Master of Fine Arts

Angie O'Gorman's articles and essays have appeared in America Magazine, Commonweal, National Catholic Reporter, and Natural Bridge. She compiled and edited a collection of essays entitled,  The Universe Bends Toward Justice: A Reader on Christian Nonviolence in the United States.  Her first novel, The Book of Sins, was published in 2010.  Susan Neville, author of Sailing the Inland Sea: On Writing, Literature, and Land, said of O'Gorman's novel, "She has imagined a future in which capitalism has bought out Christianity....Like all good dystopian novels, The Book of Sins asks us to consider what will happen if present trends continue, and her fully-realized characters cause us to question our own complicity in those trends."  Originally from New York, O'Gorman has lived in Guatemala, Honduras, and the West Bank where she worked with unarmed peacekeeping teams. She now lives in St. Louis, Missouri and works at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri. She is currently writing a series of linked stories and can be reached at thebookofsins.wordpress.com or ogorman4400@yahoo.com.

"The only way someone can improve his or her tennis skills is to compete with more talented tennis players. As a student at Covenant College and Washington University--St. Louis, I sometimes felt like I was one of the best writers in each one my creative writing courses. This was not because I was more talented than they were but because I worked harder than most of my classmates. The majority of them did not desire to become professional writers. However when I enrolled in UMSL's MFA program, I quickly realized that all of my new classmates were far more gifted than I was, and I needed their wisdom to sharpen my skills and to lift my writing to the privileged status of professional, published poetry and prose. Every semester I have been with the program my writing has improved a thousand fold.

I sometimes write Native American Literature, and I worried that my work might be denounced by my professors for not falling in line with the standards of Western Literature. Instead, I discovered that both my professors and my classmates encouraged me to experiment with various writing styles. It is a comforting thought to know that everyone in the MFA program will help me find my voice." - Mark Shaw

Mark Shaw is two-thirds of the way through the program but has taken time off to live on his American Indian reservation in Bowler, Wisconsin. As an enrolled member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Nation, he currently works for the Mohican News as a full-time staff reporter, photographer, and editor. 

Matthew Freeman woke up to find himself a poet while a still lovelorn teenager in Dogtown, St. Louis. After an irregular journey he found himself back at St. Louis University, where he was twice given the Montesi Award for his poems. His fourth collection, The Boulevard of Broken Discourse, was recently published by Coffeetown Press. Matt teaches at Adapt, Missouri, and his proud to be in the MFA program at UMSL.

Jason Vasser began writing poetry while attending Visual Performing Arts Middle school at Marquette. While there he performed Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s poem A Negro Love Song, for their Black History program. Preparing for his performance, Jason learned to read and write poetry and the art form became his primary source of self-expression. He began his academic career by serving with AmeriCorps East St. Louis as a mentor to students at Wyvetta Hoover Young Middle School, located in Washington Park Illinois. Upon the completion of two years of service, he earned an education award which he used to enroll at the University of Missouri St. Louis and major in Anthropology. While at UMSL, Jason taught as a student teacher in the Center for Human Origin and Cultural Diversity where the subject matter focused on how concepts of race are societal constructions. Jason graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and a certificate in African Diaspora studies in 2012 and was accepted into the Master of Fine Arts program where he will continue to study poetry. 

Marisol Ramirez came to her sense in the fall of 2011 and found the courage to call herself a poet. Earlier, she had tentatively been the future lawyer, the future teacher, the future marketing manager—never the writer. She took her first-ever workshop senior year of undergrad simply for pleasure. The problem with dabbling in passionate hobbies is that they might become careers.  In May 2012, She graduated from the University of Arizona with a BA in English and a Marketing Minor, headed for UMSL after a whirlwind of spontaneous applications to MFA programs across the nation. The last time she had taken poetry this seriously was in high school, where she had won the poetry contest three consecutive years and been published in the campus literary magazine. Now she has moved across country, away from her Arizona border town, taco stands, open range, rattlesnakes, chorizo con huevos, purple mountain ranges, and flaming sunsets to do what she loves—write.

Kent Walker is a graduate of Cape Girardeau’s Southeast Missouri State University. He taught Adult Education and English as a Second Language for two years. He authored, compiled, and self-published a flash fiction compilation titled, Raw Clips. He taught a creative writing class titled Flash Fiction "How Less is More" at Southeast Missouri State University. He has been known to write fiction that is drawn from his two years of experience in Iraq, and he also enjoys writing fiction with themes of magic surrealism.