More than 1,000 writers have participated in The MFA Application Prep Workshop and gone on to attend MFA programs nationwide and internationally. The workshop is geared toward helping writers choose and even polish their application writing samples and personal statements, as well as giving writers advice on all aspects of the application process. Writers have two opportunities to share their writing sample pages (up to 6250 words each time) and receive detailed feedback on those samples and on their personal essay. A private conference with the instructor is also included.

Writers have access to our online class platform, Wetink, where the instructor posts weekly craft lessons, as well as informative and encouraging advice on the application process. The platform also includes a class discussion page and a useful line comment tool to use when critiquing your classmates’ work — a perfect way to prep for your future MFA experience.

The class is open to both fiction and nonfiction writers and will help writers through every stage of the MFA application process, all while participating in a supportive group of writers with the same goals.

Keija Parssinen graduated cum laude from Princeton University, where she studied English literature and received a certificate from the Program for the Study of Women and Gender. She earned her MFA at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote fellow, a Teaching and Writing fellow, and the student editor of the Iowa Short Fiction contest. After finishing the program, she won a Michener-Copernicus award for her debut novel, The Ruins of Us, which was published in the US (HarperCollins), UK (Faber& Faber), Ireland, Australia, South Africa, Italy (Newton Compton Editori) and around the Middle East. The novel was long-listed for the Chautauqua Prize, was chosen as Book of the Month by National Geographic Traveler, and was selected as a Best Book of the Middle East Region by Turkey’s Today’s Zaman newspaper. In Fall 2019, it was published in Arabic by the Syrian Ministry of Culture.

Her second novel, The Unraveling of Mercy Louis, won an Alex Award from the American Library Association, was chosen as Book of the Month by Emily St. John Mandel, and was selected as a Best Book of the Year by the Kansas City Star, Lone Star Literary Life, Missouri Life, Vox Magazine, and Brazos Bookstore.

Her short fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in the New York Review of Books Daily, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Review of Books, the Lonely Planet travel-writing anthologies, World Literature Today, Slate, The Arkansas International, The Brooklyn Quarterly, Slice Magazine, Salon, Five Chapters, the New Delta Review, Marie Claire, Off Assignment, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by fellowships and residencies from Hedgebrook, the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, the Vermont Studio Center, Playa Summer Lake, the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, and the Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow, where she was a My Time Fellow.

Keija was born in Saudi Arabia and lived there for twelve years before her family moved to Austin, Texas. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College and lives in Ohio with her family.