University of Texas Names Bret Johnston as Director of Michener Center for Writers

 

Best-selling fiction writer Bret Anthony Johnston was announced as the director of the Michener Center for Writers. Johnston was an 11-year director of creative writing at Harvard University and best known for his works “Remember Me Like This” and “Corpus Christi: Stories.” He graduated from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

“The Michener Center has this long tradition of success, so it’s attracting the absolute best writers in the world,” Johnston said. “I think this is the one job in the world that could have pulled me away [from Harvard].”

Students at the Michener Center can select two concentrations from four genres of writing: poetry, fiction, screenwriting and playwriting.

“Most MFA programs will bring in a student writer and just ask him or her to focus on one genre,” Johnston said. “What the Michener Center tries to do, and the idea on which it was founded, is writers have the capacity to write in different genres and make contributions to those genres in meaningful ways. We don’t put our writers in as solid a box as most other programs do.”

Established in 1993, the Michener Center for Writers got its name from the late James A. Michener, the center’s benefactor and source of the Michener Fellowship, which waives all tuition and fees and includes a $27,500 stipend per academic year for all admitted students. Historically, students have hailed from the U.S. as well as from Australia, India, New Zealand, Nigeria, England and Canada.

The MFA program at Michener was ranked in the top 10 graduate programs in creative writing by The Atlantic,  and ranked 15 on the College Choice list of 25 Best MFA Degrees for 2017.