Book club
Sixty years of great reads from the UMass MFA for Poets and Writers
One of the oldest and most highly regarded creative writing graduate programs in the country, the UMass Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers celebrates its 60th anniversary this year. The program has launched the careers of a wide variety of literary luminaries doing innovative work across genres and styles. Here we present a few tantalizing samples from the many alumni who have been a part of the program’s rich and storied history.
Hanging from a wooden beam to the right of my desk is a pair of reindeer boots I made when I lived in the Arctic, before my brain injury, when I could still travel with ease. What to bring to show my mother the last seventeen years of my life?
Mira Bartók ’08MFA
The Memory Palace (Free Press, 2011)
2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography
Women who worried about ticking clocks were the same women who traded salmon-loaf recipes and asked their husbands to clean the gutters. She was not and never would be one of them.
Then, suddenly, she was one of them. Not the gutters, but the clock.
Leni Zumas ’04MFA
Red Clocks (Little Brown, 2018)
National bestseller; The New York Times Editors’ Choice
Watch Zumas read from Red Clocks
Isma was going to miss her flight. The ticket wouldn’t be refunded because the airline took no responsibility for passengers who arrived at the airport three hours ahead of the departure time and were escorted to an interrogation room.
Kamila Shamsie ’98MFA
Home Fire (Riverhead, 2017)
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize
This would be my sixth, and on that morning in February, the first morning I”d known I was with child, I’d simply turned to Leston in bed next to me, the room gray from a winter sky outside the one window, that sky not yet lit with the sun, and I’d said, “There’ll be no more after this one.”
He rolled onto his back, his eyes still shut, the little hair he still had wild and loose on his head. He put his hands behind his head, and gave a sort of smile, one I’d seen enough times before this. Five times before, to be exact.
Bret Lott ’84MFA
Jewel (Washington Square Press, 1999)
Selected for Oprah’s Book Club
Looking at him makes my spine stiffen; I could feel the straightness of it, the elongation of my neck as I turned away. There was the rustling sound of my skirt sweeping against the carpet as I left the room, terminating thereby another lively interview with my husband.
Valerie Martin ’74MFA
Property (Doubleday, 2003)
2003 Orange Prize for Fiction
I suppose some people can weep softly and become more beautiful, but after a real cry, most people are hideous, as if they’ve grown a spare and diseased face beneath the one you know, leaving very little room for the eyes. Or they look as if they&rquo;ve been beaten. We look. I look.
Heather Christle ’09MFA
The Crying Book (Catapult, 2019)
The New York Times Editors’ Choice
Ten years her senior and she smiles, mostly to herself, remembering him teaching her how to drive. All the places she goes. In his Cadillac down Fulton Street, down Nostrand Ave., without question up and down Atlantic and Pacific, DeKalb … And what she negotiated with Gerald, a married man, about his role in my care—definitely included a one-way street.
Arisa White ’06MFA
Who’s Your Daddy (Augury Books, 2021)
2022 Golden Crown Literary Award for Poetry; finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry
You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.
Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:
head south on Mississippi 49, one—
by—one mile markers ticking off
another minute of your life.
—from “Theories of Time and Space”
Natasha Trethewey ’95MFA
19th Poet Laureate of the United States
Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2007)
2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
The white man,
whose spherical countenance
was at first viewed as incomplete moon,
beat everyone up,
lassoed the stars and rode amuck,
spilling trails of sequins.
—from “The Invention of Texas”
Gillian Conoley ’83MFA
2017 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America
A Little More Red Sun on the Human: New and Selected Poems (Nightboat Books, 2019)
2020 Northern California Book Award
I will sail through my own fjord and I will name the fjord My Fjord.
I know it‘s incorrect to say that the Vikings wore horned helmets,
but I will wear a horned helmet, for my job is to correct history.
—from “My Fjord”
Lee Upton ’81MFA
Poetry Society of America Emily Dickinson Award
The Day Every Day Is (Saturnalia Books, 2023)
At an intersection, four blocks away from the office, Sojourner noticed soaring birds in loud groups overhead, coming home from Florida or Europe—maybe Africa, Argentina, India, or the Azores. Sojourner didn’t know this type of thing, didn’t bother asking anybody. She waited for the light to change, the birds to pass. She waited for the world to show her a sign. She thought the deer from this morning, maybe, had been a sign. No, she thought, that was meditation. That was different. That was a door opening, the universe telling her to set out, move on. Now, she was out. Now what? She waited for the light to change. More birds passed, stragglers fought against the unseen currents. A semitruck made a wide right, huffed, splashed her feet with curb water, moved slow down a narrow avenue.
Not a sign.
Gabriel Bump ’17MFA
The New Naturals (Algonquin Books, 2023)
A 2023 New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book and a Boston Globe Best Book of the Year
If this trick works we can rub our hands
together, maybe
start a little fire
with our identification papers.
I don't know but I keep working, working
half hating you,
half eaten by the moon.
James Tate
Faculty member at the MFA for Poets and Writers from 1971 to 2015
Hell, I Love Everybody: The Essential James Tate: Poems (HarperCollins, 2023)
Poems selected from among Tate’s many books; among many accolades for his poetry, Tate was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Wallace Stevens Award.
