Four writers talk about what came after their MFA programs-applying to a Ph.D. program, publishing a first book, teaching part-time, and traveling on a Fulbright grant-and how, throughout each of these endeavors, they continued to write.
SAMINA ALI was born in Hyderabad, India, and raised both there and in the United States. Her debut novel, Madras on Rainy Days, was awarded the Prix Premier Roman Etranger 2005 Award by France and was also chosen as a nalist for both the PEN/Hemingway Award in Fiction and the Northern California Book Reviewers Award. Poets & Writers Magazine named Madras as one of the Top 5 Best Debut Novels of the Year 2004. Samina speaks regularly at colleges across the country and has also been traveling internationally with the U.S. State Department. She has published essays in SELF Magazine, CHILD, the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times.
ALEX GREEN, a native of California, is the author of The Stone Roses, a book examining the cultural and political relevance of the debut album of the band from Manchester, England. As a music journalist, his reviews and interviews have appeared in Magnet, Trouser Press, CMJ New Music Monthly and HITS! He is the managing editor and founder of www.caughtinthecarousel.com, a monthly music website whose essays and interviews have been nominated for the Best American Music Writing series. His poems have appeared in RHINO, Barrow Street, The Canary and The Mid-American Review, and he has just finished a collaboration with director Tom DiCillo (Living in Oblivion, Box of Moonlight).
GRAHAM FOUST received his MFA from George Mason University and his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of four books of poetry: As in Every Deafness, Leave the Room to Itself, Necessary Stranger and A Mouth in California. His poems and criticism have appeared in Conjunctions, Fence, Colorado Review, American Letters and Commentary, Verse, The Nation and many other journals.
LESLIE CAROL ROBERTS received an MFA from the University of Iowa and an M.A. from the University of Canterbury. She is the author of The Entire Earth and Sky: Views on Antarctica, which grew out of the four months she spent in Antarctica. Her work has appeared in newspapers, general magazines and literary journals in the United States and abroad, including the Sydney Morning Herald, Forbes FYI and the Christian Science Monitor. In 2003, she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to New Zealand, where she continued her research as a visiting Fellow at Gateway Antarctica International Research Institute. Roberts is currently the director of the Writing Curriculum/Graduate Design at California College of the Arts.
