MFA Creative Writing
Fiction | Creative Nonfiction | Poetry
Donna Masini attended Hunter College and received her MFA in Poetry from New York University in 1988. Her latest collection of poems, 4:30 Movie, an elegy for her sister, explores personal loss, global violence, the ways in which movies shape our imaginations. Her first collection of poems, That Kind of Danger (Beacon Press, 1994) was selected by Mona Van Duyn for the Barnard Women Poets Prize. She next published a novel, About Yvonne which The New York Times called "a stunning novel of sexual obsession." In 2004 she published her second collection of poems, Turning to Fiction (WW Norton and Co.) Of her poems Adrienne Rich has said: "Donna Masini's poems are on the wavelength of Whitman and Rukeyser but are inimitable her own: urban, sexual, working-class, passionate, marked by great moral intelligence and generosity. She is one of the marvelous new poets this country is generating in a terrible time." Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry, Poetry, Ploughshares, APR, Open City, TriQuarterly, The Paris Review, Brooklyn Poets, Renga for Obama, and many more. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, and Pushcart Prize, among others.
John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher 2010, Four Way Books 2020), finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way 2020), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Poetry Society of Virginia's North American Book Award, and finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, Believer Poetry Award, Maya Angelou Book Award, Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award and the NAACP Image Award. His other honors include the Four Quartets Prize from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, two Larry Neal Writers Awards, a pair of Pushcart Prizes, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, an NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Murillo's poems have appeared in such publications as American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Best American Poetry 2017, 2019, and 2020.
Nicole Sealey (starting Fall 2026) was born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I., and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of Ordinary Beast, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. An excerpt from her forthcoming collection, The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Her honors include a 2023-2024 Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies including The New Yorker, Poetry London, and The Best American Poetry (2018 and 2021). She was the Executive Director at Cave Canem Foundation from 2017-2019.
Past Poetry Faculty