News Items
Brainstorm, our student-run reading series, had another successful reading, this time at The Queensboro. We just wanted to share some pictures, so you can see what you may have missed out on!
Be sure to keep reading this blog for more Brainstorm events!
We are thrilled to announce that the winner of the 2025 Ghostbird Press Birdhouse Chapbook Prize is Sonia Arora for her manuscript, Rewilding the Home and the World.
Sonia’s chapbook will be published this spring. Please stay tuned for details about a book launch and reading to be held here at Queens College!
Congratulations to Sonia on this wonderful accomplishment!
Sonia Arora has been teaching literature and humanities for almost 20 years. Her work as a teaching artist takes her into classrooms across Long Island, New York City and Philadelphia where she explores oral history, digital media, poetry, activism, and film-making with youth in elementary, middle and high schools. She has published short fiction, poetry and essays. Publications include: Apiary; Putting the Movement Back Into Civil Rights Teaching; Prompted, an anthology printed by Philadelphia Stories, 3-2-1 Contact, Sonic Boom, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Biostories, Lunch Ticket and more. Last year, one of her poems was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has studied writing with Frederic Tuten, Terrance Hayes, Porochista Khakpour, and Jenn Givhan.
Ghostbird Press is a small, independent chapbook press that publishes collaborations of writing and visual art. Peter Vanderberg, a fellow QC MFA alum, offers the annual Birdhouse Prize to graduating QC MFA students, resulting in a gorgeous full-color chapbook for the winner.
Winning a chapbook prize with your thesis is only one of the great opportunities you get as a QC MFA student. Discover more on our Opportunities page!
This just in–our own Professor John Weir has been nominated for a Pushcart!
Here’s the catch: his short story “Starting From Paumonak” doesn’t come out in Epiphany for a few more weeks, so you can’t read it just yet–you’ll just have to stay tuned to find out when it drops!
The Pushcart Prizes celebrate the best work published in small presses over the course of a year. The annual anthology resulting from the prize is already itself of great renown, but also the Pushcart Prize series itself has been honored with the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle in 2005,[12] and the Poets & Writers/Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers award in 2006.
If you think this is a big deal (and you’re right that it is) you should also check out what else our faculty are doing:
It’s no secret that the fantasy genre is booming right now. (Maybe we all need to dwell in possibility right now?) The New York Times put together a best-of list of complex and poignant books from the darker side of the fantasy genre, so of course they included our own Alaya Dawn Johnson!
The article is called “Great Fantasy Novels With Unlikely Heroes” and focuses on antiheroes and outcasts. Alaya’s book, The Trouble With Saints, is set in a noirish alternate 1940s New York, which features a mixed-race woman passing for white and explores how even in a universe with people with extraordinary powers, they can still be constrained by the color line.
Definitely go read that article, and Alaya’s book when you have the chance!
As a program, we’ve been so lucky to have Alaya Dawn Johnson here as part of our Visiting Professor program. Every year, we bring a new writer to campus in order to broaden the literary conversation we have here in the program. We’ve had fantasy and YA writers, graphic novelists, and translators teach here as part of that initiative.
To learn more about our current faculty, visit our faculty page through the link below:
Our very own Director, Jason Tougaw, has a new essay in Inkwell called “To Protect a Hen,” which involves a fierce fight with a red-tailed hawk. You can read it for free on the Inkwell website:
https://www.mville.edu/english-creative-writing/creative-writing-mfa-inkwell.php
Inkwell is a publication of Manhattanville University and has a mission of bringing new and established writers into the national literary conversation.
We have exciting news: MFA student Cydni Thompson has been named as one of the recipients of the Poetry Coalition’s 2025-26 Fellowship Program. She’ll be working at the Poetry Society of America as part of the program over the next year.
The Poetry Coalition, a national alliance of nearly thirty poetry organizations, selects nine aspiring literary leaders from thousands of applicants each year for paid fellowships and career development opportunities at esteemed national literary organizations. Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Beyond Baroque, Kundiman, Lambda Literary, Mizna, The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, Woodland Pattern, and Youth Speaks participate in this coalition, along with Poetry Society of America.
These fellows take part in poetry and community programming that reaches more than 30 million individuals annually. Getting to put their minds and voices to work on this scale ensures the vitality of the future of poetry and helps grow the next generation of nonprofit leadership.
The Academy of American Poets is a leading publisher of contemporary poetry across the United States. The organization annually awards $1.3+ million to more than two hundred poets at various stages of their careers through its prize program. It also produces Poets.org, the world’s largest publicly funded website for poets and poetry; established and organizes National Poetry Month each April; publishes the Poem-a-Day series and American Poets magazine; provides free resources to educators; hosts an annual series of poetry readings and special events; and coordinates a national Poetry Coalition that promotes the value poets bring to our culture. To learn more about the Academy of American Poets, visit poets.org.
Congratulations, Cydni!
Our own director, Jason Tougaw, has a new piece in Queerty, exploring the 20-year career (so far!) of rapper Cazwell. This queering is more than a change of aesthetics, Cazwell’s music is about gay pride, refusing to hide one’s true self, as Jason puts it:
“Cazwell is an autobiographer of queer raunch, and the compilation chronicles the evolution of his persona from club kid to daddy.
But he’s no Eminem. He’s not telling stories about his damage. Instead, Cazwell declares the human right to sexual liberation. His queer raunch is as radical today as it was in 2003.”
Interested in reading more? Check out Jason Tougaw’s whole piece, “How Cazwell’s queered hip-hop with two decades of revolutionary raunch“
It’s not often we post about journals looking to publish literary work (we tend to save that for talking with students and alums directly), but this one is different because it is our own.
The Queens Review is a student-run international literary journal that, by publishing writing from around the world, allows our students to enter a world greater than their own. The journal may have gone by a few different names since our program’s founding all those years ago, but by taking on this editorial work, our students have gone on to work for publishing houses, magazines, and presses (both big and small) around the country.
It’s another example of how self-starters can get their start at QC MFA!
The Queens Review takes its home seriously: we are based in the most culturally diverse place on the planet and the journal seeks work that speaks to the varied landscapes of the world around us, as well exploring the internal topography of our own internal terrain.
Submissions will be open from October 15 to December 15. Check out the Review’s Submittable for more info:
https://thequeensreview.submittable.com/submit
The journal is just one of the many chances we give our students to advance themselves outside of the classroom. Take a look at our Opportunities page to get a better idea of what path you might take:
A special congratulations to MFA student Kayla Baur, whose novel All the Love in Copper Valley just launched with Kindle Direct this week!
All the Love in Copper Valley is a YA murder-mystery novel set in 1982, and something Kayla was working on just last year in fiction workshop. She says that the advice she got in workshop helped steer this project forward, which is exactly what we love to hear!
Head to Amazon for more details!
The New York Writers Institute has chosen one of our very own MFA faculty members as the next Poet Laureate of New York State: Kimiko Hahn.
Kimiko Hahn will join novelist Min Jin Lee as the next State Poet and State Author, respectively. These positions were established in 1985 by Governor Mario M. Cuomo and the State Legislature to promote the literary arts in New York State. Awardees serve for two years in their honorary positions and receive a $10,000 honorarium.
This is the topper to a great year of honors for Kimiko Hahn, including the lifetime achievement award from the Poetry Foundation & Poetry Magazine, and a visit to the White House with First Lady Jill Biden.
Please join us in celebrating Kimiko Hahn! I know the people of New York State will love her ability and warmth just as everyone here at Queens College does!
