UVA’s Creative Writing Program offers a top MFA, plus undergraduate concentrations in poetry and prose and a range of elective courses.
The Virginia Center for the Book is hosting the 2026 Virginia Festival of the Book. Programming begins this Thursday with preview events, and will continue from this Friday, March 20th, through this Sunday, March 22nd. For Arts This Week, we spoke with the director of the Center, Kalela Williams.
For Women’s History Month this year, librarians at UVA recommend a variety of books written by women, ranging from science fiction to memoir to Greek myths. “Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia Butler” by Susana M. Morris (Amistad, 2025) In tracing the interior world of science fiction legend Octavia E. Butler through her writing, journals, archives, and interviews, Susana M. Morris generates a fascinating character study as well as a gripping story of struggle and persistence set against late-20th-century U.S. cultural history.
Since 2008, the Library of Congress has hosted a “Conversations with African Poets and Writers Series,” bringing award-winning writers such as Chimamanda Adichie or Abdulrazak Gurnah from across the continent and diaspora to share their work. The latest guest is University of Virginia religious studies professor Oludamini Ogunnaike. A Nigerian American academic and poet, he published his poetry collection, “The Book of Clouds,” in 2024.
