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 news2021-2022 news. Please also visit our UWM creative writing program bookshelf.


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 Railjubilat, RHINOStorm CellarThrushPrick of the SpindlePreludeYour Impossible VoiceForklift, 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.

UWM Land Acknowledgement: We acknowledge in Milwaukee that we are on traditional Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk and Menominee homeland along the southwest shores of Michigami, North America’s largest system of freshwater lakes, where the Milwaukee, Menominee and Kinnickinnic rivers meet and the people of Wisconsin’s sovereign Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Oneida and Mohican nations remain present.   |   To learn more, visit the Electa Quinney Institute website.