Creative Writing Concentration
english department
The English department offers a Creative Writing Concentration that allows certain students to intensify and focus their English majors by taking a series of practice-based writing courses along with their literature courses.
Writers’ Resources
- Boston College English Department Undergraduate Writing Prizes
The submission deadline for these prizes is 4:00 p.m. on March 31.
Please direct questions to Elizabeth Graver. - The Association of Writers & Writing Programs
- Poets and Writers Magazine
- Poetry Daily
- Poets.org
Boston College Literary Publications
Events at Boston College
Boston-Area Readings
Breaking News
Sarah Lunnie (Class of 2008), the Literary Manager of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, was recently featured in a story on National Public Radio.
Congratulations to Philip McHarris (class of 2014), winner of the 31st annual Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Scholarship.
Two former students have work appearing in esteemed national publications this month: An article by Liz Kulze (Class of 2011) is currently running on The Atlantic website, and Reeves Wiedeman (Class of 2008) has just published his first full-length feature in The New Yorker. Congratulations, Liz and Reeves!
Alumna Jennifer Close has just published her first novel, Girls in White Dresses, which chronicles a group of recent BC graduates and highlights the bond between women during those crucial years after college and before marriage, employment, and children. The book has been featured in Washington Life Magazine, Canada's National Post and elsewhere.
Alumni Writing News
Kate Balch (Class of 2008) is a Production Associate at ABC News in New York. She is also a Master's student at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and will receive her degree in May 2011. ABC News recently published her Master's Thesis, and additional clips from her reporting can be viewed at the Columbia News Service website.
David Benoit (Class of 2008) is a reporter for the Dow Jones News Service.
Rebecca Buckley (Class of 2008) completed the Columbia Publishing Course and is now Assistant to the CEO at Prometheus Global Media, which owns such media properties as Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, and Adweek Media.
Katherine Cannella (Class of 2008) is a design and planning associate for the Battery Conservancy in New York City. A significant part of her job involves writing about landscape, a subject she studied in an advanced nonfiction writing workshop at BC.
Erin Dionne (Class of 1997) published a young adult novel, Models Don't Eat Chocolate Cookies, in 2008, and has a second YA novel, The Total Tragedy of a Girl Named Hamlet, forthcoming. website
Matthew Di Paoli (Class of 2005) was a Dever Fellow and recipient of the Cardinal Cushing Award. He recently finished his MFA at Columbia University for Fiction. He has been published in the Nib Magazine, FictionWeek Literary Review, BlazeVox, Ascent Aspirations, Newport Review, and Post Road literary magazines among others. He also has an article series with Atticus Books called On Location NYC. Currently, he is writing a novel entitled Doc and teaches Writing and Literature at Monroe College.
Will Dowd (Class of 2006) earned a Master of Science in Science Writing at MIT in 2007, where he was a Lyons Fellow. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at NYU as a Jacob K. Javits Fellow. His poems have appeared in Post Road Magazine, 32 Poems, and The Comstock Review, and he has published nonfiction in Skeptic Magazine. He received the Scott Merrill Scholarship to attend the Key West Literary Seminar in January 2010 and was runner-up in NPR’s “Three-Minute Fiction Contest,” judged by James Woods.
Kate Griwert (Class of 2009) works as a writer for the Brafton news and marketing agency.
Donald Harrison (Class of 2004), who will finish the 3-year MFA at the University of Texas in 2010, won an honorable mention in the 2009 Atlantic Student Writers Competition and has published fiction in The Roanoke Review.
Sarah (Sally) Holmes (Class of 2009) completed the Columbia Publishing Course in 2009 and now has a paid internship with New York Magazine.
Sean Keck (Class of 2007) started the PhD program at Brown in 2009 and during the final year of his MA at BC served as Assistant Managing editor of Post Road. He was a finalist in the 2009 Redivider AWP Quickie Contest (Poetry), winner of the 2008 PSA Poetry in Motion Contest (St. Louis), received Honorable Mention in the 2007 Deane Wagner Poetry Prize, and has published work in Eclipse and Concho River Review.
Simone Kearney (Class of 2006) received her MFA in poetry from Hunter College. She is one of this year’s recipients of the Amy Award from Poets & Writers Magazine, and her work can be found in Post Road Magazine, Elimae, Maggy, Sal Mimeo and Supermachine. She works for the Thierry-Goldberg Projects gallery in Manhattan, and teaches writing and literature at Pace University. She lives in Brooklyn.
Sarah Khan (Class of 2003) was an English and communication major at BC and received an MA in Magazine, Newspaper, Online Journalism from Syracuse University. She is an editor at Travel and Leisure magazine in New York, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Vogue India, and many other publications. You can read more of her work or follow her on Twitter @BySarahKhan.
Liz Kulze (Class of 2011) is a freelance writer and works for New York Magazine's online department. Her work has appeared on the Daily Beast, Bullett Media, XOJane, the Atlantic, and in New York Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn.
Lloyd Liu (Class of 2007) published a short story in Kartika Review (an Asian-American lit journal) last year, and is at Georgetown Law School. He is looking to do public interest work.
Sarah Lunnie (Class of 2008) is the literary manager at Actors Theatre of Louisville, where she is involved in curating and developing new works for the Humana Festival of New American Plays. She is the co-editor of several volumes of Humana Festival: The Complete Plays and a handful of student play anthologies. The Kentucky Foundation for Women awarded her a 2009 Artist Enrichment Grant to support her writing. Lunnie is an affiliated artist with the New York-based company The Mad Ones and a founding member of the Telephonic Literary Union.
Jennifer Massoni (Class of 2002) is pursuing an MFA in Fiction at Mills College in Oakland, CA. She is also still the Senior Editor for Gentry magazines in Menlo Park, CA.
Marissa Matteo (Class of 2005) got her MFA at U of Miami in 2009 and is enrolled in UCLA's MFA in Screenwriting program. She has, along the way, become a successful ghostwriter (her ghost-written work has appeared on the NY Times bestseller list). She is also at work on a novel.
Caitlin Moran (Class of 2011) was awarded the Gary Fincke Writing Prize for Prose, for the best work of fiction published in the Fall 2010 Susquehanna Review. Her work has appeared in BC’s own Stylus and Laughing Medusa, as well as Pure Francis, RIPPLE magazine, and AISES Winds of Change magazine.
Katie Moulton (Class of 2008) is working as an administrator at Washington University, and writes regular concert reviews for the Riverfront Times. She is also a contributing editor for the literary journal River Styx, and was a featured poet at their 2009 summer reading series for young writers.
Meaghan Mulholland will complete her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas in 2010. She worked for several years at National Geographic in Washington, DC, and won a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy in 2005 to do research for a novel set in Sicily. Her writing awards include top rankings in several fiction contests. Samples of her work.
Gino Orlandi (Class of 2009) received a 2009 residency under the Edgewood Arts Program in Savannah, GA. As part of the residency, he has also taught at local middle schools three times a week through the “DEEP” Storyboard Program, a non-profit organization that offers after-school creative-writing courses to students in grades six through eight.
Janelle Nanos (Class of 2002) is an editor at National Geographic Traveler and edits its Intelligent Traveler blog. She's also a DC stringer for New York Magazine, for which she used to work. She has an MA in journalism from NYU.
Jim O'Sullivan (Class of 2003) is a reporter for the State House News Service, on Beacon Hill.
Daniel Pritchard (Class of 2005) works at David R. Godine, Publisher, and is the founder and managing editor of The Critical Flame: a Journal of Book Reviews & Criticism. He is also a founding member of the Boston Poetry Union, and the managing editor for Fulcrum: an Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics. He is a poet and critic with work appearing in 66: the Journal of Sonnet Studies, The Charles River Journal, Pusteblume, Fulcrum, and the Contemporary Poetry Review, among others. Website
Skye Shirley is a poet living and working in Boston. She received the Dever Fellowship in 2010 after the completion of her poetry thesis, “The Good Women.” Her chapbook Opening the Storm Door received the McCarthy Creative Writing Award in 2009 and her poem "The Paper Called Them Black-Fish" was recently awarded the Gary Fincke Prize for Poetry. Her poems have been published in several journals, including Susquehanna Review, Best Undergraduate Writing of 2009, and Pure Francis.
Joseph Spece (Class of 2005) completed an MFA at Columbia in 2009, and was awarded a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship in poetry. He has published work in Post Road and Poetry and his first book of poems, Roads (Cherry Grove), is forthcoming in March 2013.
Chris Staudinger is a riverperson in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where he works under artist John Ruskey as a boat builder, canoe guide, teacher, and writer. His most recent piece, a feature in the Memphis Flyer, described a Mississippi River expedition that was broadcast into classrooms throughout the valley.
Reeves Wiedeman (Class of 2008) works in the fact-checking department at The New Yorker, and his writing is featured regularly in the magazine's "Talk of the Town." His first full-length article for The New Yorker appears in the December 10, 2012 issue.
Do you have Alumni Writing News to share? If so, please email it to christopher.boucher@bc.edu.