Alumni Interview Series: Molly Antopol

January 27, 2013

After finishing her B.A. at UCSC in 1991, Molly Antopol earned her MFA at Columbia University.  She is a recent Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford, where she works as a lecturer.  Her work has appeared in One Story, American Short Fiction, The Mississippi Review Prize Stories, Nimrod’s Prize Stories, NPR’s This America Life, The Rumpus, and Croatia’s magazine Zarez, and recently, her short story "The Quietest Man" was recognized in The Best American Short Stories of 2011.  She currently lives in San Francisco, where she is working on a collection of short stories and a novel.  Antopol talked to us about her experience at UCSC and offered advice to current students.

What did you enjoy most about your time at the Creative Writing program? 

I honestly loved everything about it -- I found a few really wonderful readers, I loved having the time to write, and most of all I feel really grateful to have worked with Micah Perks. I must have taken five or six workshops with Micah, and I owe so much to her -- she was so supportive, generous, patient, rigorous and involved. She genuinely seemed to care about all of her students and their fiction -- I graduated thirteen years ago and I still see her as a model, both as a writer and a teacher.

Do you have any advice for current UCSC creative writing students? 

Stay in touch after graduation with the people in workshop who were good readers for you -- I continued to trade work with friends from UCSC for years, and it was unbelievably helpful.