This past year our MFAs have published their writing, worked on projects with English department faculty, and contributed to social justice initiatives in their communities. We’re so proud of everything they’ve accomplished. Learn more about three current MFAs below.
Jordan Carter is a third year MFA candidate in Fiction. She serves as the Fiction Editor for Cheat River Review and as the Assistant to the Director of the West Virginia Writers' Workshop. Last fall, she served as a teaching assistant for an Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program course at a prison in Pennsylvania, where she is currently a member of the Appalachian Community Think Tank, a group dedicated to criminal justice reform. Her short story "Nymphs" was chosen by Crystal Wilkinson as the second place winner of the West Virginia Fiction Competition and is forthcoming in The Anthology of Appalachian Writers.
Storey Clayton is a second year MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction. He works as a Graduate Assistant in the Eberly College Research Office, helping faculty write grants for research funding. He also reads nonfiction for WVU’s Cheat River Review. In the past year, his nonfiction has appeared in a dozen literary journals, including Pleiades, Five on the Fifth, Drunk Monkeys, Unearthed, Mud Season Review, and North Dakota Quarterly. You can learn more about Storey at his personal website, The Blue Pyramid.
Sharon "Shay" Reynolds is a first year MFA candidate in Poetry. Last fall, she was awarded the Eberly College Social Justice Fellowship for her research on the strange intersections of aggressive sexual mimicry, beetles, orchids, and sex worker narratives. Shay recently joined the editorial crew at What are Birds? Journal as a poetry reader. She lives in a woodsy area about half an hour to an hour outside of Morgantown depending on whether you take the highway or the back roads.