McNEESE STATE UNIVERSITY
McNeese State University is hosting a special poetry and fiction reading on Friday, March 27, at 7 p.m. in Stokes Auditorium in Hardtner Hall. McNeese alumni J. Bruce Fuller, Michael Shewmaker and Jenn Alandy Trahan, who were also Wallace Stegner Fellows at Stanford University, will be reading their own works.
“We are welcoming back three alumni who have been awarded the extraordinarily prestigious Stegner Fellowship. This Stanford University fellowship offers two fully funded years at Stanford during which time writers work under the mentorship of world-class faculty,” explained Dr. Keagan LeJeune, dean of McNeese’s College of Liberal Arts. “The Stegner Fellowship has an exceptionally low acceptance rate. Of the more than 2,000 applicants each year, only 10 are chosen. That McNeese has had four of its alumni receive this award is truly amazing and speaks to the program’s long history of stellar accomplishments.” The fourth alumnus is Pulitzer Prize author Adam Johnson (1996), a professor of English at Stanford.
McNeese has been offering the Master of Fine Art (MFA) in creative writing for 45 years and is Louisiana’s oldest MFA program. The cornerstone of the three-year program is the workshop, where students submit their creative work for review, critique the writing of their peers, and build necessary skills as writers and readers of fiction and poetry. While working closely with individual faculty—Michael Horner and Vallie Lynn Watson in fiction, Michael Robins and Kevin Thomason in poetry—students enroll in craft-based form and theory courses that provide a foundational knowledge vital to the development of writing skills.
Fuller is a Louisiana native and the author of How to Drown a Boy (LSU Press, 2024). His chapbooks include The Dissenter’s Ground, Lancelot and Flood. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review and Best New Poets 2022. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Stanford University, where he was a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow. He currently teaches at Sam Houston State University, where he is director of the Texas Review Press. He received his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing and Master of Arts in English from McNeese in 2011 and a doctorate in creative writing from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Shewmaker is the author of Leviathan (2023) and Penumbra (2017), winner of the 2016 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His recent poems appear in Best American Poetry, The Believer, Oxford American, Ploughshares, Southern Review and Yale Review. Born in Texarkana, he earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from McNeese in 2010 and his doctorate in creative writing from Texas Tech University. He teaches creative writing at Stanford.
Trahan was born in Houston, Texas, to Filipino immigrants and raised in Vallejo, California. A first-generation college graduate, she has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of California, Irvine, and a Master of Arts in English and Master of Fine Arts in fiction from McNeese in 2015. A Wallace Stegner Fellowship in fiction brought Trahan to Stanford, where she’s currently a Jones Lecturer. Published in Harper’s, One Story and The Best American Short Stories, her work has been supported by organizations such as the Elizabeth George Foundation, Plympton and The Writer’s Block and The Edith Wharton & Straw Dog Writers Guild Writer-in-Residence Program.
For more information about the Master of Fine Art in creative writing, visit www.www.mcneese.edu.
Persons requesting accommodations in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) should contact the Office of Campus Compliance and Civility at least 72 hours before the event. Additional information is available from the Office of Campus Compliance and Civility, located in the Burton Business Center, Suite 407, by phone at 337-475-5428, by fax at 337-475-5603, or by email at compliance@mcneese.edu.
