Alumn John McManus (MCW 2004) is the winner of the 2024 American Short(er) Fiction Prize, judged by Dantiel W. Moniz for his story “Jack Sprat’s Wife.”

Moniz called McManus’ story “a gorgeously crafted and contained world, a peek inside the deep bowels of family, shame, and grief, which, although brief, also allowed me to see the characters past the page. From the first word, I tumbled into this story and was captivated until it let me go.”

John McManus is the author of the short story collections Fox Tooth Heart, Born on a Train, and Stop Breakin Down and the novel Bitter Milk. He’s the recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award, a Fulbright Scholar award in South Africa, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Literature Award, and a Creative Capital Literature grant. His MFA in fiction and screenwriting comes from the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas.

MCW Alumn Monica Macansantos (MCW 2013) been awarded a Black Mountain Institute 2024-2025 Shearing Fellowship. The fellowship brings writers to the UNLV campus for one year to “join a community of creative writers and scholars in a thriving literary scene in Las Vegas and on the campus of UNLV.” More on the fellowship and this year’s recipients can be found here.

Monica Macansantos holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD from the International Institute of Modern Letters at the Victoria University of Wellington. She is the author of the forthcoming essay collection Returning to My Father’s Kitchen, and the story collection Love and Other Rituals. Her work has been recognized as Notable in the Best American Essays 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2016. She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the I-Park Foundation, and others.

Rachel Kondo (MCW 2016), co-creator of Shōgun on FX, has been awarded the 2024 New Voice Award from Austin Film Festival. Kondo is being honored alongside the show’s co-creator, Justin Marks, who is receiving the Writer’s Writer Award. 

The AFF New Voice Award celebrates unique and captivating new voices in film, television, and new media.

More about the Kondo’s work, the awards, and this year’s Film Festival can be found here.

Look out for MCW alumni work in your feed this summer: TV series Shōgun (FX) and Fallout (Prime Video), and podcast Pack One Bag (Lemonade Media).

Shōgun, a new series co-created by Rachel Kondo (MCW 2016) and based on the bestselling novel by James Clavell, is now streaming on FX. The series is “set in Japan in the year 1600, at the dawn of a century-defining civil war. ‘Lord Yoshii Toranaga’ (Hiroyuki Sanada) is fighting for his life as his enemies on the Council of Regents unite against him, when a mysterious European ship is found marooned in a nearby fishing village” –FX. Shōgun has been renewed for a second season.

Fallout, a post-apocalyptic drama based on the video game franchise of the same name, was released in April and has amassed millions of viewers on Amazon Prime Video, making it the second most-watched title in Prime history. Kieran Fitzgerald (MCW 2010) is a writer for the show and wrote Episode 4, “The Ghouls.” Fallout has been renewed for Season 2.

Pack One Bag, a new Tribeca-winning podcast by documentarian David Modigliani (MCW 2007) featuring Stanley Tucci, explores the “epic true story of an Italian family, split apart by love, fascism and war.” The 10-part series premieres June 5th.

Michener Center Fellow Darius Atefat-Peckham has been named a runner-up for the 2024 UT Keene Prize for Literature, for an excerpt from his forthcoming book of poetry, Book of Kin.

The Keene Prize, named for E. L. Keene, a 1942 graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, is open to all UT students and is meant to support the pursuit of great American writing. The award for this year’s prize was $70,000, with three runners-up receiving $40,000 each.

Laurel Faye, a graduate student in the New Writers Project, was awarded the grand prize for her novel excerpt “Seal, Wife.” In addition to Atefat-Peckham, other runners-up included Ira James Goga and Kyle Okeke.

The poems in Book of Kin follow a boy’s coming of age in the aftermath of a car accident that took the lives of his mother and brother, Susan and Cyrus Atefat-Peckham. Inspired by the Persian epic The Book of Kings, the Sufi mystic poetry of Rumi, and his mother’s poetry, these poems form a path of connection between the author and his Iranian heritage. Book of Kin interrogates what it means to exist between cultures, to be a survivor of tragedy, to practice love and joy toward one’s beloveds, and to hope for greater connection.

Book of Kin is forthcoming from Autumn House Press in October 2024.

Michener Center Playwriting Alumnus Abe Koogler‘s play Staff Meal has opened to rave reviews, with recent coverage from The New York Times, Vulture, Observer, New York Theatre Guide, and New York Stage Review.

Writing for Vulture, Sara Holdren calls Staff Meal “a quietly surreal shapeshifter of a play with a tilted sense of humor and a generous, sorrowful heart.”

“Staff Meal feels like a portal,” Holdren writes. “We tumble through its funny, eerie evocation of the moment that made—is still making—our present, and we come out the other side feeling, for all its ebb toward emptiness, full.”

Staff Meal is at Playwrights Horizons through May 19.

The Michener Center celebrated the Class of 2024 at graduation events this past Friday and Saturday, April 26th & 27th, 2024.

This year’s Fiction graduates include Eileen Sungyoo Chong, Sophia Emmons-Bell, Stephanie Malia Morris, Gracie Newman, Lara Palmqvist, and Frankie Zwick. Poetry graduates include Alfredo Aguilar, Janna Coleman, Gabriel Fine, Gabrielle Rajerison, Paul S. Ukrainets, and Xiao Yumi.

On Friday evening, graduates and their loved ones enjoyed our annual Graduation Dinner, which takes place on the lawn of the historic J. Frank Dobie House, home to the Michener Center.

On Saturday, they read their work to a packed theatre of current MCW students, faculty, alumni, family, & friends at the UT Harry Ransom Center.

We’re proud to announce that Michener Center Alumnus and playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig (MCW 2009) is the recipient of a 2024 Whiting Award. The Whiting Awards give $50,000 each to ten exceptional emerging writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.

The 2024 Whiting Awards Judges praised how Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s “meticulous and politically acute fables bring the histories of nations, of capital, and of censorship to life.”

According to the Whiting Foundation, “The prizes are designed to recognize excellence and promise in a spectrum of emerging talent, giving most winners the chance to devote themselves full time to their own writing, or to take bold new risks in their work.”

“This year’s winners have made liminal space their own — that place of potential that exists between states, whether those are genres, languages, countries, or definitions of self,” said Courtney Hodell, Whiting’s Director of Literary Programs. “The rigor and fluid beauty of their writing make us excited for the work to come.”

Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig‘s trilogy The China Plays was recently published by Methuen Drama. They were produced in the U.K. at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Hampstead Theatre, and the National Theatre, and in the U.S. at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Manhattan Theater Club, Classic Stage, and the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Cowhig was born in Philadelphia and raised in Northern Virginia, Okinawa, Taipei, and Beijing; her father worked for the US State Department. Her work has been honored with the Wasserstein Prize, the Yale Drama Series Award (selected by David Hare), an Edinburgh Fringe First Award, the Keene Prize for Literature, and a United States Artist Fellowship.

We can’t stop staring at our beautiful new building!

The Dobie House garage has been transformed into a gorgeous, spacious, and ADA-accessible room.

We recently threw a party to celebrate what would have been Mr. Michener’s 117th birthday, and we were thrilled by how many students, staff, and faculty found time to stop by.

We hope to host many more events here in the future, and we’re already looking forward to when we can celebrate the completion of the next phase of this project—the restoration and revitalization of Bertha Dobie’s famous garden! Stay tuned!