MFA in Narrative Media Writing

Ann Marie Allison/Jenna Milly

Brian Egeston

Jade-Addon Hall

Katoya Fleming

KaToya Ellis Fleming is an assistant professor of publishing arts at the University of North Carolina–Wilmington and editor at Lookout Books. She was previously in residence in Little Rock, Arkansas, as the 2019–20 Oxford American Jeff Baskin Writers Fellow. She holds a BA in English from Spelman College and an MFA in narrative nonfiction from the University of Georgia and is currently at work on “Finding Frank,” a bibliomemoir. Her work focuses on race and culture in the American South and has appeared in Oxford American, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.

Laurie Hertzel

Laurie Hertzel is senior editor for books at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where she has worked for more than 20 years. Her journalism and short fiction have appeared in newspapers, magazines and journals across the United States, in Finland and in Australia. Her fiction has been published in South Carolina Review, North Dakota Quarterly and elsewhere, and her nonfiction has been anthologized and also published in the Chicago Tribune, TriQuarterly, Brevity.blog, Siirtolaisuus (Turku, Finland), Ascent, Blue River Review, and many other places. She has won many national awards for her journalism and her short fiction. Hertzel is the author of three books, including “News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist,” winner of a 2011 Minnesota Book Award. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction from Queens University in Charlotte, N.C., and is past president of the National Book Critics Circle.

Alex Koltowitz

Alex Kotlowitz is the author of four books, including his most recent, An American Summer, which received the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. His first book, the national bestseller There Are No Children Here, was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the 150 most important books of the twentieth century. The Other Side of the River received The Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Nonfiction. Alex’s work has regularly appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and on This American Life. His documentary work includes The Interrupters, for which he received a Film Independent Spirit Award and an Emmy. His other honors include two Peabodys, a George Polk Award, the Harold Washington Literary Award and the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his books and journalism which “illuminate astonishing national inequities through the lens of individual experience.” Alex is a professor at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. He and his wife, Maria, live in Chicago.

Danielle McGuire

Danielle McGuire, PhD, is an award-winning historian, public speaker and author of At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance-a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (Knopf), which won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award and the Lillian Smith Book Award. She is the recipient of the Lerner Scott Prize for best dissertation in women’s history. Her Journal of American History article, “It was Like We Were All Raped: Sexualized Violence, Community Mobilization and the African American Freedom Struggle,” won the A. Elizabeth Taylor Prize for best essay in southern women’s history and was reprinted in the Best Essays in American History. McGuire is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and has appeared on PBS, CNN, MSNBC and Headline News, among others. Her popular essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Detroit Free Press and Bridge Magazine, among others. She serves as a consultant on documentary films such as The Rape of Recy Taylor and You Belong to Me: The Ruby McCollum Story.

Natalie Moore

Natalie Moore is a reporter of race, class and communities at WBEZ Chicago. Her enterprise reporting has tackled race, housing, economic development, food injustice and violence. Natalie’s work has been broadcast on the BBC, Marketplace and NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition. Natalie is the author of “The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation,” winner of the 2016 Chicago Review of Books award for nonfiction and a Buzzfeed best nonfiction book of 2016. She is also co-author of “The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American Gang” and “Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation.”  Natalie is a playwright and she athors a monthly column for the Chicago Sun-Times. Her work has been published in Essence, Ebony and the Chicago Reporter, among others. She has been honored with several awards including the 2017 recipient of Chicago Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award and the Studs Terkel Community Media Award in 2010 for reporting on Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods.

Kamille Whittaker

Kamille D. Whittaker is managing editor of Atlanta magazine and co-founder of Canopy Atlanta, where she directs the Fellowship program. Previously, she served as staff writer and associate editor for Atlanta Tribune: The Magazine and Atlanta Daily World. In addition to her journalistic work, Whittaker instructs students in Mercer University’s Academic Resource Center and Online Writing Lab. She is an ’05 graduate of Howard University and a ‘21 graduate of UGA’s MFA program in Narrative Nonfiction.

Hear Tell Podcast

Interested in hearing more about the MFA Narrative Nonfiction program? Check out the Hear Tell podcast, hosted by André Gallant (ABJ ’10, MFA ’17), featuring interviews and readings from alumni, mentors and instructors of the program.

Recent featured guests include:

• Martin Padgett
• Max Blau
• Moni Basu
• Jasmin Pittman Morrell
• Kristen Lowe