by Kathleen Driskell, Chair The Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University is pleased to announce that West: A Translation, a one-of-a-kind poetry collection by award-winning poet and writer Paisley Rekdal, wins the 2026 Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature. West was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award in Poetry and is the winner of the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the 2024 Reading the West

July 30, 2026 by Jennie Malboeuf, poetry faculty I can’t say that what I’m about to say hasn’t been said before and better. By Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, Anne Lamott, etc. But maybe you need to hear it again? At readings and lectures and Q&As that I’ve attended over the last twenty-five years, at least one person in the audience asks, What’s your process? Or what are your rituals? Or what is your daily schedule for writing? Probably they are at a loss for words. Or th

EXCITING NEWS & UPDATES FROM SPALDING'S NASLUND-MANN SCHOOL OF WRITING STUDENTS, ALUMNI, FACULTY & STAFF Students Raluca Comanelea (F) published a prose piece titled “Gravity,” which is featured in the Summer 2026 Issue of Chestnut Review. Another of her short stories, “Tata,” will be featured in the online edition of The Hemlock Journal. A. E. Costello (W4CYA) has published a series of short stories on her Substack Tell Your Story. Her young adult paranormal novel The Ot

July 16, 2026 by Lynnell Edwards, poetry faculty I’ve been writing some haiku lately. Not a lot, but so far twelve, and I can see the shape of a series, a progression of seasonal tableaux. While this shouldn’t be any kind of revelation from someone who’s spent a career writing and teaching poetry, for me it’s a startling turn from my maximalist approach to the narrative, documentary, and persona poems that have characterized my last three books. Most recently, The Bearab

Nick Martino Scrap Book Alice James Books / 2026 / 92 pp / $21.95 Paperback Reviewed by James Long, July 2026 Imagine being handed a set of photographs from before you were born, Polaroids documenting your parents facing a trauma that would come to shape your own life. As Nick Martino reveals on the page of his website dedicated to Scrap Book, this is exactly where his debut poetry collection began. Scrap Book is Martino’s attempt to reckon with a past fractured by his fa

July 2, 2026 by Angela Jackson-Brown, fiction faculty Finding a literary agent is very much like high school dating. You do everything you can to make the other person fall in love with you. You spend months, sometimes years, getting yourself ready. You obsess over every detail. You ask your friends what they think. You rehearse what you are going to say. Then, finally, you work up the nerve to hand over your number. And then you wait. And wait. And wait some more.

The Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing invites MFA alumni who graduated in poetry to submit proposals for a fifty-minute-long plenary craft lecture in the area of poetry. The lecture will be presented at the Fall 2026 residency, November 14-23. The deadline for proposals is August 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 poetry but present inform

June 18, 2026 By Erin Keane, faculty, creative nonfiction and poetry Back when my first books of poems were published, a bookstore reading was a standard promotional event. You (and, perhaps, an opening reader or two) would read from the book, then answer a few questions and sign copies at the end. These still happen, of course. (Popular novelists with established audiences, for example, are still a draw for solo events, as far as I can tell). But by the time my debut memoi

Beth Macy Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America Penguin Press / 2025 / 368 pages / $32 USD/ $42CD Reviewed by Kristie Helms Nettles / June 2026 Beth Macy has built a career reporting on the outside forces tearing at the seams of American life. Her bestselling book Dopesick pulled back the curtain on the Appalachian opioid epidemic, and Raising Lazarus followed those who were trying to pick up the pieces. With Paper Girl, she turns her investigative

June 3, 2026 by Kathleen Driskell, Chair On behalf of our Naslund-Mann leadership team, faculty, students, and alumni, I am delighted to announce that on July 1, 2026, Whitney Collins will assume new duties as the Associate Programs Director for the School of Writing. Whitney will take over the duties of advisor to all Naslund-Mann graduate students and will serve as direct supervisor to all faculty members in the School of Writing, as well as continuing in her current ro

May 21, 2026 By Beth Bauman, faculty, writing for children and young adults If you’re a YA writer, you already know you need to read a wide variety of literature, including YA, of course, and general fiction with teen protagonists. But I’d argue it can be just as helpful to study good TV and movies about teens. If you’re struggling, say, to move a character through a narrative, visual literature (TV and movies) is really good at externalizing the internal landscape of a c

Aaron Fagan Atom and Void: Poems Princeton University Press / 2025 / 55 pp / $17.95 Reviewed by Melissa Shepherd / May 2026 Aaron Fagan’s Atom and Void proves the paradox of freedom in constraint. Within the confines of their tidy boxes, the book’s fifty-five one-stanza sonnets range through existential ideas and loop together without section breaks in an ongoing interrogation of knowledge and perception. As its title suggests, opposing forces shape Atom and Void, Fagan’s f

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