2025 Converse MFA Alumni Book Award Winners Announced
The Converse Creative Writing Program is pleased to announce the winners and finalists for the 2025 Converse MFA Alumni Book Award. This year’s award series was judged by award-winning writer and editor, Anita Skeen, professor emerita, and former director of the Center for Poetry at Michigan State University.
The winning manuscript and the runner-up will be published by Clemson University Press as part of the Clemson-Converse Literature Series in 2026. After publication, the winner and the runner-up will be invited to give readings from the winning books as part of the Converse MFA Reading Series, and/or part of the Converse Undergraduate Creative Writing Program’s Coker Visiting Writers Series.
This award series was established in 2019, and these will be the fifth and sixth books published in the Clemson-Converse Literature Series. The book award contest is conducted every other year, and is judged by an outside evaluator, an award-winning writer with a national reputation.
2025 Award Winner: Leaf Collection, by Hannah Marshall
Hannah Marshall lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she works at the public library. Marshall’s poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, New Ohio Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Four Way Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Her manuscript The Shape Good Can Take was a finalist for the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award. She received her MFA in creative writing from Converse University in 2020.
Runner-up: Everything That We’ve Buried and Other Stories, by Kyler Campbell
Kyler Campbell, author of the story collection Everything That We’ve Buried and Other Stories, is an Assistant Professor of English at Charleston Southern University and has published individual stories and articles in such journals as Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Hawaii Pacific Review, and Paradise Review, among others.
Finalists:
Redacted Redline Report, by Zorina Exie Frey;
Golden Arches, by Kelsey Stancliffe;
Where Is It: Stories, by Scott Laughlin.