MFA in Creative Writing & Literature: Books and E-Books

University of Notre Dame Press, c2011. Winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry 2011.

White Pine Press, 2010.

Graywolf Press, 2009.

Morris, a writer for the New York Times, mixes humor and social commentary in this courageous book, revealing the bitter grief of his mother's death and the joyous re-emergence into life of Joe, his widowed father. Hapless and lacking in social graces, the author's 79-year-old father, a former New York judge for the state department of motor vehicles, loves off-color jokes and appreciates the late pop icon Dinah Shore. Morris, a lonely gay journalist, acts as senior adviser and moral chaperone to his dad's girlfriends, who include lovely Edie, low-carb Ann, nutty Rita, egghead Roz and serviceable Gracie. Never losing sight of the complex relationship between aging parents and adult children, the commitment-phobic son conquers some key intimacy issues to wade into a love affair with a man, while learning tolerance and openness from his father's juggling of female companions. Ultimately, the inspirational memoir captures all the needed laughs and emotions that go with love and life in the waning years of parent-child bonding. (Publisher's Weekly)

In 1967, 21-year-old singer–song writer Smith, determined to make art her life and dissatisfied with the lack of opportunities in Philadelphia to live this life, left her family behind for a new life in Brooklyn. When she discovered that the friends with whom she was to have lived had moved, she soon found herself homeless, jobless, and hungry. Through a series of events, she met a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe who changed her life—and in her typically lyrical and poignant manner Smith describes the start of a romance and lifelong friendship with this man: It was the summer Coltrane died. Flower children raised their arms... and Jimi Hendrix set his guitar in flames in Monterey. It was the summer of Elvira Madigan, and the summer of love.... This beautifully crafted love letter to her friend (who died in 1989) functions as a memento mori of a relationship fueled by a passion for art and writing. Smith transports readers to what seemed like halcyon days for art and artists in New York as she shares tales of the denizens of Max's Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribner's, Brentano's, and Strand bookstores. In the lobby of the Chelsea, where she and Mapplethorpe lived for many years, she got to know William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Johnny Winter. Most affecting in this tender and tough memoir, however, is her deep love for Mapplethorpe and her abiding belief in his genius. Smith's elegant eulogy helps to explain the chaos and the creativity so embedded in that earlier time and in Mapplethorpe's life and work. (Publisher's Weekly)

Wolitzer, author of the acclaimed The Wife, is a smart, funny, and entertaining novelist. . . . Here she begins with a wickedly clever premise: a Long Island couple, Roz and Paul Mellow, who have four children ranging in age from 6 to 15, decide to celebrate their spectacular sex life in a how-to book. (Booklist)

Inspired by the stories the author read to his possibly illiterate Sicilian grandmother as a child, these nested narratives are told by couples traveling through hallucinatory, romantic landscapes. As the traveler in "Self Portrait with Sicily" rides a train through the Bronx, boundaries between worlds, geography, and generations blur, transporting him through Sicily and the rural landscape of his Nonna. On a honeymoon in Spain, the narrator of "Self Portrait with Bullfight" decides that "forbearance" is the key to a lasting marriage and proceeds to try the patience of his new bride with a long-winded tale of the "frisson of rivalry" between two youths vying for the attentions of a Gypsy woman. In "Self Portrait with Cheese," an allegory about a family of bears that flees the circus only to languish, bored, in their freedom, offers a convoluted fable about the needs of artists. Tuten's (The Green Hour) polished stories of beauty, longing, and loss are relatable, yet strange enough that they constantly pique. (Publisher's Weekly)

Winner of the National Book Award. Denis Johnson is one of those few great hopes of American writing, fully capable of pulling out a ground-changing masterpiece, as he did in 1992 with the now-legendary collection, Jesus' Son. Tree of Smoke showed every sign of being his "big book": 600+ pages, years in the making, with a grand subject (the Vietnam War). And in the reading it lives up to every promise. It's crowded with the desperate people, always short of salvation, who are Johnson's specialty, but despite every temptation of the Vietnam dreamscape it is relentlessly sober in its attention to on-the-ground details and the gradations of psychology. Not one of its 614 pages lacks a sentence or an observation that could set you back on your heels. (Amazon)

Inspired by actual case histories of long-term missing African American children, this provocative collection of poems evokes the experience of what it means to be among the missing in contemporary America. The book looks at absence from the standpoint of the witnesses surrounding the void and offers an intimate depiction of those impossible moments of aftermath lived by those who remain accounted for and present. While enabling us to question our own sense of identity, this unique collection of poems reveals the blurred edges of separation between them and us and the impact that the missing have upon our present and future.

Winner of the 2007 National Poetry Series Open Competition as selected by James Tate.

Thaw is the second winner of the annual Poets Out Loud Prize from Fordham University Press. Chosen by Marie Ponsot, whose introduction is included in the volume. The landscape of Thaw is America but the vast field of language is bravely Shakespearian. Sheehan's poems roil through catalpa, maurade through familial and domestic brakes, and, ultimately, brim to the top of the old earthen pot. Everywhere the poems remind that the endless-were we truly able to grasp it-would astonish. Each poem celebrates the ingredients, practice, and serving up of the fugitive mortal banquet, from pudding to bone.