SFSU CREATIVE WRITING ALUMNI NOTABLE BOOKS 2017 2020

SFSU CREATIVE WRITING ALUMNI NOTABLE BOOKS 2017 -2020 SFSU Mission Statement (excerpt) From the heart of a diverse community, San Francisco State University honors roots, stimulates intellectual and personal development, promotes equity, and inspires the courage to lead, create, and innovate.

CREATIVE WRITING DEPARTMENT MISSION STATEMENT The mission of the Creative Writing Department is to make our writers attentive readers of the literatures of the world and socially aware members of society, who can use writing for selfexpression, explorations of the possibilities of the medium, as well as in service of social causes and concerns. To this end, we employ well-published and well-recognized faculty to teach in our undergraduate, masters and masters of fine arts program, in which they guide students in the production and revision of their craft in creative nonfiction, playwriting, poetry, and literary translation. By studying elements of craft, process, vision, and revision, we prepare our students to become practicing creative writers and often teachers, professors, editors, publishers, translators, and arts organization professionals as well. We wish to instill confidence in them to remain in the field and continue their commitment and contribution to the literary arts.

FISAYO ADEYEYE

JULI DELGADO LOPERA

KAYLA EASON/MIEKE EERKENS

PEN BINGHAM PRIZE

ALVIN ORLOFF/MARY PEELEN

RENÉ VAZ

SHRUTI SWAMY

GAIL TSUKIYAMA

MICHAEL RUBIN BOOK AWARDS FROM FOURTEEN HILLS The Michael Rubin Book Award is an annual award open to students and recent graduates of San Francisco State University. Alternating each year between poetry and fiction, manuscripts are gathered in an open competition and read by an independent guest judge. The winner must be an enrolled student or recent graduate at SFSU whose work shows exceptional accomplishment and promise. The winning manuscript is published by Fourteen Hills Press in a limited one-run printing.

MRBA: 2017 AUSTIN MESSICK; 2018 KIMBERLY REYES; 2019 ROB HENDRICKS

IN MEMORIAM, ERNEST J. GAINES

TRANSFER MAGAZINE Transfer is another of San Francisco State’s student-run literary magazines, featuring poetry, fiction, drama, creative nonfiction and art by SFSU students. Each semester, the undergraduate staff taking CW 640 discusses and selects student submissions for publication. Often the breakthrough publication for San Francisco State’s emerging writers, Transfer has featured authors who have gone on to become well-established, such as Ernest J. Gaines.

ALUMNI PLAYWRIGHTS CHRISTOPHER CHEN is an Obie award-winning playwright whose full-length works have been produced and developed across the United States and abroad, at companies such as the American Conservatory Theater, Arcola Theatre, Artists Repertory, Asian American Theater Company, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Beijing Fringe Festival, Berkeley Rep/Ground Floor. Honors include: the 2017 Obie Award for Playwriting (for Caught); the 2017 Lanford Wilson Award; the 2015 -2016 Sundance Institute/Time Warner Foundation Fellowship for theater

ALUMNI PLAYWRIGHTS, CONT. MARCUS GARDLEY is a poet-playwright. He was the 2012 James Baldwin Fellow and the 2011 PEN Laura Pels award winner for Mid-Career Playwright. The New Yorker describes Gardley as “the heir to Garcia Lorca, Pirandello and Tennessee Williams. ” His play The House that Will Not Stand was commissioned and produced by Berkeley Rep and had subsequent productions at Yale Rep and the Tricycle Theater in London.

ALUMNI PLAYWRIGHTS, CONT. ED BULLINS is an American playwright, novelist, poet, and journalist, one of the leading and most prolific dramatists of Black theater. His first full-length play, In the Wine Time, examines the scarcity of options available to the Black urban poor. It was the first in a series of plays—called the Twentieth. Century Cycle—that centered on a group of young friends growing up in the 1950 s. Other plays in the cycle are The Corner, In New England Winter, The Duplex, The Fabulous Miss Marie, Home Boy, and Daddy. He received critical acclaim for The Taking of Miss Janie, a play about the failed alliance of an interracial group of political idealists in the 1960 s.

ALUMNI PLAYWRIGHTS, CONT. JONATHAN SPECTOR is a playwright and theatre-maker based in Oakland, California. His play EUREKA DAY was a New York Times "Critics' Pick" and an “Honorable Mention” in Time Out New York’s Best Plays of 2019. Its World Premiere with Aurora Theatre in Berkeley won all of the region’s new play awards: Will Glickman Award, San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award, Rella Lossy Award, and Theatre Bay Area Award.

ALUMNI PLAYWRIGHTS, CONT. PETER SINN NACHTRIEB is a San Francisco-based playwright who often writes about misfits, biology, apocalypse, and people struggling against large systems. His works include the plays boom (TCG’s most produced play 2009 -10), BOB: A Life in 5 Acts, The Totalitarians, Hunter Gatherers, The Making of a Great Moment, among others. His work has been seen off-Broadway and across the world and in the Bay Area at Z Space, A. C. T. , Encore Theatre, Killing My Lobster, Marin Theatre Company, Impact Theatre, and The Bay Area Playwrights Festival. Peter is an alumna of New Dramatists and was the Mellon/Howl. Round Playwright in Residence at Z Space in San Francisco 2013 -18.

ALUMNI PLAYWRIGHTS, CONT. RACHEL BUBLITZ is an award-winning and internationally produced playwright known for telling stories about women and creating exciting new work for young performers. Her full-length play “Ripped” had its World Premiere with Z Space in San Francisco and was awarded the 2020 Will Glickman Award for the best premiere play of the Bay Area in 2019.

ALUMNI PLAYWRIGHTS, CONT. PRINCE GOMOLVILAS's plays include Big Hunk o' Burnin' Love, a groundbreaking Thai-American comedy; Theory of Everything, which won the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Drama and was published by Dramatic Publishing; and Mysterious Skin, the stage adaptation of the Scott Heim novel. His work has been produced around the United States, as well as in Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, Singapore, and Thailand.

COME, WRITE WITH US! Visit creativewriting. sfsu. edu to apply to join our vibrant welcoming community. For more information, contact cwriting@sfsu. edu