A Journey Through Identity, Creativity, & Culture

Posted October 26, 2023January 24, 2025 in Alumni, Creative Writing, Stories

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Growing up in the New Jersey suburbs, surrounded by music and shifting perceptions of identity, shaped the vivid storytelling of Martin Wiley, a Creative Writing MFA graduate. Now the Coordinator of the Writing Center at Arcadia University, Wiley channels these experiences into his latest book, When Did We Stop Being Cute?. This “novel in poetic form” blends rhythm, nostalgia, and raw honesty to explore race, culture, and the complexities of growing up. Described as “bold and brazen, rhythmic, musical, and at times nostalgic,” the book is available through Cavankerry Press, on Amazon, and at local bookstores.

Discovering My Passion: From Artist to Author

I received my MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers-Camden where I was a Rutgers University Fellow. I started college as an artist at Mason Gross School of the Arts at the Rutgers New Brunswick campus but found that I did not actually want to be an artist. After leaving college, I worked as an activist and community organizer, before receiving my BA from Goddard College in Vermont. I went on to get my MFA from Rutgers-Camden.

I chose Rutgers-Camden for my MFA because it was the only school I saw that required students to take classes outside of their main genre; poets had to take fiction, fiction writers took nonfiction, etc. I have always enjoyed writing different things in different ways, seeing a memoir piece through a poetic lens, or attempting to bring a playwright’s use of dialogue into a short story.

To be in that space and rub shoulders with some legendary writers… changed me forever as a writer and as a person, and I owe that to Rutgers-Camden
Martin Wiley

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From Internships to Independent Studies

When I was at Rutgers-Camden, the MFA program did not have a call on playwriting. Since I wanted to work on writing plays, I was able to connect with the head of the theatre department and develop an independent study, and I will always be grateful for how easy the school made that process.

One thing that stood out was my internship at The New Yorker magazine, which was arranged by the school. To be in that space and rub shoulders with some legendary writers—meeting Ishmael Reed in the hallway and asking him about his novel “Mumbo Jumbo,” being taken out to lunch by John Lahr to talk about theatre, etc.—changed me forever as a writer and as a person, and I owe that to Rutgers-Camden.

The Story Behind “When Did We Stop Being Cute?”

My new book, “When Did We Stop Being Cute?”, is a “novel in poetic form,” meaning that it is a poetry collection where each poem is part of a larger story. It is based on my experiences growing up as a mixed-race kid in the New Jersey suburbs in the ’80s and is heavily influenced by the music of the time; each poem’s title is a lyric taken from a song I listened to then. Some of these songs are classics, while others are definitely of their time.

More than anything, the book provides a look at what it’s like trying to become a man in a place where Black men are viewed as dangerous. There, I had to grapple with the sudden shift from being seen as a cute kid to being perceived as a threat.