10.18.23

Ulrich Museum hosts MFA program anniversary celebration reading

In celebration of the 45th anniversary of Wichita State’s MFA in creative writing program, Kerry Jones ’00 hosted a reading from her newly released short story collection The Last Innocent Year, winner of Southeast Missouri State University’s Nilsen Prize.

A multi-award winning author whose fiction has appeared in many literary journals, including Orchid, Night Train, The Rambler, Bryant Literary Review, Sycamore Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Seems, and SLAB, Jones holds a BA in English from Mansfield University with dual minors in philosophy and creative writing and is a teaching professor and director of the writing center at Wichita State. She came to WSU from her home state of Pennsylvania in 1998 after being accepted into the creative writing program. She was lured to campus, she says, by a chance glance at a program ad.

She explains, “At the time, 1997 to 1998, I was in an MA program in creative writing at Temple. I’d never wanted an MA, really. I’d wanted an MFA since that’s a terminal degree. I wanted to write, but more than that, I wanted to teach college. It’s typical for English departments to advertise other programs, and on one snowy and dismal Philadelphia afternoon, I stepped out of Temple’s English department and noticed an ad for WSU’s MFA program — ‘Out in the Middle of Somewhere.’ That sounded pretty good to this depressed Pennsylvania girl, so I sent away for application materials. This would mean moving from Pennsylvania to Kansas, and, in my right mind, I knew there was no way I was ever going to do that.”

But she did do that — and has been on faculty at WSU ever since graduating with an MFA in creative writing in 2000. Through the years, she has proven to be fluent in balancing teaching with her own creative writing pursuits and has posted success in both chapters of her professional life. In addition to winning the Nilsen prize, she is a recipient of the Richard Yates Short Story Award, has been a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award and was first runner-up for the 2010 Wabash Prize. In 2021, the year she was named winner of the Nilsen Prize, Jones read from her then-newest short story “Love, American Style” on a Shock Talk podcast episode.

Critical praise for the seven stories that comprise The Last Innocent Year includes this review by Perry Glasser, author of American Mayhem: “Kerry Jones’s work opens our eyes anew. The subtle interplay among her characters is in stark contrast to the action those characters experience. This is life as we live it, often odd, sometimes funny, but always dramatic.”

Writing Now/Reading Now events are cosponsored by the WSU Department of English, Fairmount College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, and Watermark Books & Café.