April 16, 2026   by Lynnell Edwards, poetry faculty, Associate Programs Director     Like many of you, I have the happy problem of too many books I want to read piling up on my bedside table, the desk in my office, the floor of my study, the table next to the chair where I like to read in the afternoon . . . you get the picture. And this is despite my valiant attempt in August to make a dent in the piles with the Sealey Challenge ! However, National Poetry Month challenges m

by Kathleen Driskell, Chair   I’m very pleased on behalf of our Naslund-Mann leadership team and faculty to announce three new mentors are joining our faculty and will be available to work with mentees during the Spring 2026 independent study. Look for their faculty videos, teaching philosophies, and spalding.edu email addresses in Canvas.   Please join us in welcoming writers and teachers Willie Davis, Jennie Malboeuf, and Danni Quintos to our writing community!   Willie Da

April, 9, 2026 By Lesléa Newman   They say flattery will get you nowhere, but I beg to differ. In my case flattery did get me somewhere. And not just anywhere. It got me a book deal.   I had previously published Welcoming Elijah: A Passover Tale with a Tail  with Charlesbridge, a wonderful children’s book press. The book had done very well, winning both the National Jewish Book Award and the Association of Jewish Libraries Sydney Taylor Award, and had been picked up by the PJ

by Kathleen Driskell, Chair   Louisville is finally thawing after a rough winter, by our Kentucky standards anyway, and we’re beginning to see dogwood trees and azaleas budding around campus. We’ve long been planning a wonderfully enriching residency for spring students who will be participating on Spalding’s campus, but the warm weather always has a way of kicking us into high gear. From May 23-30, we look forward to having students, faculty, and alumni back on campus for se

March 26, 2026 By Roy Hoffman, fiction and creative nonfiction faculty   With art nearby when I write, I find myself inspired, as a word person, by the color, shape, and texture of the visual. When visiting museums I take out my pocket notebook and jot down images or, on the street, feel enlivened by a sculpture, mural, or architectural marvel. In addition to nature’s art just beyond my porch—magnolias, camellias, so much more—we have works made by friends, or those acquired

By Katy Yocom, Associate Director, Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing In September, a group from the Naslund-Mann School travels to Edinburgh and the Lake District, sites of iconic natural beauty and birthplace of some of the most important works in English literature.   This is not a residency. We'll spend most of our time out exploring the culture. We’ll also journal, discuss a book in common, and have the option to read from our own work. Our expected itinerary is as

March 12, 2026 by Leah Henderson, faculty, writing for children & young adults   We’ve all been there, envisioning a perfect story in our minds, only to sit down excited to type, and find the words just aren’t there, or worse, we start off strong and then our ideas and momentum peter out as quickly as they first came to us. Where did all those amazing ideas go that were bursting with imaginative subplots, dynamic characters, and heart-stopping emotion? They are just gone. Hid

Fiction is our cross-genre area. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar is our residency book in common.   by Kathleen Driskell, Chair, Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing           As we leave the snow and bitter cold and turn to finalizing curriculum plans for our spring residency, May 23-30, and the virtual summer residency June 20-27, I’m delighted to announce that this spring's/summer's cross-genre area is Fiction and our book in common for both residencies is Martyr!  by Kaveh Akba

February 26, 2026 by Keith S. Wilson, poetry faculty     Where I live in Chicago, any restaurant that feels a little fancy will open their front door and go all out on those wrought-iron deck chairs. Maybe the tables, with their round bases that don’t quite sit flush, will match the chairs, which are the filigreed kind with metalwork that exists within the delicate space between lacework and hand-rolled Play-Doh. And finally they’ll line up those metal fence-stands that the c

February 12, 2026 By Whitney Collins, fiction faculty     During Covid, thanks either to an Anthony Bourdain episode or a late-night scrolling of Pinterest baked beans, I became enamored with the traditional English Breakfast and its nine components: eggs, bacon, tomatoes, mushrooms, fried bread (yes, please!), potatoes, blood pudding (no, please!), beans, and sausage.   Googled images of this generous and unapologetic mainstay revealed overflowing plates that balanced the be

January 29, 2026   By Sam Zalutsky, faculty, writing for TV, screen, and stage   Last month I finished another semester teaching Storytelling Strategies to NYU Tisch School of the Arts undergraduate film and TV students. It’s an intense but exciting class that’s basically an introduction to dramatic writing and dramatic structure through shorts, features, and TV pilots. We read and discuss a different feature or pilot each week in the lecture portion of the class. In the reci

EXCITING NEWS & UPDATES FROM SPALDING'S NASLUND-MANN SCHOOL OF WRITING STUDENTS, ALUMNI, FACULTY & STAFF Students   Colleen Alles (P) has accidentally fallen in love with the novella. Her debut novella, Incident at Twin Lakes Resort , won the 2025 Etchings Press ( University of Indianapolis) contest for best novella and was published October 20. In March, Finishing Line Press will publish her second short novel, The Very Terrible Drowning of Bryan Price , which was longlisted

Erika J. Simpson This Is Your Mother: A Memoir   Scribner / May 2025 / 213 pp / $27.99 Hardcover Reviewed by Josephine Greenfield / January 2026   “Imagine this is your mother, Sallie Carol. Daughter of sharecroppers. Middle of ten.”   Thus begins Erika J. Simpson’s debut memoir, This Is Your Mother , which tells the story of the traumatic childhood Simpson and her sister endured as their mother battled illness, poverty, and a recurring cycle of evictions from increasingly ru

January 14, 2026 by Angela Jackson-Brown, fiction faculty When my fiction begins to feel overworked, when scenes linger past their usefulness or explanation crowds out feeling, I turn to poetry. Poetry reminds me that language does not need excess space to carry power and that writing under pressure forces each word to earn its place. That pressure sharpens resonance and clarifies intention. In this essay, I offer a working definition of compression, examine how poets and hyb

The Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing invites MFA alumni who graduated in fiction to submit proposals for a fifty-minute-long plenary craft lecture in the area of fiction. The lecture will be presented at the Spring 2026 residency, May 23 - 30. The deadline for proposals is February 28 .   Alumni may propose to lecture on craft or on an important figure or school of writing in the featured area. The best proposals will focus on distinct concerns of fiction but present i

December 18, 2025 by Nathan Gower, fiction faculty   Here’s a question for you, my fellow writers: where does your inspiration come from?   When speaking at conferences or giving public readings of my work, I usually get some variation of this question during the audience Q&A. I suppose it’s a perfectly reasonable question. It is certainly a well-intentioned  one.   But I hate that question. Why? Well, I can never quite figure out how to answer it. When I try, I usually rattl

November 20, 2025 by Lesléa Newman, faculty, writing for children and young adults   “First thought best thought” –Allen Ginsberg Since Allen was my teacher, I happen to know what this means and more importantly what it doesn’t mean. Allen didn’t mean that the first thing you put down is your best piece of writing and it doesn’t need revision. It means that you should never lose sight of the original spark of inspiration that got you excited about any particular piece of writ

November 6, 2025 by Robin Lippincott, fiction and creative nonfiction faculty     I am in Provincetown, Massachusetts once again, this glorious, narrow strip of land at the end of Cape Cod. Though P’town is a place I’ve loved deeply and visited countless times for over forty years, it has been almost eight years since I was last here, the longest stretch I have ever gone since my first visit in the early 1980s. I am here now to scatter the remains of my beloved friend and fir

October 23, 2025 by Leah Henderson, faculty, writing for children and young adults     Since I debuted in 2017, I’m continuously trying to find a healthy footing in the writing world even after several books. Thankfully, along the way, I’ve paid close attention during most of my stumbles and leaps and have been able to add a few useful takeaways to my toolkit—takeaways that may be helpful to consider for anyone pursuing a career in writing, whether with a focus of writing for

EXCITING NEWS & UPDATES FROM SPALDING'S NASLUND-MANN SCHOOL OF WRITING STUDENTS, ALUMNI, FACULTY & STAFF Students   Morrow Dowdle  (P) was nominated for Best of the Net 2025 by Sky Island Journal  for their poem “I No Longer Want to Be Heartsick.”   Gratton Hicks  (F) is coming down the stretch on his third book and first adult novel, Mere Images . . . . . . of Lucky . The novel has just crossed the eighty-thousand-word count. He has planned extensive editing and feedback for

October 9, 2025   by Lee Martin, fiction and creative nonfiction faculty I’m taken these days with the popularity of the lyric essay,...

October 2, 2022   by Kathleen Driskell, Chair On behalf of the faculty and staff of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing, I’m...

September 25, 2025 by Beth Ann Bauman, writing for children and young adult faculty   One of my favorite TV shows is the HBO crime drama...

In a move that aligns all of Spalding’s creative writing programs for the first time, the Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Creative Writing...

September 11, 2025 by Nancy McCabe, creative nonfiction and fiction faculty   I’m working on a craft book, Creating Some Measure of...

Also, announcing faculty and guest books and scripts in common for Fall 2025—and our pre-lecture in W4TVSS and residency workshop...

August 27, 2025   by Lynnell Edwards, poetry faculty   As of this writing, I am a little past the halfway point in my reading for the...

Arianna Rebolini   Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die   HarperCollins / April 2025 / 352 pp / $30 Hardcover   Reviewed by Hope...

August 14, 2025 by Whitney Collins, fiction faculty   Back in the 1900s, when my friends and I were growing up relatively unplugged and...

EXCITING NEWS & UPDATES FROM SPALDING'S NASLUND-MANN SCHOOL OF WRITING STUDENTS, ALUMNI, FACULTY & STAFF Students   Colleen Alles ’s  ...