The Creative Writing Program is proud to celebrate the many successes of students past and present.
See below for our current news, and these pages for news from prior years: 2024–2025 news, 2023–2024 news, 2022-2023 news, 2021-2022 news. Please also visit our UWM creative writing program bookshelf.
Note: All links below are to external sites.
Sophie Nunberg (PhD in progress) has won one of the coveted AWP Intro Journals Project Awards for her creative nonfiction piece, “This is Just to Say I Have Recommended the Last Book You Were Saving.” It will appear in an upcoming issue of Mid-American Review. From AWP’s website: “The AWP Intro Journals Project is a literary competition for the discovery and publication of the best new works by students currently enrolled in AWP member programs. Program directors are invited to nominate student work, and winners are selected for publication in participating literary journals.” UWM creative writing students have received honors 8 times in the past 20 years, a record exceeded by very few universities.
The inaugural Frederick Smock Poetry Prize was awarded to Ellen Elder (PhD, 2009) for her poetry collection, We Left a Window Open to the Sea, selected by Kentucky Poet Laureate Emeritus Richard Taylor. The book will come out in fall 2026.
Mary Thorson (BA, 2014), has published her first collection of stories, A Women’s Guide to True Crime. which features several selections from The Best American Mystery and Suspense series
Chelsea Tokuno-Lynk (MA in progress) has a story in the April 2026 issue of MĀNOA Journal.
Kim Rouse (MA in progress) won the Lillian Boese Award for Writing Excellence from the Southeast Wisconsin Festival of Books.
Peter Burzyński (PhD, 2018) has just published his debut full-length poetry collection, Infinite Zero, with Writ Large Press. He is also the author of the chapbook A Year Alone inside of Woodland Pattern (Adjunct Press, 2022) and the translator of Martyna Buliżańska’s This Is My Earth (New American Press, 2019). Peter’s poetry, translations, reviews, and essays have appeared in the Georgia Review, jacket2, the Brooklyn Rail, jubilat, RHINO, Storm Cellar, Thrush, Prick of the Spindle, Prelude, Your Impossible Voice, Forklift, Ohio, and elsewhere.
Alum and emerit professor Brenda Cárdenas (BA, 1987) recently spoke to WUWM-FM about her tenure as Wisconsin Poet Laureate.
Ryan Burden (PhD, 2021) has his debut novel, Where the Light Flickers, forthcoming from Silent Clamor Press.