MFA Program in Creative Writing >> Publications

AWARD-WINNING PUBLICATIONS

The MFA Program in Creative Writing at Boise State University supports two award-winning literary magazines and a 29-year-old poetry press renowned for the quality of its list. Graduate students have the opportunity to take hands-on, practical classes in Writing, Editing, and Design for Professional Advancement (which includes work with The Idaho Review) and Small Press Publishing (which involves work with Ahsahta Press).

The program also publishes Free Poetry featuring essays and poetry from today's leading poets. Graduate students serve as editors of the literary magazine cold-drill which will celebrate 40 years of publishing the "traditionally experimental," next year.

THE IDAHO REVIEW

Editor Mitch Wieland founded The Idaho Review in 1998 with the intent of creating a national, high-quality literary annual. Since that time, The Idaho Review has consistently won praise and awards. Stories published in the magazine have been included in The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses and listed among the "100 Other Distinguished Short Stories of the Year" in The Best American Short Stories. Contributors to the review have included Rick Bass, Madison Smartt Bell, Stuart Dybek, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Richard Bausch, Alyson Hagy, Stephen Dixon, and Stephen Minot. MFA students may participate in the magazine's production through a graduate assistantship and coursework. See The Idaho Review website at http://english.boisestate.edu/idahoreview for more information.

AHSAHTA PRESS

Boise State University's Ahsahta Press was launched in 1974 by three Boise State English professors as a press that would resurrect and republish the poetry of Western American writers that had gone out of print. Soon, however, the press began publishing the work of contemporary Western writers as well, including poets such as Sandra Alcosser, David Baker, Linda Bierds, Gretel Ehrlich, and Leo Romero. Wyn Cooper's poem "Fun," which became a number-one hit song for Sheryl Crow, appears in his Ahsahta Press book The Country of Here Below. In 2000, after Ahsahta Press came under the aegis of the MFA Program, director Janet Holmes expanded Ahsahta's reach beyond the West; in 2002, the press inaugurated the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, which awards $1500 to the a manuscript selected by a nationally known judge. See the Ahsahta Press website at http://ahsahtapress.boisestate.edu for more information.