Andrew Milward, Assistant Professor of English and the editor of the Mississippi Review at the University of Southern Mississippi, visited Literary Arts classes at MSA on January 11, offering writing prompts and two one-hour fiction workshops and then answering the students’ questions about the English Department and its writing programs at USM.
Milward, who earned his MFA at the Iowa Writers Workshop and has published two books of short fiction, told students how he set off to college planning to become a basketball player but decided to become a writer during his freshman year after a scheduling error allowed him into a senior seminar in English. He explained that one of the attributes required in writing that he had arrived with at college was the self-discipline that his work in basketball had given him.
When Milward gave the MSA students copies of the most recent Mississippi Review, he explained that this newest issue included a poem and a short story from their recent annual contest. (He noted that the fiction contest often included over 500 entries, some from foreign countries and many from professors and writers who had already published books.) This time, however, the contest had been won by a nineteen-year-old undergraduate at the University of Mississippi—Charles Ramsay McCrory.
Mississippi Review — http://www.mississippireview.com
“I smiled because, once upon a time, Charles had been a Literary Arts student at Mississippi School of the Arts”, said Dr. Jeanne Lebow, Literary Arts Instructor at MSA.