We're thrilled to announce that after a national search, novelist Ivy Pochoda has joined our faculty as a Visiting Assistant Professor for the 2022/23 academic year. Ms. Pochoda will begin teaching this fall. Ivy Pochoda holds a BA in Classics and Literature, with a focus on Dramatic Literature, from Harvard, where she graduated cum laude, and an MFA in fiction from Bennington College. She is the New York Times #1 bestselling author of the novels These Women, Wonder Valley, Visitation Street, and The Art of Disappearing, for which she has rightfully earned a place as one of the premier writers of crime fiction in the world, including winning or being a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (twice!), the California Book Award, the International Thriller Award, the Strand Critics Award, the Southern California Independent Booksellers Award, the Macavity Award, and others too numerous to list. Ivy is also the author of the YA/fantasy series created by the late Kobe Bryant,  Epoca: The Tree of Ecrof, an immediate New York Times bestseller, and Epoca: The River of Sand, and is an in-demand ghost writer as well. Her nonfiction and criticism appears regularly in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Wall Street Journal, among others. Her next novel, Sing Her Down, will be released this summer. 

In addition, Ivy's work has become a favorite for Hollywood, These Woman, Wonder Valley, and Visitation Street all currently or previously under option by notable producers and studios. 

"We're excited to have Ivy in the fold," says program director Tod Goldberg. "In the last five years, she's had a career's worth of acclaim and it's all richly deserved. These Women and Wonder Valley, specifically, have changed the canon of California crime fiction, putting her in a league with the giants of the form. I can't wait to see what our students write this year."

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The Low Residency MFA at UC Riverside was founded in 2008 and is based out of our Palm Desert Center. For more information, including application deadlines and funding opportunities, please visit palmdesertmfa.ucr.edu.