Your Summer Reading List: 10 Books by Creative Writing Alumni
Summer is made for the long, unhurried read: the kind you sink into on a porch, a beach towel, or a hammock with nowhere else to be. The hard part is choosing.
So look no further than the alumni of the College of Arts and Sciences. For nearly five decades, the College's highly-selective Creative Writing M.F.A. program has launched many of its graduates (both poets and fiction writers) on to national acclaim — to best-seller lists, major literary prizes and even the big screen. This summer, that tradition continues. Recent books by program alums span stories that range from a grief-struck New Jersey boyhood to the outer edges of the cosmos. Whichever you slip into your beach bag, we promise it’ll pair perfectly with a cooling beverage and a long afternoon in the sun.
Mood Swings: A Novel
Frankie Barnet G’19
After humanity wipes out every animal on Earth, a directionless young poet falls for the billionaire behind it. A biting satire for the doom-scroll age.
Great Disasters: A Novel
Grady Chambers G’15
Six friends grow up in early-2000s Chicago, drinking in basements and half-watching the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan begin, until the years quietly pull them apart.
The Spoil: A Novel
Maile Chapman G’01
A woman caring for her dying mother in Las Vegas opens a box of old things and lets something ancient loose. Underneath the horror, it's a book about grief.
Crawl: Stories
Max Delsohn G’24
Wry, aching stories about trans men coming of age in 2010s Seattle — its bars, its bathhouses, its promise of a queer utopia that never quite arrived.
Atom and Void: Poems
Aaron Fagan G’06
Tight, brainy sonnets that borrow from physics and philosophy and keep circling one question: what does it mean to be here at all?
Tiny Vessels
JR Fenn G’22
Small stories, enormous range: a prize-winning flash-fiction collection that travels from a kitchen table to the edge of the universe.
Everything Alive: Poems
Molly Johnsen G’21
Molly Johnsen wrote these poems after a truck nearly killed her. They're about the body, the people who got her through and everything still alive around her.
Ghost Town: A Novel
Tom Perrotta G’88
Tom Perrotta, author of Election and Little Children, returns with a darkly nostalgic novel about one summer in 1970s New Jersey and the ghosts it leaves behind.
Soft Spots: A Novel
Leila Renee G’22
A young woman flees her family and bluffs her way into a teaching job she's determined to ace. Then comes news that her estranged father is gravely ill. (Available Aug. 4, 2026)
Hotshot: A Life on Fire
River Selby G’18
River Selby was one of the only women on an elite wildfire crew. Their acclaimed memoir is both a survival story and a sharp history of how the West burns.
Published: July 7, 2026
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