Mississippi Review is proud to be a part of a vital creative and academic community. The Center for Writers is the creative writing program in the Department of English at The University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, 90 miles north of New Orleans. Between 35 and 40 students work toward M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English with emphases in fiction or poetry, and each student completes a creative thesis or dissertation to fulfill requirements for the degree.  The tone of the program is serious but informal, with workshops offered in fiction, non-fiction, prose, and poetry by the program's distinguished faculty.  Additional courses in craft, literary forms, and teaching creative writing are also offered regularly, and students participate in a regular reading series and in the publication of a student journal, Product as well as Mississippi Review.

Current Creative Writing faculty include fiction writers Justin Taylor and Anne Sanow, poets Adam Clay and Angela Ball, and critic Monika Gehlawat. The literature faculty is staffed by dynamic young scholars, many hired in the past few years. The students  come from all over the country and universities near and far, including Johns Hopkins, Hollins, Texas-Austin, UMass, University of Pennsylvania, University of Miami, Ole Miss, University of Sydney, Syracuse, Stanford, and others.

Recent guests in our Visiting Writers' Series have been Ben Lerner, Kimiko Hahn, Antonya Nelson, Lauren Groff, Adam Clay, Michael Robbins, and Ada Limón.  Past visitors have included, Kevin Young, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Amy Hempel, Lucie Brock-Broido, Rick Moody, Padgett Powell, Mary Gaitskill, Anne Beattie, James Tate, Dara Wier, among others.

Students and graduates have won the AWP Intro Award, Whiting Award, the Henfield Prize, the Flannery O'Connor Award and National Endowment fellowships and published books with Counterpoint, William Morrow, St. Martins, Ticknor and Fields, Georgia, Red Hen, Faber & Faber, Atlantic Monthly Press, Kore, Prentice Hall, Sarabande, and a number of other first rank presses.