepit. The department offers both a traditional curriculum as well as innovative, dynamic courses in screenwriting, visual rhetoric, the history of print technologies, new media, editing and publishing, and more. The Creative Writing Program now offers both the MFA and the Ph.D. and is affiliated with FSU’s top-ranked schools of Film and Theatre. The community of writers that’s taken root here includes winners of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and a faculty known widely not just as writers but as teachers of writing. No program in the world has been included more often in Harcourt’s Best New American Voices. Recent graduates have published books with Hyperion, Norton, Viking, MacAdam/Cage, Penguin, Henry Holt, Simon & Schuster, Copper Canyon, Houghton Mifflin, and several university presses. Our students have published in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The Southern Review, Harper’s, Ploughshares, and many other distinguished magazines.
Joshilyn Jackson's short fiction has been published in literary magazines and anthologies including TriQuarterly and Calyx, and her plays have been produced in Atlanta and Chicago. Her bestselling debut novel, gods in Alabama won SIBA's 2005 Novel of the year Award and was a #1 BookSense pick. Her other books include Between, Georgia and The Girl Who Stopped Swimming (March 2008).
Karen Abbott, a former journalist and contributor to Salon.com, is the author of New York Times bestselling novel, Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul about the infamous Everleigh Club brothel operating in Chicago's South Side from 1900-1911. A reading you surely won't want to miss given this reviewer's comments, "Karen Abbott has combined bodice-ripping salaciousness with top-notch scholarship to produce a work more vivid than a Hollywood movie."
Julianna Baggott is the author of four novels including national bestseller Girl Talk, The Miss America Family, The Madam, and Which Brings Me to You, co-written with Steve Almond, as well as three books of poems. She also writes novels for younger readers under the pen name N.E. Bode: The Anybodies trilogy, The Slippery Map, the prequel to Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, a movie starring Dustin Hoffman, Natalie Portman, and Jason Bateman; and The Prince of Fenway Park (spring season 2008). Her work has appeared in such places as Best American Poetry series, Glamour, Ms., Poetry, TriQuarterly, and on NPR's Here and Now and Talk of the Nation. She teaches at Florida State University's Creative Writing Program.
Reared in Southwestern Virginia, Lee Smith, the author of eleven novels and three short story collections, draws largely on her childhood landscape: Blue Ridge Mountains, coal-mining towns and Appalachia in much of her critically acclaimed work. Her 2002 book, The Last Girls, based on a raft trip she made down the Mississippi River, was the winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle award and a New York Times bestseller.
Hal Crowther is an essayist whose most recent collection, Gather at the River was a National Book Award nominee. He has been dubbed "the best essayist working in journalism today," and his book, Cathedrals of Kudzu, was a finalist for the Southern Book Award in non-fiction.
Mark Jarman is the author of numerous collections of poetry including To the Green Man, Unholy Sonnets, Questions for Ecclesiastes, winner of the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and The Black Riviera, which won the 1991 Poets' Prize.
Salman Rushdie's second novel, the acclaimed Midnight's Children, won the Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and in 1993 was judged to have been the 'Booker of Bookers,' the best novel to have won the Booker Prize for Fiction in the award's 25-year history. The critic Malcolm Bradbury acclaimed the novel's achievement "a new start for the late-twentieth-century novel." Rushdie's third novel, Shame, won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses won the Whitbread Novel Award and Shalimar the Clown was shortlisted for the same award.
Claudia Emerson was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for her collection Late Wife. Her other books include, Pharaoh, Pharaoh and Pinion, An Elegy published as part of Louisiana State University Press's signature series, Southern Messenger Poets. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, TriQuarterly, Crazyhorse and New England Review.
Jeanne Leiby's short stories have been published in Fiction, Indiana Review, The Greensboro Review, and New Orleans Review. In 2000, she won the Poets and Writers Writer Exchange. Her first collection of short stories, Downriver, was published by Carolina Wren Press as the 2006 winner of the Doris Bakwin prize. Leiby has also served as fiction editor of Black Warrior Review and as the Editor in Chief of the Florida Review (2004-2007). In Spring 2008, she will take over as editor of The Southern Review.
Rick Campbell's most recent book is The Traveler's Companion. His first full-length book, Setting The World In Order won the Walt McDonald Prize. His poems and essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, The Tampa Review, Southern Poetry Review, Puerto Del Sol, and Prairie Schooner. Campbell has won an NEA Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and two fellowships from the Florida Arts Council. He is the director of Anhinga Press.
Stephen Dobyns has published ten books of poetry and twenty novels. Some of his poetry collections include Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides, Common Carnage, Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966-1992, Cemetery Nights, winner of a Melville Cane Award, Black Dog, Red Dog, winner in the National Poetry Series, Heat Death and Concurring Beasts winner of the 1972 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets. Dobyns is also the author of a collection of short stories, Eating Naked and a book of essays, Best Words, Best Order. Among his many honors and awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
