My MFA Third Term Reading List

All the books I read during my third term in grad school studying to get my MFA in fiction.

I’m currently in the thesis year of my fiction MFA and months away from graduating! I completed my third term back in November 2025, but I wanted to share the books I read over the last half of last year. Since I’m in my thesis year, most of the books I read pertained to my critical thesis and my creative thesis.

I’ll get into more of why these books and how they helped inform my writing, but first, BOOKS!

Nonfiction

1. The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

2. Of Solids and Surds by Samuel R. Delany

3. About Writing by Samuel R. Delany

4. A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux

5. Spring Summer Asteroid Bird by Henry Lien

6. Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War by Harriet EH Earle

7. Happily: A Personal History-With Fairy Tales by Sabrina Orah Mark

8. Trauma in Contemporary Literature: Narrative and Representation edited by Marita Nadal

9. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction by Laurie Vickroy

10. Chase Darkness With Me by Billy Jensen

Poetry

1. Heaven Looks Like Us edited by George Abraham and Noor Hindi

Fiction

1. The Jewels of Aptor by Samuel R. Delany

2. Out of the Dead City/Captives of the Flame by Samuel R. Delany

3. Babel 17 by Samuel R. Delany

4. Atlantis: Three Novels by Samuel R. Delany

5. Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

6. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany

7. Native Son by Richard Wright

8. The Outsider by Stephen King

9. The Best of World SF Volume 3 edited by Lavie Tidhar

10. Our Share of the Night by Mariana Enriquez

11. Legion by William Peter Blatty

12. The Deep by Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, and William Hutson

13. Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon

14. Revival by Stephen King

15. Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

16. The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

17. A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay

18. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

19. The Vegetarian by Han Kang

20. Bad Cree by Jessica Johns

21. Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley

22. The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

23. Dance Hall of the Dead by Tony Hillerman

How I Designed My Reading List

I’ve already written a big post on what I worked on throughout my third term, but I wanted to share how I built the above list and what considerations I had in mind as I selected each book. I design each of my term’s reading lists based on what I am writing, what I am studying, and recommendations from my teacher and cohort. For my third term,

I wrote…

A horror thriller novel that deals with trauma, belief/faith, and truth seeking. The novel is about three women returning to a small Wyoming town in order to solve a string of murders that took place when they were teens. A lot of the books that helped inform my work around my thesis were novels in the same genre or style as mine. So, books like Dance Hall of the Dead, Revival, and stuff like that. I also read some nonfiction books on trauma and structure to help me think about the broader aspects of my novel.

A short story that doesn’t really fit into any one genre and is best described as general speculative fiction. The story follows a child as they recount a moment from when they were young and met someone who could do magic and the events that conspired after that event. I actually don’t think I read anything for this story because it just came out of me one week.

Several short essays and a longer critical paper. My short essays, for the most part, have been republished on here in the annotations’ section and were all reflections on craft from an assortment of books. My critical paper was on the structure of catharsis horror and trauma storytelling.

I studied…

Trauma storytelling and writing as well as general trauma theory.

Narrative structure and writing stories with multiple POVs that don’t switch until later in the novel.

Samuel R. Delany’s work.

Character voice.

I was recommended…

Books by people in my cohort and my teacher that ranged from nonfiction books that used interesting or unique styles.

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Interested in more reading lists? Check out theses posts and find your next read: