Endowed Chair
Each year, our University Endowed Chair in Creative Writing teaches one graduate MFA workshop. The Chair holder also visits classes and gives two readings.

Téa Obreht
National Book Award Finalist
2020-2022
Téa Obreht was born in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, and grew up in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States. Her debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, and was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and an international bestseller. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading, and has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, Vogue, Esquire and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many others. She was the recipient of the Rona Jaffe fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and a 2016 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. She splits time between Wyoming and Texas.

Karen Russell
Pulitzer Prize finalist
2017-2020

Ben Fountain
National Book Critics Circle Award winner
2014-2016

Robert Stone
National Book Award finalist
2010-2011

Li-Young Lee
American Book Award winner
2008-2009

Tim O'Brien
National Book Award winner
2003-2004
2005-2006
2007-2008
2011-2012

Denis Johnson
National Book Award winner
2006-2007

Barry Hannah
Pulitzer Prize finalist
2004-2005

Ai
National Book Award winner
2002-2003