Recent UMSL MFA graduate Alysha Black has won a 2025-26 Fulbright Scholarship to teach literature and creative writing in Belgium.
About Alysha
Alysha Black is spending the 2025-2026 school year on a Fulbright Scholarship in Belgium where she is teaching English, literature, creative writing, and American studies at Howest University of Applied Sciences. As part of her Fulbright year, she is also learning Dutch, biking around the countryside, writing essays, and working on her novel.
While in the UMSL MFA program, Alysha won a fellowship from the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Paul Thiel Scholarship in Creative Writing. Alysha has had her short fiction accepted for publication at various on-line and in-print journals, including The Saturday Evening Post, Cleaver, and Iron Horse
Alysha's Fiction
The UMSL MFA program challenged me to think more broadly about my life and to take my writing more seriously. I valued the dedicated professors, the wide-ranging backgrounds of my fellow students, and the flexible pacing that allowed me to complete the program on my own schedule.Alysha Black on her experience in the MFA program