MFA in Writing at University of San Francisco

MFA in Writing at University of San Francisco Fiction (short story, novel), nonfiction, and poetry. Small class sizes. Acclaimed faculty. http://w

The MFA Program at USF offers students an intimate, personalized learning experience within San Francisco's vibrant and diverse literary scene. Set in a sanctuary city, the MFA program is designed to help writers develop their creative work (novels, short stories, memoirs, essays, poetry) and immerse them in a supportive community.

This Sunday at Fabulosa Books in the Castro, USF’s own K.M. Soehnlein will be in conversation with Steven Reigns, discus...
09/12/2026

This Sunday at Fabulosa Books in the Castro, USF’s own K.M. Soehnlein will be in conversation with Steven Reigns, discussing Reigns’ new poetry collection, “Outliving Michael.”

Outliving Michael is a memorial memoir in poetry, chronicling Reigns’s profound friendship with Michael Church, who died of AIDS in 2000.

Through vignettes and tender reflections, Reigns traces their intergenerational bond, a connection of mentorship, shared artistic pursuits, and the quiet acts of devotion that shaped their lives as gay men in the 1990s.

Outliving Michael is a testament to friendship’s power to sustain, transform, and survive even death itself.

This event is free and open to the public, on Sunday, September 13th, at 4pm.

Fabulosa Books is located at 489 Castro Street in San Francisco.

K.M. Soehnlein is an award-winning novelist who teaches fiction in the USF MFA program. You can follow him on Instagram at Karl Soehnlein

Steven Reigns is a poet, artist and activist, who was also West Hollywood’s first City Poet. You can follow him on Instagram at 𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒏 𝑹𝒆𝒊𝒈𝒏𝒔

TONIGHT — two brilliant novelists who teach in the USF MFA program, in conversation together. Jasmin Darznik and Vanessa...
09/09/2026

TONIGHT — two brilliant novelists who teach in the USF MFA program, in conversation together. Jasmin Darznik and Vanessa Hua (USF’s current Ann Getty Fellow), chatting about Hua’s new novel, Coyote Land.

Set in the East Bay hills, Hua’s latest novel explores family, race, class, belonging, and the unexpected forces—human and otherwise—that can unsettle a seemingly perfect neighborhood.

Here are the event details…

Wednesday, September 9, 2026
6:30–7:30 p.m.
Creekside Room
Mill Valley Public Library
375 Throckmorton Avenue
Mill Valley, CA 94941
In person · Registration required

Registration is available through the Mill Valley Public Library online at millvalleylibrary.gov

You can follow Vanessa Hua on Instagram at Vanessa Hua

And you can follow Jasmin Darznik on Instagram at Jasmin Darznik

Laleh Khadivi’s newest novel, “Female Life on Planet Earth,” is available for pre-order now! It’s on sale from Ecco/Harp...
09/08/2026

Laleh Khadivi’s newest novel, “Female Life on Planet Earth,” is available for pre-order now!

It’s on sale from Ecco/Harper Collins in the USA on September 22, 2026. Oneworld Publications releases the UK edition on September 24, 2026.

“A novel about love, secrets and the unknown depths of the people we love, Female Life on Planet Earth is intoxicating. Khadivi writes with bristling intelligence and real beauty.”
- Katie Kitamura, author of Audition

“As hilarious as it is profoundly moving, Laleh Khadivi’s multitudinous Female Life on Planet Earth is so very wise about love and its intimate attendant, sorrow. Powerful, startling, and marvelously vibrant.”
- R. O. Kwon, national bestselling author of Exhibit

“Female Life on Planet Earth is a spellbinding fever dream. A wholly engrossing deep dive into womanhood and loss. A must-read revelation of a book.”
- Jonathan Escoffrey, author of If I Survive You

You can follow Ecco at Ecco and Oneworld Publications at Oneworld Publications

Laleh is a writer, teacher, mother, and former filmmaker. She’s also the director of the USF MFA in Writing program.

You can learn more about Laleh at lalehkhadivi.com

Follow Female Lives on Planet Earth to see the interactive-art-film-sister project that Laleh is creating with Sam

And check out femalelivesonplanetearth.com as well

Novelist K.M. Soehnlein shared his class reading list for “Point of View and Characterization,” one of our fiction semin...
09/07/2026

Novelist K.M. Soehnlein shared his class reading list for “Point of View and Characterization,” one of our fiction seminars this fall at USF.

From Prof. Karl Soehnlein:

This semester in my seminar, Point of View and Characterization, we’re reading two novels, “Another Brooklyn” by Jacqueline Woodson and “What You See in the Dark” by Manuel Muñoz.

Plus a long list of short fiction by writers including Daniel Alarcón,
Charlie Jane Anders,
Jennifer Egan,
Jonas Eika,
Danielle Evans,
Mary Gaitskill,
Vanessa Hua,
Jamil Jan Kochai,
Paule Marshall,
Luis Negrón,
Claire Messud,
Viet Thanh Nguyen,
Casey Plett,
Keith Ridgway,
James Salter,
Saïd Sayrefiezadeh,
and Jeanette Winterson.

For our current MFA students only: Tonight, the prolific and multi-disciplinary writer Forest Gander is stopping by to v...
09/03/2026

For our current MFA students only: Tonight, the prolific and multi-disciplinary writer Forest Gander is stopping by to visit the program.

Forrest Gander is the author of numerous books of poetry, including “Redstart: An Ecological Poetics” and “Mojave Ghost.”

Gander also writes novels (“As a Friend” and “The Trace”), essays (“A Faithful Existence”) and translates.

Recent translations include “Even Time Bleeds” by Jeannette L. Clariond, “Names and Rivers” by Shuri Kido, and “Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda Poems.”

His most recent anthologies are “Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin American” (selected by Raúl Zurita) and “Panic Cure: Poems from Spain for the 21st Century.”

Gander’s book “Be With” was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize.

His book “Core Samples” from the World was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

USF MFA in Writing faculty member Jasmin Darznik will be in conversation with Vanessa Hua, USF’s current Ann Getty Fello...
09/02/2026

USF MFA in Writing faculty member Jasmin Darznik will be in conversation with Vanessa Hua, USF’s current Ann Getty Fellow, about Hua’s new novel, Coyoteland.

Set in the East Bay hills, the novel explores family, race, class, belonging, and the unexpected forces—human and otherwise—that can unsettle a seemingly perfect neighborhood.

Wednesday, September 9, 2026
6:30–7:30 p.m.
Creekside Room
Mill Valley Public Library
375 Throckmorton Avenue
Mill Valley, CA 94941
In person · Registration required

Registration is available through the Mill Valley Public Library online at millvalleylibrary.gov

09/01/2026

The SF Bay Area is full amazing bookstores. And it’s full of amazing literary events, many of which take place on a regular basis. And yet, Poets in the Window at Medicine for Nightmares in The Mission remains singularly fresh, exciting, and rebellious.

Last month, our very own andrea isabel andrea isabel 🪐 (class of ‘27) was asked to read.

Here’s a video of the first of the two poems she shared that night, called “revision.”

Alexia Nader’s debut novel is on the way, and we are beyond ready to dig into “The Meaning of Daughter,” which goes on s...
08/31/2026

Alexia Nader’s debut novel is on the way, and we are beyond ready to dig into “The Meaning of Daughter,” which goes on sale Sept. 15 from University of Iowa Press.

Here’s the synopsis…

After immigrating from Lebanon to Haiti as a young girl, Merjan comes of age in an insular, conservative community, where it seems as though her sole escape is marriage.

Striking a bargain with a young art dealer, she marries and dreams of becoming a painter, only to find her husband’s support tethered with expectations.

In the late 1970s, Merjan’s daughter Yvonne is a young woman on the cusp of a marriage of convenience.

Though resentful of her mother, Yvonne dreams of establishing a Haitian art gallery in New York with the help of a well-connected older man—but her time there ends disastrously, creating a deep rift between her and her family as she starts one of her own.

In the present day, Yvonne’s daughter Eva is a student whose art draws inspiration from her grandmother Merjan’s largely undiscovered work. When Eva becomes unexpectedly pregnant, she moves back to her childhood home in Miami to sort out her ambivalent feelings, only to find her family upended by feuds.

An intimate family saga, The Meaning of Daughter explores questions about maternal ambivalence, ambition, artmaking, and how desire resists gendered expectations.

…Alexia earned her MFA at the University of San Francisco, and was also a 2023-2024 Steinbeck Fellow. She’s currently an Artist-in-Residence at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, as well as a creative writing instructor at Writopia Lab.

You can pre-order “The Meaning of Daughter” now from Barnes & Noble, Books and Books, Green Apple Books, Books are Magic, and bookshop.org.

You can learn more about Alexia (and pre-order her book) online at alexianader.com

08/28/2026

Candy Shue, USF MFA alumnus, reads from her award-winning chapbook “Bridge of Knots.”

Here’s the synopsis from her publisher, Gold Line Press/Ricochet Editions…

A revelatory, nuanced debut, CE Shue’s Bridge of Knots weaves together meditations on marriage, motherhood, art-making, and the complexities of Asian American identity in pandemic-era San Francisco.

Grappling with revelations from her past, Shue’s narrator depicts “life as a collage” as she reconciles “what we choose and what we make of what we choose” with memories the body holds.

Written in an associative, impressionistic style that has drawn comparisons to Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation and Chet’la Sebree’s Field Study, Shue’s narrative, at once intimate and international, is attuned to the knots that hold communities, families, and selves together across time and geography.

…”Bridge of Knots” was selected by Matthew Salesses for the Gold Line Press fiction award, and was first published in 2023.

Candy holds an MFA from the USF and has been published in Drunken Boat, Entropy, Washington Square, Sparkle & Blink, Flash Fiction Review, Paragraph, E*Ratio, Spiral Orb, Lumina, Storyscape, The Satirist, flock, Poet As Radio, Switchback, The Collagist, and other journals.

The recipient of scholarships and grants from USF, The Provincetown Fine Arts Workshop, Vermont Studio Center, and Kundiman, she was a longtime board member for The Bay Area Generations reading series. She has read at Quiet Lightning, LitQuake and The Racket, as well as other festivals in the Bay Area.

You can follow Candy on Instagram at Candy Shue

Candy’s Little Book House newsletter is on Substack at substack.com/candyshue

And you can learn more about her on her website at invisibleadventure.com

Gold Line Press is on Instagram at Gold Line Press

Ricochet Editions is on Instagram at Ricochet Editions

Booklist reveal! Our nonfiction seminar this fall is “Memoir: Shapes & Structures”, a new course taught by Prof. Dave Ma...
08/28/2026

Booklist reveal! Our nonfiction seminar this fall is “Memoir: Shapes & Structures”, a new course taught by Prof. Dave Madden (Dave Madden).

With a focus on the diverse ways writers fit the messiness of life into aesthetic and narrative shapes, the class will unpack the tools of memoir that carry readers from your first sentence to your last.

Together, we’ll closely read these nine memoirs, plus craft essays by Elissa Washuta, Mary Karr, Henry Lien, Vivian Gornick, John McPhee, and others.

[Image description:

This post has a photo of nine memoirs…

Hanif Abdurraqib: Go Ahead in the Rain

Ingrid Rojas Contreras: The Man Who Could Move Clouds

Yiyun Li: Dear Friend, From My Life I Write To You In Your Life

Therese Marie Mailhot: Heart Berries

J.R. Ackerley: My Father and Myself

Charles Foster: Being a Beast

Sheila Heti: Alphabetical Diaries

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich: The Fact of a Body

Rigoberto Gonzales: Autobiography of My Hungers]

Address

2130 Fulton Street
Baltimore, MD
94117

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when MFA in Writing at University of San Francisco posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The School

Send a message to MFA in Writing at University of San Francisco:

Shortcuts

Share

Category