Filled bookshelf in Hay-on-Wye, Wales famous as the Town of Books

Our poetry faculty consists of nationally and internationally known writers from many different backgrounds, working in broadly diverse styles and subject matter. At SNU Tahoe, you’ll work with writers like Carolyn Forché, Patricia Smith, Brian Turner, Nathalie Handal, Lee Herrick, and many more.

Our faculty have been awarded the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award, a Lamont Poetry Selection, the Lenore Marshall Prize, National Book Award nominations, shortlist for the T.S. Eliot Prize (U.K.) and winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize (U.S.), NAACP Image Award, Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, PEN Best in the West Award, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, Lannan Foundation Fellowships, the Poet’s Prize, USA Fellowships, Guggenheim Grants, NEA Fellowships, a Witter Bynner Foundation Poetry Fellowship, and the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature. Their work has been published in Poetry, APR, The Paris Review, the Guardian, the Best American Poetry Series, Vanity Fair, the Poetry Foundation, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Georgia Review, Poetry Ireland, and for Words without Borders, among many others.

Cover of "Incendiary Art" by Sierra Nevada University MFA in Creative Writing faculty Patricia Smith
Cover of "The Selfless Bliss of the Body", poetry by Sierra Nevada University faculty Gayle Brandeis
Cover of "The Wild Night Dress" by Sierra Nevada University MFA in Creative Writing faculty Laura McCullough
Cover of "Against Forgetting" by Sierra Nevada University MFA in Creative Writing faculty Carolyn Forche
Cover of "Scar and Flower" by Sierra Nevada University MFA in Creative Writing faculty Lee Herrick
Cover of "Up Jump the Boogie" by Sierra Nevada University MFA in Creative Writing faculty John Murillo
Cover of Blue Hour by Carolyn Fourche, faculty in the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program at Sierra Nevada University
Cover of "Spill" by Sierra Nevada University MFA in Creative Writing faculty Kelle Groom
Cover of "The Country Between Us" by Sierra Nevada University MFA in Creative Writing faculty Carolyn Forche
Cover of Gardening Secrets of the Dead by Lee Herrick, faculty in the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program at Sierra Nevada University
Cover of "Phantom Noise" by Sierra Nevada University MFA in Creative Writing faculty Brian Turner
Cover of "A Sense of Regard" by Sierra Nevada University MFA in Creative Writing faculty Laura McCullough
Cover of The Rural Lives of Nice Girls by Gailmarie Pahmeier, faculty in the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program at Sierra Nevada University
Cover of Of Dirt and Tar by June Saraceno, faculty in the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program at Sierra Nevada University
Cover of Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah by spoken word poet Patricia Smith
Cover of "The Poetry of Arab Women" by Sierra Nevada University MFA in Creative Writing faculty Nathalie Handal
Cover of Here, Bullet by Brian Turner, faculty in the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program at Sierra Nevada University
Cover of Map Predetermined and Chance by Laura Wetherington, faculty in the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program at Sierra Nevada University

“In the Sierra Nevada University MFA program, graduate students can expect supportive rigor, literary inspiration, and a deepened understanding of their craft. We want to work with you and share what we know—from idea to final draft, from the personal to the political, from the local to the global. This program builds writers, and through your words, your life and others’ lives may well be transformed.”

— Lee Herrick, MFA Faculty

Recent guest authors have included Monica Sok, Tanya Shirley, John F. Deane, Sinéad Morrissey, Matthew Sweeney, and Damir Šodan.

SNU Tahoe provides a nurturing, mentoring environment for its students, where social and environmental justice issues can be explored alongside poems that explore the interior world of the artist. We equip students with the tools — and the inspiration — to succeed in their writing lives long after obtaining their degree. As we see it, the poems we write today have something to teach us about the poems we will write tomorrow.

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