Udall made several Top 10 lists
Over the last few years the faculty at Boise State in the Master of Fine Arts program has been achieving on a national level. Brady Udall's novel "The Lonely Polygamist" made several national Top 10 fiction lists in 2010, including #9 in Publisher's Weekly, #10 at Amazon.com and #1 in Entertainment Weekly. Udall was named Idaho's writer-in-residence, an honored awarded every three years by the Idaho Commission of the Arts. It is the fifth such award for a Boise State writer since 1990. Professor Anthony Doerr's book "Memory Wall" was named one of the best of 2010 as well--#9 by Amazon.com, #3 by the Boston Globe and #6 by The Oregonian, and was named a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the $20,000 Story Prize.
Janet Holmes produced a 2009 bestseller called "The MS of M Y Kin". Mitch Wieland's 2009 book "God's Dogs" was judged Idaho Book of the Year, was a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award and was honored as a "Best of the West" prize anthology. Martin Corless-Smith's new collection "English Fragments: A Brief History of the Soul" drew the praise of longtime Boston Review poetry editor Timothy Donnelly, who named Corless-Smith one of his six favorite contemporary poets.
Huffington Post recently went further, ranking Boise State among the Top 25 underrated programs in the country along with Cornell, Johns Hopkins and Purdue. The web site praised Boise State for its "enviable setting, robust support for students and extremely strong faculty in both fiction and poetry."
I salute these fine teachers of the students of Boise State.
