When you come to the Writing Center, you will work with one of our writing consultants who are undergraduates and graduate students, mostly in the Department of Literature.
We're students too, so we're well-versed in writer's block! We've put together some of our favorite reads to get your creativity flowing.
Toyin Adeyemi was born in Seattle, Washington and is a first-year MFA student. She enjoys the writing process, and tries to avoid the trap of chronic (over)editing. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edward Said, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o are among the writers who have moved her most.
Steve Beaulieu is originally from Miami, Florida, but is returning to DC as a first-year MA student. Some of his favorite authors are Vladimir Nabokov, e. e. cummings, and W. Somerset Maugham, though his favorite book is House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski. His biggest struggle with writing is a constant need to edit as he goes, and never really being satisfied with a rough draft.
Kelsey Blackmon is a second-year MA student from Olney, Maryland. Her favorite reading includes the works of Charlotte Bronte, Emily Dickinson, and Raymond Chandler. While writing, she often falls into a lengthy struggle to find an absolutely perfect word, but loves the feeling of an eloquent sentence.
Claire Conklin is a first year MA student from the small, coastal town of Astoria, Oregon (think Goonies). Her favorite authors generally tend to whatever she is currently reading, but the ultimate bookshelf includes Virginia Woolf, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sylvia Plath and William Stafford. She fosters a certain obsession with parentheses and semi-colons and struggles against the call for simplicity.
Meridian Ganz-Ratzat is a junior Literature major from the DC suburbs. She loves to read—anything from philosopy to children's fantasy, but her favorite genres are critical Victorian lit and flash fiction. Her favorite part of writing is the "Aha!" moment when everything comes together—but she still struggles to remember all those grammar rules.
Alicia Gregory is a first-year MFA student who has lived in Washington, DC for the past two years by way of New Jersey, New York, and South Africa. She prefers the helpful flow of free writing to both get her started and keep her moving when hung-up on an idea, line, or word. Her favorite writers are those with duende—what “surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning, it’s not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins: meaning, it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation.” (García Lorca, Theory and Play of the Duende).
Griffin Moar is a first-year MA student from Rochester, NY, who studied literature and philosophy as an undergraduate. His favorite reads are modernist poets, postmodern novelists, and good journalists. He admires writers that can effortlessly translate thoughts into words, because he isn’t one of them.
Michael Moreno, a third-year MFA candidate, was born in West Texas and has lived and worked in many parts of the American South. For him, the best part of writing is self-discovery, and it’s also the worst part. He enjoys reading the poetry and plays of William Shakespeare, gritty tales of Cormac McCarthy, popular fiction of Stephen King and magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez.
Toni McIntyre is a 3rd year MFA student who was born in Philadelphia but is obsessed with British TV. Her new favorite author is Haruki Murakami. Her biggest struggle with writing is organizing her thoughts and paragraphs appropriately.
Andrea Robertson is a second-year MFA student from West Virginia who still feels like her feet look funny in shoes. Her reading interests tend to lean toward old folk tales and the fantastical, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Haruki Murakami, Karen Russel, and Neil Gaiman, as well as the curmudgeonly, like Kurt Vonnegut. Her main problems with writing include avoiding tangents and how disagreeable semicolons can be.
Chuck Sebian-Lander is a first-year MFA student. He grew up in southern Maryland and attended the University of Maryland as an undergraduate. He is an obsessive stickler for easy grammar rules who will read just about anything with well-crafted sentences.
