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Yale Creative Writing by Yale Students & Alumni: Home

Recommend a Book

We welcome your recommendations of published creative writing by Yale students and alumni! We will also consider purchasing these titles for the Bass Library general collection.

Recommend fiction and other creative writing by Yale students and alumni.

About The Collection

Bass Library celebrates creative writing by current Yale students and alumni. The books on this guide span a wide range of topics, genres, and class years.

While we do our best to collect creative writing by Yale student authors, we cannot collect everything. The titles shown here are a sampling, collected via librarian recommendations, publications on the Yale Alumni website, and personal knowledge of students and their work.

If you would like to see an author or title added to our collection, please fill out the recommendation form above.

Highlights

Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi (Yale '09)

Rooted in foundational loss and the hope that can live in anger, Riot Baby is both a global dystopian narrative and an intimate family story with quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience.

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The Burning God by R. F. Kuang (Yale GSAS '27)

R. F. Kuang’s acclaimed, award-winning epic fantasy that combines the history of twentieth-century China with a gripping world of gods and monsters, to devastating, enthralling effect.

The Final Voicemails by Max Ritvo (Yale '13)

Diagnosed with terminal cancer at sixteen, Ritvo spent the next decade of his life pursuing poetry with frenetic energy, culminating in the publication of Four Reincarnations. As with his debut, The Final Voicemails brushes up against the pain, fear, and isolation that accompany a long illness, but with all the creative force of an artist in full command of his craft and the teeming affection of a human utterly in love with the world.

Town Crier by Sarah Matthes (Yale '13)

The poems in Town Crier wryly express the pervasive nature of loss, how it suffuses all aspects of a life: memories, hopes, love, sex, lunch. The death of the author's dear friend, the late poet Max Ritvo, becomes the cornerstone of the book, a foundational pain along which the poems are aligned. 

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Everything is Fine: A Memoir by Vince Granata (Yale '09)

Grief, mental illness, and the bonds of family are movingly explored in this extraordinary memoir 'suffused with emotional depth and intellectual inquiry' (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises) as a writer delves into the tragedy of his mother’s violent death at the hands of his brother who struggled with schizophrenia.

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(S)kinfolk: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah by Tochi Onyebuchi (Yale '09)

Provoked by the fraught relationship between the African continent and American culture in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, acclaimed Nigerian-American novelist Tochi Onyebuchi takes an emotional and intellectual journey through his own education in Blackness--his first loves, his introduction to politics, and his eventual commitment to the struggle.

The Guest Book by Sarah Blake (Yale '83)

An ambitious novel that weaves the American past with its present, Sarah Blake's The Guest Book looks at the racism and power that has been systemically embedded in the U.S. for generations.

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For the Winner by Emily Hauser (Yale '17)

Some three thousand years ago, the warriors of Greece journeyed to the ends of the earth in the quest for the Golden Fleece. One woman fought alongside them. When the king of Pagasae left his infant daughter on the slopes of a mountain to die, he believed he would never see her again. But Atalanta, against the will of the gods and the dictates of the Fates, survived--and went on to bring to life one of the greatest legends of all of ancient Greece...