Novels, Memoirs, and Poetry Collections
A Place for What We Lose: A Daughter's Return to Tule Lake by Tamiko Nimura (PhD, 2004)
UW Press, April 2026. From the press: "In a moving conversation with the past, Tamiko Nimura explores her late father’s life and her family’s wartime history at Tule Lake. With honesty and lyrical precision, Nimura shows how intergenerational trauma and silence are transmitted, and how confronting them can foster healing. Part memoir, part dialogue with the past, A Place for What We Lose illuminates the enduring costs of incarceration while honoring the persistence of family, memory, and story. It is a profoundly moving exploration of grief, history, and the fragile but necessary work of resilience."
The Poems of Sylvia Plath edited by Amanda Golden (PhD, 2009) and Karen V. Kukil
Faber & Faber, May 2026. From the press: "The Poems of Sylvia Plath is a landmark publication: the definitive edition of the poet’s work for scholars, students and general readers. Sylvia Plath’s first Collected Poems was published in 1981. This new volume draws on decades of research and almost doubles the content of that edition. The book is in two parts: the first contains the poems Plath composed in the last ten years of her life and upon which her reputation is founded, and the second includes those poems written in childhood and through her student years. In both sections, the editors have dated, corrected and arranged each poem chronologically, drawing on manuscripts, typescripts and related archival material. Critical notes document and cast new light on Plath’s extraordinary evolution as a poet, from her childhood compositions, through the early blossoming of her talent and ambition, and into the molten core that was to shape the poems of her last few years, securing her place in literary history."
Let the Moon Wobble by Ally Ang (MFA, 2021)
Alice James Books, November 2025. From the author: "Ang’s debut considers multiple speakers’ journeys through concurrent apocalypses: the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, and the rise of fascism. These poems span a wide range of forms and poetic traditions, full of humor, lyricism, and endearing absurdity. They emerge from the speaker’s need to process their emotions and feelings of helplessness. As Ang aches for connection to their communities and lineage in a time of unrelenting isolation, their poems plumb the depths of grief and rage against the systems and institutions that aim to repress and kill queer people of color."
Accidental Devotions by Kelli Russell Agodon (BA, 1992)
May 2026. From the author: "Kelli Russell Agodon has published her fifth collection of poems, Accidental Devotions (Copper Canyon Press), which finds meaning in a screen-lit world haunted by ghosts both digital and real, blending humor and vulnerability to explore desire, technology, spirituality, aging, queerness, and the ongoing strangeness of being human. Sharp, tender, and playful, these poems form a defiant field guide for devoted readers and quiet rebels, making room for grief and joy, pleasure and struggle, birdsong and missed calls, all at once."
Underlake by Erin L. McCoy (MFA, 2017)
Penguin Random House, April 2026. From the press: "When a mother claims her missing daughter is alive beneath a lake in a flooded valley, a marine biologist descends into a hidden underwater settlement where those who refused to leave have built a sealed-off world—and where the consequences of that choice are beginning to surface.
Hypnotic and arresting, Underlake brings a poet’s attention to language, evoking the ethereal work of Marilynne Robinson, Lauren Groff, and Emily St. John Mandel and the imaginative brio of Margaret Atwood. In taking her place as a major new voice in American fiction, McCoy shrewdly explores the American obsession with land, inheritance, and race, asking what we cling to when the world changes—and who gets erased in the name of preserving it."
Wrecks by Erin L. McCoy
Noemi Press, October 2025. From the press: "Wrecks is a collection of poems inspired by the great auk, a flightless seabird driven to extinction in the mid-1800s. The last two known members of the species were killed on Eldey Island, Iceland, in 1844. The auk was repeatedly described by those who killed the bird as making human-like gestures and sounds, including sighs. Wrecks investigates how the human–nonhuman binary and the dehumanization it enables makes space for violence—against animals and the environment, but also against other humans. It explores the colonial systems that drive extinction, and the hierarchical structure by which hegemonic powers decide what is—and what is not—human. It engages the author’s experience of dehumanization as an atheist growing up in the conservative South; it also interrogates her complicity in systems of structural racism, and her inheritance as the descendant of colonizers."
In this article, McCoy talks about her time in the UW MFA program: My first book, “Wrecks,” will be published by Noemi Press
Alumni Awards
Poet Laureate of Bainbridge Island: Erin Malone (MFA, 1996)
From the award website: Erin Malone succeeds inaugural Bainbridge Island Poet Laureate Michele Bombardier, who served from 2023 – 2025. Erin is the author of Site of Disappearance, a finalist for the National Poetry Series (Ornithopter Press, 2023), Hover (Tebot Bach, 2015), and a chapbook, What Sound Does It Make (Concrete Wolf, 2008). Born in New Mexico and raised in Nebraska and Colorado, she earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington. For many years she’s taught in community spaces as well as at elementary schools and universities. Erin and her family now live on Bainbridge Island.
2026 New Literary Project Jack Hazzard Fellowship: Bea Chang (MFA, 2013)
These very competitive fellowships provide support for high school teachers to pursue their own writing projects over the summer. Chang, who teaches at the Bush School in Seattle, will be pursuing the project Everything We Couldn't Be (Creative Nonfiction).
Congrats to all of our amazing alumni!