After graduating from Harvard, Alix Ohlin worked in book publishing, at bookstores, and in various writing and editing jobs before applying to the MFA in 1998. She chose the program, she says, "for the unbelievably generous funding, which translates into the one thing every writer wants most: time to work. The openness of the program also allowed me to discover interests I didn't even know I had before I got there, like creative nonfiction and writing about the visual arts."

After completing her MFA, Alix spent two years as writer-in-residence at Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island and now teaches creative writing at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. Her first novel, The Missing Person, will be published by Knopf in May 2005.

"I really don't know if I would have finished the first draft of my novel without going to Texas, " she says. "I was helped so much by the time the program gave me, the increased confidence (or, to be honest, slightly decreased anxiety), and Jim Magnuson telling me all the time that everything was going to be okay."

Since graduating, Alix has been writer-in-residence at Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island and now teaches creative writing at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. Her first novel, The Missing Person, was published by Knopf in May 2005. Her collection of stories Babylon was published in 2006.