UAF English MFA Program

02/05/2026

📚 English Students & Alumni: We’re Hiring!! The Literacy Council of Alaska is seeking an Adult Education Program Support Specialist to support adult learners working on reading, writing, GED preparation, and workforce skills.

This position is a strong fit for English majors interested in literacy, education, nonprofit work, or community engagement. The role includes student communication, program coordination, event support, and workshop facilitation.

🕒 30–35 hrs/week
💵 $19/hour
📍 Fairbanks
✨ Excellent benefits and a supportive nonprofit environment

A great opportunity to apply your English degree in a meaningful, people-centered way.

👉 Learn more and apply through the Literacy Council of Alaska: https://www.literacycouncilofalaska.org/employment/adult-education-program-support-specialist-2

01/22/2026

The Alaska Humanities Forum Storytelling Fellows program supports new and emerging Alaska writers in publishing their first pieces, in FORUM magazine.

As AKHF's Director of Regrants and Stories Programs Shoshi Bieler reflects, we've learned a lot from the first two cohorts of Fellows. "For me, a fascinating — and challenging — part of facilitating this program has been finding the balance between the two goals of professional development and relationship-building," she says. "Like with any AKHF program, we spend a lot of time and energy carefully designing each experience, from the overall arc of the cohort to the agenda for each session. And, like with any program – especially a new program – there are certain things that can only be discovered in the room, with the participants."

Features like paired feedback sessions, prioritizing writers' voices over a unified FORUM magazine voice, and introducing a live reading opportunity for each cohort have all emerged from conversations with and feedback from participants. Read more about this unique professional development opportunity on our Gather Round blog at https://tinyurl.com/2pbt3mke

And don't forget: Applications for the next Fellowship are open through Feb. 8!
https://www.akhf.org/forum-storytelling-fellowship

01/07/2026

🎓✍️ Graduate Students: Spring 2026 Writing Contests Are Open Soon. The UAF Department of English is accepting submissions for its Spring 2026 Writing Contests, including multiple opportunities open to graduate students in literary criticism and creative nonfiction.

Graduate-eligible awards include:
• Harold McCracken Award for Outstanding Writing about Alaska (Nonfiction) — $500
• E.L. Bartlett Contest for Literary Criticism — $200

📅 Submissions open January 28, 2026
⏰ Deadline: March 17, 2026 at 5:00 p.m. AKST

If you’ve written strong work in a graduate or upper-division course—or have a piece ready to revise—this is an excellent opportunity to gain recognition and funding.

🔗 Contest rules and submission forms:
https://www.uaf.edu/english/student-resources/contests.php

Questions? Email [email protected]

12/04/2025

🖊️🌎 Graduate Writers: Elevate Your Nonfiction Craft and Expand Your Professional Range. Graduate English students seeking to refine their nonfiction voice — or explore how storytelling can illuminate science, climate, and the environment — will find a valuable opportunity in JOUR F639: Science Writing for Popular Media. Meeting Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9:45 to 11:15 a.m. on Zoom, this course invites graduate students to examine how today’s leading science writers turn complex research into compelling narrative.

Across sixteen weeks, you’ll analyze features from The New Yorker, National Geographic, Wired, and other major outlets, exploring rhetorical strategies, narrative architecture, metaphor, framing, and the art of explanatory writing. You’ll also produce your own feature-length work, guided by lectures, exercises, and individualized feedback that help you merge literary technique with journalistic precision.

This course is ideal for graduate students pursuing creative nonfiction, environmental humanities, rhetoric and composition, narrative theory, or public-facing scholarly communication. Prerequisites can be waived for students willing to embrace the rigor of the genre.

For questions, contact Professor Lynne Snifka at [email protected]

11/24/2025

Embark on a journey to the ends of the Earth—where ice, story, and imagination meet. In this course, students will travel through the landscapes of the Arctic and Antarctic, encountering polar bears, penguins, and the many peoples and cultures who call these regions home in Dr. Jennifer Schell’s Images of the North: (Ant)Arctic Adventure class, offered in spring 2026.

Rather than focusing on exploration alone, the course centers on voices and perspectives often overlooked in polar fiction and nonfiction—human and more-than-human alike. Through a diverse selection of readings and short writing projects, students will explore how stories shape our understanding of the North and South, the environment, and ourselves.

The course meets Thursdays from 2:15 to 5:15 p.m. online via Zoom. Instruction for spring semester courses runs from January 12 through April 27, 2026.

Dr. Jennifer Schell earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in the English Department’s Critical and Cultural Studies program. Her specialties include American literature, Arctic writing, animal studies, and environmental humanities. Her book, A Bold and Hardy Race of Men: The Lives and Literature of American Whalemen, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2013. She has recently published articles on the ecogothic, including Ecogothic Extinction Fiction: The Extermination of the Alaskan Mammoth and Polluting and Perverting Nature: The Vengeful Animals of Frogs. Dr. Schell is currently completing a new manuscript, Ghost Species: North American Extinction Writing and the Ecogothic, 1820–2017.

To learn more about this class, please contact the instructor, Dr. Schell via email at [email protected]

11/18/2025

Witness the beauty — and fragility — of our planet through time-lapse eyes. Acclaimed environmental photographer James Balog was once a skeptic about climate change and a cynic about the nature of academic research. But through his Extreme Ice Survey, he discovers undeniable evidence of our changing planet. In Chasing Ice, Balog deploys revolutionary time-lapse cameras to capture a multi-year record of the world's changing glaciers. His hauntingly beautiful videos compress years into seconds and capture ancient mountains of ice in motion as they disappear at a breathtaking rate.

Traveling with a team of young adventurers across the brutal Arctic, Balog risks his career and his wellbeing in pursuit of the biggest story facing humanity. As the debate polarizes America, and the intensity of natural disasters ramps up globally, Chasing Ice depicts a heroic photojournalist on a mission to deliver fragile hope to our carbon- powered planet.

Explore how image and story shape our understanding of the poles in Images of the North: (Ant)Arctic Adventure (ACNS/ENGL 620) offered this spring 2026 semester on Thursdays, 2:15–5:15 p.m. via Zoom with instructor, Dr. Jennifer Schell.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIZTMVNBjc4

Acclaimed environmental photographer James Balog was once a skeptic about climate change and a cynic about the nature of academic research. But through his E...

11/12/2025

“I am a vessel in which stories are told from time immemorial.”

In Co**se Whale, Iñupiaq poet dg nanouk okpik invites readers into a living landscape where human, animal, and spirit voices intertwine. Fearless in her craft, okpik fuses traditional and contemporary storytelling to create poems that sing with rhythm, movement, and memory.

Her words move through interior and exterior worlds — dark and light, ecological and spiritual — bringing the reader into the pulse of Arctic life. Each poem stands alone, yet together they form a haunting, cohesive body that expands how we experience story, place, and self.

🌊 Experience poetry that listens to the North — and answers back.
Join us for Images of the North: (Ant)Arctic Adventure (ACNS/ENGL 620) this spring 2026 semester!
📅 Thursdays, 2:15–5:15 p.m. | Zoom
📧 Instructor: Dr. Jennifer Schell ([email protected])

11/04/2025

“What is true freedom?”

At just eleven years old, Washington Black is born into the brutal confines of a Barbados sugar plantation — until an unexpected encounter changes everything. His master’s eccentric brother, an inventor and abolitionist known as Titch, chooses Wash as his assistant, igniting a journey that defies gravity and expectation.

Together they take to the skies in a fantastical flying machine and embark on a sweeping adventure that spans continents — from the lush Caribbean to the icy expanse of the Arctic. Along the way, Wash confronts betrayal, wonder, and the haunting question of what it means to be free.

Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black is both a tale of flight and a meditation on survival, invention, and the courage to reimagine one’s place in the world.

🌍 Discover how landscapes — from sugarcane fields to polar horizons — shape human destiny in Images of the North: (Ant)Arctic Adventure (ACNS/ENGL 620).
📅 Spring 2026 | Thursdays, 2:15–5:15 p.m. | Zoom
📧 Instructor: Dr. Jennifer Schell ([email protected])

10/27/2025

🦣 The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler: Winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Novella

When you bring back a long-extinct species, there’s more to success than the DNA. In a near-future Moscow, scientists have resurrected the woolly mammoth — but no one knows how to teach them to be mammoths. Enter Dr. Damira Khismatullina, the world’s leading expert in elephant behavior. There’s only one problem: she’s been dead for a year. Her consciousness now lives inside the mind of a mammoth.

As Damira struggles to guide her herd through the frozen wilds, she must confront poachers, corporate exploitation, and the haunting question of why humanity brought these giants back at all. What begins as an act of resurrection becomes a reckoning with extinction, ethics, and the limits of science itself.

Ray Nayler’s The Tusks of Extinction is a breathtaking eco-thriller that blends cutting-edge science fiction with the ancient pulse of the natural world.

🌍 Explore the boundaries between humanity, technology, and survival in Images of the North: (Ant)Arctic Adventure (ACNS/ENGL 620).
📅 Spring 2026 | Thursdays, 2:15–5:15 p.m. | Zoom
📧 Instructor: Dr. Jennifer Schell ([email protected])

10/24/2025

A family alone on a remote island.
A mysterious stranger washed ashore.
A storm closing in.

In Wild Dark Shore, Charlotte McConaghy—the bestselling author of Migrations and Once There Were Wolves—crafts a luminous and haunting story about love, loss, and the fragile ties that bind us to one another and to the Earth itself.

Set on Shearwater, a near-Antarctic island home to the world’s last great seed bank, the novel follows the Salt family as they confront the ghosts of their past—and the rising seas threatening their survival. When a stranger named Rowan appears, her arrival unearths both salvation and secrets.

McConaghy’s prose is lush, lyrical, and profoundly human—a meditation on trust, resilience, and the beauty of holding on when the world begins to let go.

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy- Instant New York Times Bestseller • #1 Amazon Best Book of the Year (So Far, 2025)

“A wildly talented writer.” — Emily St. John Mandel
“Spellbinding... exceptionally imagined, thoroughly humane.” — The Washington Post
“Abounds with evocative nature writing.” — The New York Times Book Review

🌎 Explore how contemporary fiction transforms our relationship to nature, love, and the sublime in Images of the North: (Ant)Arctic Adventure (ACNS/ENGL 620).
📅 Spring 2026 | Thursdays, 2:15–5:15 p.m. | Zoom
📧 Instructor: Dr. Jennifer Schell ([email protected])

10/21/2025

Pym by Mat Johnson, named one of the Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Houston Chronicle, The Seattle Times, Salon, National Post, and The A.V. Club

When recently fired literature professor Chris Jaynes uncovers a lost slave narrative that appears to confirm the events of Edgar Allan Poe’s bizarre novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, he sets off on the ultimate academic field trip: an Antarctic expedition.

Armed with little more than Poe’s text, a bag of bones, and a crate of Little Debbie snack cakes, Jaynes recruits an all-Black crew to follow Pym’s mysterious trail to the South Pole. What they find beneath the ice is a world both hilarious and horrifying — a collision of race, history, and the absurdity of America’s cultural imagination.

Mat Johnson’s Pym is equal parts literary satire, adventure story, and social critique — a wild descent into the permafrost of the human condition.

⚓️ Unpack the myth, the madness, and the mirth of the polar imagination in Images of the North: (Ant)Arctic Adventure (ACNS/ENGL 620).
📅 Spring 2026 | Thursdays, 2:15–5:15 p.m. | Zoom
📧 Instructor: Dr. Jennifer Schell ([email protected])