Student Outcomes

The MFA Program for Writers’ unique rigor and emphasis on craft endow its students with a strength both rare and deeply necessary. Fine writing often seems magical, but when you examine it through a craft lens, it gives you x-ray vision to be able to see how the author did what they did. From there it’s only one short step to trying the same moves in your own writing. It creates a fluency. I applied to Warren Wilson’s MFA program to understand how the best fiction writing is built, and I emerged with my degree, a walking stick, dozens of lifelong friends, and those craft-discerning tools. I use them as a writer, of course, but I also use them as a teacher, a thinker, a conference talk proposer, a conversationalist, and a first-year PhD grad student.

—Candace Walsh (fiction, 2019)

Alumni Community: Wally Conference & Community Post-Graduation

Our alumni remain vitally connected to this program and to each other decades into their writing lives. They reconnect and continue to support one another through enduring friendships, local workshops, and thriving regional alumni groups and reading series in cities across the country. They gather at the annual alumni conference, as well as at AWP and other conferences and workshops. They also volunteer their talents and time at the AWP Bookfair, on the Board of Directors of Friends of Writers, and in various service projects for the program.

Publishing Success & Awards

Our alumni have published nearly 1500 books and have received national recognition–NEA, Guggenheim, Fulbright, Lilly, and Stegner fellowships; multiple Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards, book prizes from the Academy of American Poets, PEN America, NAACP, NBCC, and numerous presses, among many other accolades. They carry this program’s ethos, passion, and its creative and analytical gifts into the classroom, lab, courtroom, boardroom, and their daily lives. Our graduates truly are our best advertisement.