MFA Thesis Collection Now Available in Library

The University of Arizona Poetry Center is proud to announce our MFA Thesis Collection, which is now available in our library catalog. After years in our archives, this collection of more than 600 thesis manuscripts from the UA Creative Writing MFA Program is now available to the public. Reaching back from the 1970s to the present, the collection consists of graduate theses in creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, and includes early work from alumni such as David Foster Wallace, Nancy Mairs, Richard Siken, Agha Shahid Ali, and many others (including much of the Poetry Center staff!). The complete holdings can be found on the Library Collections page. They are available  as PDFs sorted by genrename, and year of graduation

Librarian Wendy Burk wrote, on the work it's taken to make the collection available: “Bringing the MFA thesis collection to the Poetry Center has involved years of dedicated work by our library team, interns, volunteers, and the UA Creative Writing Program. Creative Writing administrative associate Sharonne Meyerson patiently brought dozens of boxes of theses to the Poetry Center from their former home in the basement of the Modern Languages Building, over the course of a very hot summer. Amidst all of the lifting, carrying, cataloging, shelving, and alphabetizing, the work was fun for all of us because we deeply care about the theses and the writers who created them. The collection contains more than 600 unique works of literature, spanning five decades, and we can’t wait to watch it grow year after year.”

Adding her voice to the excitement, Library Specialist Sarah Kortemeier said, "The Poetry Center library staff is thrilled to be able to make this collection available to the public. This collection is important to me because it preserves such a wide range of voices, speaking to us at a very important time in their development as writers: the MFA thesis is a milestone in a young writer’s work and life. The theses are important historically, aesthetically, and culturally, and it’s such a privilege to house this unique collection here for the benefit of future generations."

The MFA Thesis Collection is not comprehensive, however. Lost in the shuffle are many, many thesis manuscripts. If you are a University of Arizona MFA Creative Writing graduate and find that your thesis is not present in our collection, please get in touch with the library at poetry@email.arizona.edu and send us a hard copy so that we can have the honor of preserving your work for future generations of students, teachers, scholars, and readers.

In conjunction with this collection's release, October 20 marks a UA Prose Reading here at the Poetry Center featuring three recent alumni of the UA Creative Writing MFA: Benjamin Rybeck reading from novel The Sadness, Natasha Stagg from novel Surveys, and Lawrence Lenhart from essay collection The Well-Stocked and Gilded Cage.

 

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