Alysha Black earned her MFA from UMSL in 2024. She’ll be spending the 2025-26 academic year at Howest University of Applied Sciences in Bruges, Belgium, as part of Fulbright’s English Teaching Assistant Program. (Photo courtesy of Alysha Black)

As soon as she started the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at the University of Missouri–St. Louis in 2021, Alysha Black found herself asking one question, time and again: “Why didn’t I do this sooner?”

Like many people, Black felt like her world had been turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic. Her career, which started with a dream position developing educational programs and exhibits at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and led her to teach elementary through college students across both St. Louis and D.C., came to a screeching halt. When her two children shifted to virtual learning amid the pandemic, Black left her job as a middle school teacher in St. Louis in order to stay home with them. A longtime writer, she found herself craving a bit more structure in her work, and the timing felt right to go back to school for her MFA.

“I fell in love with UMSL once I got there, even though it was during the pandemic,” Black said. “As pretty much anyone who’s had the opportunity to be part of UMSL in some capacity knows, it’s a St. Louis gem. I was really impressed with the people I met and the professors, who were really excited about what they do and willing to take the time to help. I just can’t say enough good things about it in that respect.”

Black found a supportive network in her peers, all of whom were excited about reading and writing, from casual hobbyists to public school teachers to younger students just out of undergrad. As an older student with a job and a family, she particularly appreciated the flexibility of the program.

“You can have a full-time job and still get top-notch instruction,” she said. “There are great creative writing programs at other institutions, but they require you to do your degree in two years nonstop, and a lot of people can’t do that, no matter how serious they are about their writing.”

Over the course of the workshop-based program, Black wrote a collection of short stories for her master’s thesis, several of which have been published in literary magazines such as “Swamp Pink,” “Cleaver,” and “The Saturday Evening Post.” She counted on her peers to bring their own knowledge and lived experiences into their critiques to help improve her work, and she felt like enrolling in the program gave her the push she needed to finally take herself seriously as a writer.

“Writing is an art,” Black said. “It takes practice, and by having the structure of a program, it forced me to take my writing more seriously. It forced me to call myself a writer and say, ‘Oh no, I’m going to do this because I’ve got an assignment due.’ At the time, I had kids, I was running a business with my husband, and it was the pandemic. To try to say, ‘I need to do this’ and to carve out that time in your life is hard. I felt very empowered by being able to do that and I was very fortunate to have the support of my husband and family all the way through the process.”

Black, who earned her MFA with an emphasis in fiction in 2024, is grateful she took the leap to go back to school, and she’s currently gearing up for another big step. Next month, she’ll be moving to Bruges, Belgium, as part of Fulbright’s English Teaching Assistant Program. Black will spend the 2025-26 academic year at Howest University of Applied Sciences, where she will teach, conduct creative writing workshops and continue to work on her novel.

As a longtime educator, Black is excited to learn more about the European educational system, particularly when it comes to multiculturalism and multilingualism, as Belgium has three official languages (Dutch, French and German).

“I’ve worked within the U.S. system for so long, and I’m very interested in educational policy, educational reform and the role of education in society,” Black said. “In Belgium, you’re right there in the middle. With Brussels being the heart of the EU, you’ve got a good window into what Europe is doing education-wise. I just really wanted that opportunity to be immersed in another culture and another language, and to be able to bring all of that experience back into whatever comes next with my education, teaching or professional career.”

Black feels fortunate to have been connected to the Fulbright opportunity through her network at UMSL and hopes to encourage other students to apply for what she knows will be a transformative experience. She’s always wanted to fully immerse herself in another culture and is excited to finally have the opportunity to make that dream come true.

“I’m 52,” Black said. “I did not do this right out of college. I had loans to pay, jobs, all kinds of things. I got my dream job right out of college when I went to the National Archives, and I never looked back. And it’s been one busy thing after another. Now, my kids are older; my youngest child will be starting college in the fall, and I have this opportunity to reinvent myself and explore.”