January 29, 2026   By Sam Zalutsky, faculty, writing for TV, screen, and stage   Last month I finished another semester teaching Storytelling Strategies to NYU Tisch School of the Arts undergraduate film and TV students. It’s an intense but exciting class that’s basically an introduction to dramatic writing and dramatic structure through shorts, features, and TV pilots. We read and discuss a different feature or pilot each week in the lecture portion of the class. In the reci

EXCITING NEWS & UPDATES FROM SPALDING'S NASLUND-MANN SCHOOL OF WRITING STUDENTS, ALUMNI, FACULTY & STAFF Students   Colleen Alles (P) has accidentally fallen in love with the novella. Her debut novella, Incident at Twin Lakes Resort , won the 2025 Etchings Press ( University of Indianapolis) contest for best novella and was published October 20. In March, Finishing Line Press will publish her second short novel, The Very Terrible Drowning of Bryan Price , which was longlisted

Students, faculty, and alums welcome! The spring 2026 edition of Spalding’s virtual Business of Writing Seminars takes place 11:00 a.m. – 3:15 p.m. EDT Saturday, March 21 , for students, faculty, and alumni of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. Three virtual sessions offer extracurricular instruction in the world of publishing, submitting to literary journals, and ways to earn income with your writing. You can attend one or more of these sessi

Erika J. Simpson This Is Your Mother: A Memoir   Scribner / May 2025 / 213 pp / $27.99 Hardcover Reviewed by Josephine Greenfield / January 2026   “Imagine this is your mother, Sallie Carol. Daughter of sharecroppers. Middle of ten.”   Thus begins Erika J. Simpson’s debut memoir, This Is Your Mother , which tells the story of the traumatic childhood Simpson and her sister endured as their mother battled illness, poverty, and a recurring cycle of evictions from increasingly ru

January 14, 2026 by Angela Jackson-Brown, fiction faculty When my fiction begins to feel overworked, when scenes linger past their usefulness or explanation crowds out feeling, I turn to poetry. Poetry reminds me that language does not need excess space to carry power and that writing under pressure forces each word to earn its place. That pressure sharpens resonance and clarifies intention. In this essay, I offer a working definition of compression, examine how poets and hyb

The Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing invites MFA alumni who graduated in fiction to submit proposals for a fifty-minute-long plenary craft lecture in the area of fiction. The lecture will be presented at the Spring 2026 residency, May 23 - 30. The deadline for proposals is February 28 .   Alumni may propose to lecture on craft or on an important figure or school of writing in the featured area. The best proposals will focus on distinct concerns of fiction but present i

December 18, 2025 by Nathan Gower, fiction faculty   Here’s a question for you, my fellow writers: where does your inspiration come from?   When speaking at conferences or giving public readings of my work, I usually get some variation of this question during the audience Q&A. I suppose it’s a perfectly reasonable question. It is certainly a well-intentioned  one.   But I hate that question. Why? Well, I can never quite figure out how to answer it. When I try, I usually rattl

Andrea Barrett Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction W.W. Norton & Company /2025 /189 pp / $26.99 Hardcover Reviewed by Amanda A. Gibson / December 2025  A few years ago, I grew fascinated with a nineteenth-century photographer, Anna Atkins, who used a photographic process called cyanotype, which employs sunshine and chemicals to make ethereal blue images. Although Atkins was the first to publish photographs, she is all but lost to history, overshadowed by male photog

November 20, 2025 by Lesléa Newman, faculty, writing for children and young adults   “First thought best thought” –Allen Ginsberg Since Allen was my teacher, I happen to know what this means and more importantly what it doesn’t mean. Allen didn’t mean that the first thing you put down is your best piece of writing and it doesn’t need revision. It means that you should never lose sight of the original spark of inspiration that got you excited about any particular piece of writ

EXCITING NEWS & UPDATES FROM SPALDING'S NASLUND-MANN SCHOOL OF WRITING STUDENTS, ALUMNI, FACULTY & STAFF Students   Morrow Dowdle  (P) was nominated for Best of the Net 2025 by Sky Island Journal  for their poem “I No Longer Want to Be Heartsick.”   Gratton Hicks  (F) is coming down the stretch on his third book and first adult novel, Mere Images . . . . . . of Lucky . The novel has just crossed the eighty-thousand-word count. He has planned extensive editing and feedback for