The 2024 Primetime Emmy nominations were announced this week. We’re thrilled to see three MCW alumni and their work in the mix!
Shōgun, written & created by Rachel Kondo (MCW 2016) received 25 nominations, including 2 nominations for Kondo for Outstanding Writing for A Drama Series.
Only Murders in the Building, which Ben Philippe (MCW 2014) writes for, received 21 nominations.
Fallout, which Kieran Fitzgerald (MCW 2010) writes for, received 16 nominations.
The full list of 2024 Emmy Nominations can be viewed here.
“When Morgan and Benji surprise their families with a wedding invitation to Maine, they’re aware the news of their clandestine relationship will come as a shock. Twelve years have passed since the stunning loss of sixteen-year-old Alice, Benji’s sister and Morgan’s best friend, and no one is quite the same. But the young couple decide to plunge headlong into matrimony, marking the first time their fractured families will reunite since Alice’s funeral… As the whirlwind weekend unfolds, old passions reignite, deep wounds resurface, and unearthed secrets threaten to shatter the fragile peace the wedding promises. With each new revelation, the to-be-weds and their complicated families are forced to question just how well they know the ones they hold dear.” – Penguin Random House“The World After Alice is a lovely debut novel that glimmers with fine writing and notes of human insight. There’s a quiet beauty to Lauren Aliza Green’s work, and I am now a fan.”
—Ann Napolitano, New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful
“A page-turner of a family drama. The World After Alice is at turns brutally honest, funny, and deeply empathic.” —Charmaine Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake
“Three years after they narrowly escaped the IRA’s worst punishment for informing, Northern Irish sisters Tessa and Marian Daly have built a new life in Dublin with their young children. Though Tessa is haunted by the abrupt and violent end to her old life, she does her best to immerse herself in the joys of Finn’s childhood and the rhythms of her new job at the Irish Observer.It’s a small island, though, and just as quickly as they disappeared, figures from the sisters’ past surface to drag them back into the conflict. Tessa is told she must track down her old handler from MI5, Eamonn, and attempt to turn him into an IRA informant, or lose everything…
With her signature hair-raising suspense, razor-sharp prose, and rich emotional depth, Edgar Award winner Berry has crafted both an unforgettable portrait of two fierce women in the Daly sisters, and her most spellbinding thriller to date.” – Penguin Random House
“Flynn Berry is a must-read for me. Trust Her delivers her trademark blend of riveting suspense and beautiful emotional depth. You will love this novel.” —Laura Dave, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Last Thing He Told Me
“Gripping . . . Ms. Berry is a lyrical writer who can set scenes both explosive and domestic.” —Wall Street Journal
“Koogler’s characters are earnest, idiosyncratic, and suspicious of hierarchy. Often bitingly funny, Koogler’s plays…reveal larger truths about the economic and racial systems under which we all live.” – The Yale Review
Deep Blue Sound: “If anything links all of these people, it is an aching loneliness. That they are trying to figure out what happened to orcas, which are remarkably social animals, is among the nice touches that Koogler has sneaked into his group portrait.” – New York Times
Fulfillment Center: “steeped in a luminous and illuminating empathy that feels both uncommon and essential right now.” – New York Times
Aspen Ideas: A fast-paced and darkly comedic thriller about an annual conference of the famous and well-connected, held high in the Colorado mountains.
Kill Floor: “Melancholy and moving. A very closely, and often quite beautifully, observed character study.” – Chicago Tribune
Advance Man: Ripe with experimental language, movement and absurdism, a surprising comedy exploring what it means to be a politically engaged American.
“Be warned, dear reader: The Black girls survive in this one.
Celebrating a new generation of bestselling and acclaimed Black writers, The Black Girl Survives in This One makes space for Black girls in horror. Fifteen chilling and thought-provoking stories place Black girls front and center as heroes and survivors who slay monsters, battle spirits, and face down death. Prepare to be terrified and left breathless by the pieces in this anthology.
The bestselling and acclaimed authors include Erin E. Adams, Monica Brashears, Charlotte Nicole Davis, Desiree S. Evans, Saraciea J. Fennell, Zakiya Dalila Harris, Daka Hermon, Justina Ireland, L.L. McKinney, Brittney Morris, Maika & Maritza Moulite, Eden Royce, and Vincent Tirado. The foreword is by Tananarive Due.” – Macmillan Publishers
“This anthology makes a statement: Black women belong in horror…Projects like this — brave, necessary — celebrate Black women, and will hopefully inspire the future of the genre.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Untenable Mystic Charm beams with scathing humor and poetic tenderness. travis l. tate’s stylish debut grapples with city life, its absurdly demanding jobs, flared artistic egos, and missed connections, in a way that’ll make you wonder why go out at all? Cancel your tonight plans, and read this instead.” – Fernando A. Flores, author of Valleyesque and Tears of the Trufflepig
“Often traditionally narrative— “for the men who flew in and out of his life like carrier pigeons”— sometimes experimental like a fractured play or poem — “Hand to milk. Hand to cake. Hand to strawberries.” “the air in the room shifts, turns light pink” — the stories in travis tate’s debut fiction collection are erotic, searching, and as soon as you think you can predict what will happen next, they’re like “psych!” Such as when I thought all the characters were millennials but then it’s like, Nope now you’re in Bavaria in the 19th-century!” – Chessy Normile, author of Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party
Alumn John McManus (MCW 2004) is the winner of the 2024 AmericanShort(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 2024-2025Shearing 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).
Credit: Katie Yu/FX
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.
Credit: JoJo Whilden/Prime Video
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.
Credit: Lemonade Media
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.
“In ‘Staff Meal,'” writes Rachel Sherman for TheNew York Times, “Koogler creates a world somewhere between front and back of house, where food is a portal and service an art. Meanwhile, patrons navigate apocalyptic events outside the restaurant, where the future appears increasingly fragile.”
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.”
Image Credit: Playwrights Horizons
“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.”
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.
