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One way MFA programs provide funding to students is by hiring them as teaching assistants to teach writing classes in exchange for a stipend and, often, tuition remission and health insurance. While each program defines its teaching assistantships differently, in general there are a few things you should know before applying and preparing for one.
Claudia Keelan was born in 1959 in Anaheim, California. She is the author of three books of poetry, Refinery (Cleveland State University (1994), The Secularist (University of Georgia, 1997), and Utopic (Alice James, 2000). A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, Keelan directs the MFA program at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
The appearance of Karen Volkman's first book of poems, Crash's Law, selected for the National Poetry Series in 1995 and published by Norton the following year, signaled the arrival of a startling and canorous voice in American poetry. In the introduction to the book, series judge Heather McHugh called Volkman "an analyst of love," and remarked that the book "bespeaks a mind attuned no less to the accidents than to the orders of a sensual life."
Donald Revell grew up in the Bronx, New York. He received his Ph.D. from SUNY-Buffalo, and splits his time between Nevada and Utah, where he is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Utah. Wesleyan University Press published Revell's seventh book of poems, Arcady, in February. Written as a response to the death of his sister and only sibling, Roberta, in 1995, Arcady draws its vision from the well of Arcadia—the utopic Greek realm described as paradise by Virgil, painted by Poussin, scored by Charles Ives, and contemplated by Thoreau.
Laura Mullen was born in Los Angeles in 1958. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop and currently teaches at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. She is the author of The Surface (University of Illinois, 1991) and After I Was Dead (University of Georgia, 1999). Her writing has won many awards including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
