A calendar of events and newsletter for the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at California State University, Fresno.

Friends, join us on Friday, May 6th at 7:00 pm in the Alice Peters Auditorium as we push another batch of graduates out into the world.

Marilyn Byrne, a native Californian, received her teaching degree from San Jose State. Taking women’s study classes here at Fresno State, she became assisted in the formative years and became the first editor of Voices: A Journal of Women’s Writing. Her poetry has appeared in local college and community publications.  Happiness, she believes, occurs as one progress toward a goal; each action toward her degree has provided her with rich layers of understanding and pleasure.

Megan Baptista Geist discovered poetry when she accidentally enrolled in an undergraduate workshop five years ago, where she learned to spot the lyric moment. A transplant from California’s north valley, after graduation she plans to stay in Hanford with her husband Josh and two small dogs. The line break is her favorite piece of punctuation.

Gabriel Ibarra was born and raised in Fresno, CA, began writing at Bullard High, fleshed it out at Fresno City College and learned how to write better at UC Santa Cruz, where he was one told that words and meaning fall on a line between a Stop Sign and Poetry. During his three years here at Fresno State, in MFA Program, he has: married his high school sweetheart, Marina; become a father to smile-a-ton Andrew; and written a thesis in which he realized he is still discovering how to write.

Jane Elizabeth Jeffers is a fiction writer and native of Maryland who moved to Southern California at age twelve.  She has worked in both the theatre and video game industries, and has visited far away lands in Europe and Africa.  Beyond that, there really isn’t anything remarkable about her, except that she has an amazing family and great friends.  Beware of digressions.