The Atlantic – September 2019

Our program, one of the oldest, most prestigious and selective in the country, has been placed among

the top ten creative writing programs by The Atlantic magazine, which ranked our faculty and alumni among

the top five. In a room overlooking the Charles River, Robert Lowell once led a seminar in which Sylvia Plath,

Anne Sexton and George Starbuck were students, and more recently Leslie Epstein worked with Ha Jin,

Jhumpa Lahiri and Peter Ho Davies, and Robert Pinsky worked with Erin Belieu, Diane Mehta and Carl Phil-

lips. Poetry workshops are now led by Karl Kirchwey, Robert Pinsky, and Nicole Sealey and those in fiction

are led by Leslie Epstein, Ha Jin, and Sigrid Nunez.

All admitted students will receive full-tuition funding and a stipend. Thanks to a generous donor, we are

able to offer each student the opportunity to travel, live and write for three months anywhere outside of the

United States as part of our Global Fellowships Program. At BU, our students have the opportunity to pursue

world language study and literary translation, giving our program a truly international reach. You can follow

our Global Fellows’ blogs at blogs.bu.edu/world.

It is always hard to measure a student’s—or a writer’s—success in the world, or the value of an MFA program

to a writer. But our poetry alumni have won the Whiting Award, the Norma Farber First Book Award, the

“Discovery”/The Nation Prize (three times), and the National Poetry Series (twice); our fiction alumni have

won the Pulitzer Prize, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner, PEN/Hemingway, and National

Book Awards. Our graduates routinely place their work with major trade and nonprofit publishers and some,

like Arthur Golden and Sue Miller, have spent a good deal of time on the bestseller lists. In the past decade,

we have placed more than twenty of our graduates in tenure-track positions at leading universities, and

some have gone on to direct creative writing programs at the University of Michigan, Washington University

(St. Louis) and Florida State University.

Whatever the measure of success, what we can promise to those who join us is concentrated time in the

company of gifted fellow-writers in that river-view room, time out from the solitary discipline of writing in

which teacher and students alike share a vision of perfecting their craft through practice and discussion.

For more information about the program, our visiting writers, financial aid, or the Global Fellowships, please

visit our website at http://www.bu.edu/writing or write to Catherine Con at [email protected].

Application deadline for fall 2020 is February 1, 2020.

Boston University is an equal opportunity, affirmative action institution.

Boston University

MFA in Creative Writing

“This riveting account

details the far-reaching

eff ects of immigration

raids on our social

fabric, off ering both a

searing condemnation

of racialized policing

practices and an inspiring

vision for change.”

—Sarah B. Horton,

author of They Leave

Their Kidneys in the

Fields: Illness, Injury,

and Illegality among

U.S. Farmworkers

$27.95 hardcover/ebook

press.jhu.edu

THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2019 91

commanded by someone else, as if the
tiny being inside had already taken control.
When I was in the middle of a three-
month-long cold, my mother chided me
for refusing to alter the pace of my life.
“I know you don’t want to disrupt your
plans,” she told me, “but there will be a
point when you won’t have a choice. You
will go into labor, and your plans will be
disrupted.” It was what I was most afraid
of—being disrupted. It was also what I
craved more than anything.
In a way, I was grateful for the physical
difficulty of my third trimester. It made
me feel like I was doing my job. During the
first few months, when morning sickness
hadn’t shown up, it had been like failing to
cry at a funeral. Wasn’t I supposed to feel
my boundaries flooded by pregnancy?
Wasn’t I supposed to hurt? Wasn’t that

Eve’s original punishment? I will greatly

multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in

sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.

Some part of me craved pain as

proof that I was already a good mother,

long-suffering, while another part of me

wanted to reject hardship as the only pos-

sible proof of devotion. I’d been so eager

to fall in love with pregnancy as a conver-

sion narrative, promising to destroy the

version of myself who equated signifi-

cance with suffering and replace her with

a different woman altogether—someone

who happily watched the numbers on

I’d always resisted the idea

that parenting involves

a love deeper than any love

you’ve ever felt before,

and some part of me wanted

to give birth just so I could argue

against that belief, just

so I could say: This love isn’t

deeper, just different.