We caught up with a few of our recent MFA alumni: Kelsey, Andrea, and Megan. Since graduating in 2017, they have been busy publishing, teaching, and traveling to new places.
Kelsey Englert studied fiction in West Virginia University's MFA program from 2014 to 2017. She currently works at the University of Arkansas in Monticello where she teaches composition, creative writing, and technical writing in the English department and graduate courses in the MFA program. She publishes fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Her writing has appeared in Passages North, Into the Void, Barely South Review, and The Citron Review, among other literary magazines. For more information, visit www.kelseyenglert.com.
After finishing her MFA in 2017, Andrea Ruggirello moved to Washington, DC where she worked as a grant writer at an anti-poverty non-profit. After a year, she became a writer and senior associate for a communications firm that supports mission-driven non-profits, foundations, and government agencies. She also completed an in-school teaching residency with PEN/Faulkner's Writers in Schools program at various DC public high schools. She has published short stories, essays, and poetry over the last two years and recently completed a novel, which was a semi-finalist for the 2017 James Jones First Novel Fellowship and supported by the 2018 Tin House Writers Workshop. You can learn more about her at andrearuggirello.com.
Megan Fahey graduated from WVU’s MFA program (fiction) in May of 2017. In July, she was hired at Point Park University in downtown Pittsburgh where she worked with the Assistant Provost to co-create the Center for Inclusive Excellence (CIE). In her time at Point Park, Megan hosted the City of Pittsburgh’s Inclusive Innovation Summit, was named Chair of the staff Academic Excellence committee, and through a series of zany mishaps, ended up addressing the graduates at the commencement ceremony for the Pittsburgh Institute for Mortuary Sciences. She was promoted to CIE Director in January of 2019.
In April of this year, Megan left Point Park to accept a position as Assistant Director of Strategic Programs in the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University where she plans Outreach events for K-12 students and manages community partnerships and Broader Impacts initiatives for the college. In her spare time, she is the guitarist for The Red Eyeballers, a low-fi basement rock band that specializes in pre-1970s Halloween music. Since graduating Megan has published six short stories and two poems in a variety of journals, including Southern Humanities Review, The Tulane Review, and Talking River, and is currently working on a book length-nonfiction project.