Join us at the Ransom Center on Thursday, January 22nd for a reading with MCW’s spring Guest Poetry Faculty, Daniel Khalastchi and Guest Fiction Faculty, Kevin Powers! Register here to attend!

Yeajoon Cho is a writer & filmmaker based in Austin, TX and Los Angeles, CA. His work has screened at notable festivals globally and he has received distinctions from the Academy Nicholl, the Black List, Humanitas, USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and more. The Humanitas College Screenwriting Awards recognize writers whose work explores the human condition in a nuanced and meaningful way and are currently enrolled in a college or university program. His screenplay sometimes, i wish i was a fish is the winner of the 2025 Humanitas Carol Mendelsohn College Drama Award.

Join Noah Hawley—novelist, screenwriter, and director—and Bret Anthony Johnson, director of the Michener Center for Writers, on Wednesday, November 12th from 6-8pm at the Harry Ransom Center for a screening of the pilot episode of Alien: Earth (released August 2025 on FX). The pilot highlights Hawley’s singular storytelling—his ability to craft complex characters, weave resonant themes, and reimagine iconic franchises with originality and depth. Hawley, recently awarded the Steinbeck Writers’ Retreat Summer Residency, will discuss the craft and vision behind the series as part of this special event. A reception will follow the program.

Join us on October 9th from 6-8pm at the Harry Ransom Center for a poetry reading with Sandra Lim. Sandra Lim’s previous collections of poetry include The Wilderness (W.W. Norton), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize selected by Louise Glück, and Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press). She is the recipient of the 2023 Jackson Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Levis Reading Prize. Her writing has appeared in a range of journals, including The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, The Baffler, and The New York Times Magazine, among others. In 2023, she was named Distinguished University Professor at UMass Lowell, where she teaches literature and creative writing. Born in Seoul, Korea, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Set in Ukraine, an eccentric scientist breeding rare snails crosses paths with sisters posing as members of the marriage industry to find their activist mother. As Russia invades, they embark on a wild journey with kidnapped bachelors and a last-of-its-kind snail. This darkly comic novel explores survival, love, and hope in times of encroaching darkness.

Dr. Chang was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for her third collection of poetry, An Authentic Life (Copper Canyon Press). Her debut, The History of Anonymity (2008), was an inaugural selection for the Virginia Quarterly Review Poetry Series and a finalist for the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers. Her second book, Some Say The Lark (Alice James Books), was longlisted for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award and won the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2012, The Nation, The New Yorker, and Poetry. Chang holds a BA from the University of Chicago and earned an MFA and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Since 2003, she has been the co-chair of the advisory board for Kundiman, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting Asian American literature.

Jessie was awarded this prize for her short story ”Mouth and Heart” (StoryQuarterly)

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.

The full list of 2024 Emmy Nominations can be viewed here.

1. The World After Alice by Lauren Aliza Green

2. Trust Her by Flynn Berry

3. Selected Plays by Abe Koogler

“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.

4. The Black Girl Survives in This One, co-edited by Desiree Evans

“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

5. Untenable Mystic Charm by Travis Tate

“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 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.