Senior graduate Faculty
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Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published to major acclaim in 1993. It has been translated into thirty-four languages and made into a feature film. In 2003, Eugenides received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). Middlesex also won the WELT-Literaturpreis of Germany and the Great Lakes Book Award, and it was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, France’s Prix Medici, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His third novel, The Marriage Plot (FSG, 2011), was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and was named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The New Republic, Publisher's Weekly, and numerous other publications. His latest book, the story collection Fresh Complaint (FSG, 2017), was a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and was named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus, The Guardian, NPR, and others. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Best American Short Stories, The Gettysburg Review, and Granta’s “Best of Young American Novelists.” Eugenides is the recipient of many awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Henry D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. He taught creative writing at Princeton for many years before joining the NYU Creative Writing Program as a tenured full professor and the Lewis and Loretta Glucksman Professor in American Letters. Eugenides has been inducted into The American Academy of Arts and Letters and The American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Terrance Hayes is a 2014 MacArthur Fellow. He was born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1971, and educated at Coker College where he studied painting and English and was an Academic All-American on the men’s basketball team. After receiving his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997, he taught in southern Japan, Columbus, Ohio, and New Orleans, Louisiana. Hayes taught at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh before becoming a Professor of English at New York University. Hayes served as the 2017-2018 poetry editor for New York Times Magazine. He was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2014 (Scribner, 2014), the preeminent annual anthology of contemporary American poetry. His poems have appeared in ten editions of the series.
His first book, Muscular Music, won a Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His second book, Hip Logic (Penguin 2002), was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for both the Los Angeles Time Book Award and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Wind In a Box (Penguin 2006), a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award finalist, was named one of the best books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly. How to Be Drawn received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry. Lighthead, was winner of the 2010 National Book Award. His sixth poetry collection, American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018), was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the TS Eliot Prize, the Brooklyn Public Library’s Literary Prize for Fiction & Poetry, the LA Times Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. His essay collection, To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism.
Yusef Komunyakaa's numerous books of poems include Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999; Talking Dirty to the Gods; Thieves of Paradise, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Magic City; Dien Cai Dau, which won the Dark Room Poetry Prize; I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award; Copacetic; The Chameleon Couch, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Griffin Poetry Prize; and most recently, The Emperor of Water Clocks. Komunyakaa's prose is collected in Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews & Commentaries and in Condition Red: Essays, Interviews & Commentaries. He also co-edited The Jazz Poetry Anthology. His performance works have been performed nationally and internationally and include Gilgamesh: A Verse Play, Testimony, Wakonda's Dream, and Saturnalia, among others. His honors include the William Faulkner Prize from the Universite Rennes, the Thomas Forcade Award, the Hanes Poetry Prize, fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Louisiana Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wallace Stevens Award. In 1999, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, where he served for five years. From 2016-2018, he served as the New York State Poet Laureate. Yusef Komunyakaa is a senior faculty member in the NYU Creative Writing Program.
Deborah Landau (Director) is the author of four collections of poetry: Soft Targets (winner of the 2019 Believer Book Award), The Uses of the Body and The Last Usable Hour, all Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon Press, and Orchidelirium, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her other awards include a Jacob K Javits Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Uses of the Body was featured on NPR's All Things Considered, and included on "Best of 2015" lists by The New Yorker, Vogue, BuzzFeed, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. A Spanish edition was published by Valparaiso Edicíones in 2017. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, and The Best American Poetry, and included in anthologies such as Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, Not for Mothers Only, The Best American Erotic Poems, and Women's Work: Modern Poets Writing in English. Landau was educated at Stanford University, Columbia University, and Brown University, where she received a Ph.D. in English and American Literature. She is a professor and director of the Creative Writing Program at New York University.
Sharon Olds is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU. Her first book of poetry, Satan Says, received the San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her second book, The Dead and the Living, was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of The Gold Cell; The Father; The Wellspring; Blood, Tin, Straw; The Unswept Room; Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980- 2002; One Secret Thing; Odes; and most recently, Arias, which was a finalist for the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2012, her collection Stag's Leap was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. She received a Lila Wallace-Readers' Digest Grant in 1993, part of which was designated for the NYU workshop program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island. In 1997, she received the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award. From 1998-2000 she was the New York State Poet Laureate. Professor Olds holds the Erich Maria Remarque Professorship at NYU.
Claudia Rankine is a recipient of the 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, and the author of six collections including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March of 2020 at The Shed, NYC, and The White Card, and the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. She also co-produces a video series, “The Situation,” alongside John Lucas, and is the founder of the Open Letter Project: Race and the Creative Imagination. In 2016, she co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). In addition to the MacArthur, her numerous awards and honors include the Forward Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. Her most recent book is Just Us: An American Conversation (Graywolf, 2020). A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Claudia Rankine will join the NYU Creative Writing Program as a tenured Professor in Fall 2021.
Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975. Her first novel, White Teeth, was the winner of The Whitbread First Novel Award, The Guardian First Book Award, The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and The Commonwealth Writers' First Book Award. Her second novel, The Autograph Man, won The Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize. Zadie Smith's third novel, On Beauty, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won The Commonwealth Writers' Best Book Award (Eurasia Section) and the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her most recent novel, Swing Time, was published in 2016. She is the editor of an anthology of short stories entitled The Book Of Other People and has published several collections of short stories including Martha and Hanwell (2005), and Grand Union (2019), as well as several collections of essays including Changing My Mind (2009), Feel Free: Essays (2018), and the most recent Intimations: Six Essays (2020). She was formerly the New Books columnist for Harper's Magazine. Zadie Smith is a graduate of Cambridge University and has taught at Harvard and Columbia universities. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She became a tenured professor of fiction at NYU in 2010 and lives between New York City and London.
Core Graduate Faculty
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Catherine Barnett is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and a Pushcart Prize. Her most recent collection, Human Hours, was published in 2018 by Graywolf Press and received the Believer Book Award in Poetry. She is also the author of Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Alice James Books, 2004), winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award, and The Game of Boxes (Graywolf Press, 2012), which received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets for an outstanding second book. Barnett has taught at Barnard, Princeton, and Hunter, and is currently a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU.
Nathan Englander's most recent novel is kaddish.com. He is also the author of the Dinner at the Center of the Earth, the collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, as well as the internationally bestselling story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, and the novel The Ministry of Special Cases (all published by Knopf/Vintage). He was the 2012 recipient of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for What We Talk About. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Vogue, and Esquire, among other places. His work has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and numerous editions of The Best American Short Stories, including 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories. Translated into twenty-two languages, Englander was selected as one of “20 Writers for the 21st Century” by The New Yorker, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He’s been a fellow at the Dorothy & Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and at The American Academy of Berlin. In 2012 Englander's translation of the New American Haggadah (edited by Jonathan Safran Foer) was published by Little Brown. He also co-translated Etgar Keret's Suddenly A Knock at the Door and Fly Already, published by FSG. His play The Twenty-Seventh Man premiered at the Public Theater in 2012, and his new play, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, winner of a 2019 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, and the 2020 Blanche and Irving Laurie Theatre Visions Fund Prize, was commissioned by Lincoln Center Theater and was supposed to be running at The Old Globe in San Diego right now—sigh. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University and lives with his family in Toronto.
Nathan Englander's most recent novel is kaddish.com. He is also the author of the Dinner at the Center of the Earth, the collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, as well as the internationally bestselling story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, and the novel The Ministry of Special Cases (all published by Knopf/Vintage). He was the 2012 recipient of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for What We Talk About. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Vogue, and Esquire, among other places. His work has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and numerous editions of The Best American Short Stories, including 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories. Translated into twenty-two languages, Englander was selected as one of “20 Writers for the 21st Century” by The New Yorker, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He’s been a fellow at the Dorothy & Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and at The American Academy of Berlin. In 2012 Englander's translation of the New American Haggadah (edited by Jonathan Safran Foer) was published by Little Brown. He also co-translated Etgar Keret's Suddenly A Knock at the Door and Fly Already, published by FSG. His play The Twenty-Seventh Man premiered at the Public Theater in 2012, and his new play, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, winner of a 2019 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, and the 2020 Blanche and Irving Laurie Theatre Visions Fund Prize, was commissioned by Lincoln Center Theater and was supposed to be running at The Old Globe in San Diego right now—sigh. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University and lives with his family in Toronto.
Nathan Englander's most recent novel is kaddish.com. He is also the author of the Dinner at the Center of the Earth, the collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, as well as the internationally bestselling story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, and the novel The Ministry of Special Cases (all published by Knopf/Vintage). He was the 2012 recipient of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for What We Talk About. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Vogue, and Esquire, among other places. His work has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and numerous editions of The Best American Short Stories, including 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories. Translated into twenty-two languages, Englander was selected as one of “20 Writers for the 21st Century” by The New Yorker, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He’s been a fellow at the Dorothy & Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and at The American Academy of Berlin. In 2012 Englander's translation of the New American Haggadah (edited by Jonathan Safran Foer) was published by Little Brown. He also co-translated Etgar Keret's Suddenly A Knock at the Door and Fly Already, published by FSG. His play The Twenty-Seventh Man premiered at the Public Theater in 2012, and his new play, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, winner of a 2019 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, and the 2020 Blanche and Irving Laurie Theatre Visions Fund Prize, was commissioned by Lincoln Center Theater and was supposed to be running at The Old Globe in San Diego right now—sigh. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University and lives with his family in Toronto.
Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of the bestselling novel Everything Is Illuminated, named Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times and the winner of numerous awards, including the Guardian First Book Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Prize. His other novels include Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and, most recently, Here I Am. He is also the author of the nonfiction books, Eating Animals, and We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast (2019). Foer was one of Rolling Stone's "People of the Year" and Esquire's "Best and Brightest,” and was included in The New Yorker magazine's "20 Under 40" list of writers. He lives in Brooklyn.
Edward Hirsch has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, the Prix de Rome, and an Academy of Arts and Letters Award. In 2008, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. His first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981), received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (1986), won the National Book Critics Circles Award. Since then, he has published several additional books of poems, including The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994), On Love (1998), Lay Back the Darkness (2003), Special Orders (2008), The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), Gabriel: A Poem (2014), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and most recently, Stranger by Night (2020).
Hirsch is also the author of five prose books, including A Poet’s Glossary (2014), the result of decades of passionate study, Poet’s Choice (2006), which consists of his popular columns from the Washington Post Book World, and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller. He is the editor of Theodore Roethke’s Selected Poems (2005) and co-editor of The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology (2008). He also edits the series “The Writer’s World” (Trinity University Press).
Edward Hirsch taught for six years in the English Department at Wayne State University and seventeen years in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. He is now president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Katie Kitamura is the author of Gone To The Forest and The Longshot, both finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. Her third novel, A Separation, was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Premio von Rezzori. It was named a Best Book of the Year by over a dozen publications, translated into sixteen languages, and is being adapted for film. Her new novel, Intimacies, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in 2021.
A recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and Santa Maddalena, Katie has written for publications including The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, BOMB, Triple Canopy, and Frieze. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.
Hari Kunzru is a Clinical Professor in the Creative Writing Program. He holds a BA in English Language and Literature from Oxford University and an MA in Philosophy and Literature from Warwick University. He is the author of five novels, most recently White Tears, a finalist for the PEN Jean Stein Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, One Book New York, the Prix du Livre Inter étranger, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His latest novel Red Pill was published in 2020 by Knopf. He is also the author of The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions, Gods Without Men and a short story collection, Noise. His novella Memory Palace was presented as an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2013. His work has been translated into over twenty languages. His short stories and essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Guardian, New York Review of Books, Granta, Bookforum, October and Frieze. He has written screenplays, radio drama, and experimental work using field recordings and voice-to-text software. He has taught at Hunter College and Columbia University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. He has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He is a past deputy president of English PEN, a judge for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize and has been a frequent presenter, interviewer and guest on television and radio.
Nick Laird was born in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland in 1975 and educated at Cookstown High School and Cambridge University. He is the author of the novels Modern Gods, Utterly Monkey, Glover's Mistake, and Feel Free, and three books of poems, Go Giants, To a Fault and On Purpose. The recipient of many prizes for his poetry and fiction, including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Award, the Betty Trask Prize, a Somerset Maugham award, and the Geoffrey Faber Prize, he has lived in London, Warsaw, and Rome. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has published numerous essays and memoirs, novellas, plays, children's and young adult fiction, and dozens of works of short fiction, poetry, and fiction, including We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde (a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize), as well as the New York Times bestsellers The Falls (winner of the 2005 Prix Femina Etranger) and The Gravedigger’s Daughter, A Book of American Martyrs, and the most recent, Hazards of Time Travel, My Life as a Rat, and Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. Her most recent works, published with HarperCollins, include the poetry collection American Melancholy (2021) and a collection of stories The (Other) You (2021). Her next novel Breathe will be published in August 2021. In 2013, she received the Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection for Black Dahlia and White Swan. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. She is the recipient of many distinguished awards including the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award, and The Norman Mailer Prize for Lifetime Achievement.
Matthew Rohrer is the author of The Sky Contains the Plans (Wave Books, 2020), The Others (Wave Books, 2017), which was the winner of the 2017 Believer Book Award, Surrounded by Friends (Wave Books, 2015), Destroyer and Preserver (Wave Books, 2011), A Plate of Chicken (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), Rise Up (Wave Books, 2007) and A Green Light (Verse Press, 2004), which was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Satellite (Verse Press, 2001), and co-author, with Joshua Beckman, of Nice Hat. Thanks. (Verse Press, 2002), and the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. With Joshua Beckman and Anthony McCann he wrote the secret book Gentle Reader! It is not for sale. Octopus Books published his action/adventure chapbook-length poem They All Seemed Asleep in 2008. His first book, A Hummock in the Malookas was selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Oliver in 1994.
His poems have been widely anthologized and have appeared in many journals. He's received the Hopwood Award for poetry and a Pushcart prize, and was selected as a National Poetry Series winner, and was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Recently he has participated in residencies/ performances at the Museum of Modern Art (New York City) and the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle).
Matthew Rohrer was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was raised in Oklahoma, and attended universities in Ann Arbor, Dublin, and Iowa City. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at NYU and lives in Brooklyn.
Darin Strauss is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Chang and Eng, The Real McCoy, More Than it Hurts You, the NBCC-winning memoir, Half a Life, the comic-book series, Olivia Twist, and most recently the acclaimed novel, The Queen of Tuesday: A Lucille Ball Story (Random House, 2020). A recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Library Association Award, and numerous other prizes, Strauss has written screenplays for Disney, Gary Oldman, and Julie Taymor. His work has been translated into fourteen languages and published in nineteen countries, and he is a Clinical Professor at the NYU Creative Writing Program.
Ocean Vuong is the author of The New York Times bestselling novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, out from Penguin Press (2019) and forthcoming in 30 languages. A recipient of a 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize. Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Granta, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker, Ocean was also named by BuzzFeed Books as one of “32 Essential Asian American Writers” and has been profiled on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” PBS NewsHour, Teen Vogue, Interview, Poets & Writers, and The New Yorker. Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, he was educated at nearby Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to study International Marketing. Without completing his first term, he dropped out of Business school and enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a BA in Nineteenth Century American Literature. He subsequently received his MFA in Poetry from NYU.
2021-2022 Visiting Graduate Faculty
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Kiran Desai is the author of the novels Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, winner of the Betty Trask Award, and The Inheritance of Loss, for which she received the 2016 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She was awarded a 2013 Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin.
Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poems, Love and Other Poems, Together and by Ourselves, and Begging for It. His poems have been published in The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Paris Review, and Poetry. In addition to NYU, he has taught writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, and Barnard College. Previously, he was the Senior Content Editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited the popular series Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine. With Dorothea Lasky he is the co-author of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac. He lives in New York.
Uzodinma Iweala is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, and medical doctor. He is the CEO of The Africa Center in New York, promoting a new narrative about Africa and its diaspora through a focus on culture, policy and business. Uzodinma is the Co-Founder of Ventures Africa Magazine, a publication that covers business, policy, culture and innovation spaces in Africa. He is a member of the Presidents Youth Advisory Group (PYAG) for Jobs for Youth Africa (JfYA) at the African Development Bank (AfDB). He is also on the Board of the NewNow, a subsidiary of the Virgin Group’s charitable arm, Virgin Unite. He has written three books: Beasts of No Nation (2005), a novel also adapted into a major motion picture; Our Kind of People (2012), a non-fiction account of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria; and Speak No Evil (2018), a novel about Washington, D.C.
David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's magazine, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Magazine Writing, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and many other publications. He contributes as an essayist to NPR’s All Things Considered, and is the recipient of a Lambert Fellowship, a Media Award from GLAAD, and a National Magazine Award. He's the author of the novel The Art Fair, a collection of stories, Three Thousand Dollars, the best-selling nonfiction book, Absolutely American, which was a Time magazine Best Book of the Year, and most recently Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace, which was a New York Times bestseller and an NPR Best Book of the Year.
Leigh Newman's memoir about Alaska, Still Points North (Dial, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle’s John Leonard prize. Her short stories have appeared in the Paris Review, Harper’s, One Story, Tin House, and McSweeney’s. She is the winner of the Paris Reviews’s 2020 Terry Southern Prize for “humor, wit, and sprezzatura” and her story “Howl Palace” was selected for 2019 Best American Short Stories, as well as won the 2020 Pushcart prize and the Paris Review’s ASME-winning award for fiction. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, Vogue, O The Oprah Magazine, and other magazines. She has taught creative writing at Pratt, Sarah Lawrence, and New York University and has received fellowships from Yaddo, Breadloaf, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the former books editor of Oprah.com, the co-founder of Black Balloon/Catapult Publishing, and is now the senior editor-at-large at Catapult. Soon to come: the story collection Nobody Gets out Alive (2022) and an untitled novel (2023) from Scribner.
Meghan O'Rourke is the author of the memoir The Long Goodbye (Riverhead, 2011) as well as the poetry collections Once (2011) and Halflife (2007), which was a finalist for both the Patterson Poetry Prize and Britain's Forward First Book Prize. Her most recent collection, Sun in Days, appeared in September 2017. She was awarded a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Radcliffe Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and a Front Page Award for her cultural criticism, among other prizes. She is the poetry editor of T Magazine and formerly an editor at The New Yorker, Slate, and The Paris Review. Her essays and poems have appeared inThe New Yorker, Poetry, Atlantic Monthly, The Kenyon Review, Best American Poetry, and more. A graduate of Yale University, she teaches at Princeton and the NYU Creative Writing Program. She is the editor of The Yale Review and is currently working on a book about chronic illness.
Julie Orringer is the author of two award-winning books: The Invisible Bridge, a New York Times bestselling novel, and How to Breathe Underwater, a collection of stories; her new novel, The Flight Portfolio, tells the story of Varian Fry, the New York journalist who went to Marseille in 1940 to save writers and artists blacklisted by the Gestapo. All her work has been published by Alfred A. Knopf, and her books have been translated into twenty languages. Her stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Granta Book of the American Short Story and The Scribner Anthology of American Short Fiction. She is the winner of the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children, and is at work on a novel set in New Orleans.
Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She received an MFA from New York University and an MLA in Africana studies from the University of South Florida. Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast (Ecco Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book and Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards. Her chapbook, The Animal After Whom Other Animals are Named (Northwestern University Press, 2016), was the winner of the 2016 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize. In 2019, Sealey was named a 2019-2020 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. She has received fellowships and awards from CantoMundo, the Cave Canem Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, and the Elizabeth George Foundation, among others.
Parul Sehgal is a book critic at The New York Times. She was previously a columnist and senior editor at The New York Times Book Review. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, Bookforum, The New Yorker, Tin House, and The Literary Review, among other publications, and she was awarded the Nona Balakian Award from the National Book Critics Circle for her criticism.
Hannah Tinti's short story collection, Animal Crackers, has sold in sixteen countries and was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway award. Her best-selling novel, The Good Thief, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, recipient of the American Library Association's Alex Award, and winner of the The Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize. Her new novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, is a national bestseller and has been optioned for television by director Matt Reeves/6th & Idaho and producer Michael Costigan/Cota Films. Tinti is also the co-founder and executive editor of One Story magazine, which won the AWP Small Press Publisher Award, CLMP’s Firecracker Award, and the PEN/Magid Award for Excellence in Editing.
Phillip B. Williams is from Chicago, IL. He is the author of the books Mutiny (Penguin, 2021) and Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books, 2016). Phillip has received a 2017 Whiting Award, the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a 2017 Lambda Literary Award, and a nomination for an NAACP Image Award. Recent fellowships include a 2021 Literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and Radcliffe Research Institute fellowship from Harvard University. He currently teaches at Bennington College and is a member of the founding faculty for the Randolph College low-residency MFA program in creative writing.
Undergraduate Faculty
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Mohammed Naseehu Ali, a native of Ghana, is a writer and musician. He is the author of The Prophet of Zongo Street, a short story collection. Ali’s fiction and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Mississippi Review, Bomb, A Gathering of Tribes, and Essence. A graduate of Bennington College, he lives in Brooklyn.
Hala Alyan is an award-winning Palestinian American poet, novelist and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in numerous journals including The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner and Colorado Review. Her books include the novels Salt Houses (2017) and the forthcoming The Arsonists' City (Houfton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021), as well as four collections of poetry: Atrium, Four Cities, Hijira, and The Twenty-Ninth Year (2019). She resides in Brooklyn with her husband.
Catherine Barnett is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and a Pushcart Prize. Her most recent collection, Human Hours, was published in 2018 by Graywolf Press and received the Believer Book Award in Poetry. She is also the author of Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Alice James Books, 2004), winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award, and The Game of Boxes (Graywolf Press, 2012), which received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets for an outstanding second book. Barnett has taught at Barnard, Princeton, and Hunter, and is currently a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU.
Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of the novels Parakeet (NY Times Editors' Choice) and 2 a.m. at The Cat's Pajamas (NPR Best Books 2014), and the story collection Safe as Houses (Iowa Short Fiction Award). Her work has received The O. Henry Prize and The Pushcart Prize, and in 2017 she was the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork, Ireland. She teaches in the MFA programs of NYU, The New School, and Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Her fourth book, the novel Beautyland, is forthcoming from FSG in 2022. More info: www.mariehelenebertino.com
Charles Bock is the author of the novels Alice & Oliver and Beautiful Children, which was a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book, and which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Believer, Vice, the Los Angeles Times, and Slate, as well as in numerous anthologies. He has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Yaddo, UCross, and the Vermont Studio Center. Charles is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars.
Leopoldine Core was born and raised in New York’s East Village and graduated from Hunter College. She is the author of the poetry collection Veronica Bench and the short story collection When Watched, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Joyland, Open City, PEN America and Apology Magazine, among others. She is the recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award for fiction, as well as fellowships from The Center for Fiction and The Fine Arts Work Center. She lives in New York.
Robert Fitterman is the author of 10 books of poetry including: The Sun Also Also Rises, war the musical, Metropolis XXX: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edge Books), Metropolis 16-29 (Coach House Press), Metropolis 1-15 (Sun & Moon Press), This Window Makes Me Feel (www.ubu.com). Metropolis 1-15 was awarded the Sun & Moon “New American Poetry Award (2000)” and Metropolis 16-29 was awarded the Small Press Traffic “Book of the Year Award (2003)”. With novelist Rodrigo Rey Rosa, he co-authored the film What Sebastian Dreamt which was selected for the Sundance Film Festival (2004) and the Lincoln Center LatinBeat Festival (2004). He has been a full-time faculty member in NYU’s Liberal Studies Program since 1993. He also teaches poetry at the Milton Avery School of Graduate Studies at Bard College.
George Michelsen Foy is a novelist and non-fiction writer whose books and articles have been published by Viking Penguin, Bantam Doubleday, Harper's Magazine, University Press of New England, Journal of Microliterature, The New York Times and Rolling Stone, among others. He is a founding member of the FlashPoint-NYC short-fiction/ jazz/ performance collective.
Elizabeth Gaffney's first novel, Metropolis, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, was published by Random House in 2005. Her second novel, When the World Was Young, was published by Random House in 2014. She won the 2019 Lawrence Prize for Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in many literary magazines, and she has translated four books from German. Gaffney graduated with honors from Vassar College and holds an M.F.A. in fiction from Brooklyn College; she also studied philosophy and German at Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich. She has been a resident artist at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony and the Blue Mountain Center. She also teaches fiction and serves as the editor at large of the literary magazine A Public Space.
Elizabeth Gaffney is a native Brooklynite.
Her first novel, Metropolis, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, was published by Random House in 2005. Her second novel, When the World Was Young, was published by Random House in 2014. She won the 2019 Lawrence Prize for Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in many literary magazines, and she has translated four books from German.
Gaffney graduated with honors from Vassar College and holds an M.F.A. in fiction from Brooklyn College; she also studied philosophy and German at Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich. She has been a resident artist at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony and the Blue Mountain Center. She also teaches fiction and serves as the editor at large of the literary magazine A Public Space.
Her first novel, Metropolis, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, was published by Random House in 2005. Her second novel, When the World Was Young, was published by Random House in 2014. She won the 2019 Lawrence Prize for Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in many literary magazines, and she has translated four books from German.
Gaffney graduated with honors from Vassar College and holds an M.F.A. in fiction from Brooklyn College; she also studied philosophy and German at Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich. She has been a resident artist at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony and the Blue Mountain Center. She also teaches fiction and serves as the editor at large of the literary magazine A Public Space.
Julia Guez is the author of In an Invisible Glass Case Which Is Also a Frame (Four Way Books, 2019). She has been awarded the Discovery / Boston Review Poetry Prize, a Fulbright fellowship and the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation. Her poetry, prose and translations have previously appeared in Poetry, Guernica, the Guardian, Kenyon Review, BOMB and the Brooklyn Rail. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers and works at Teach For America New York.
Joseph O. Legaspi is the author of Threshold and Imago, both from CavanKerry Press; and three chapbooks, Postcards (Ghost Bird Press), Aviary, Bestiary (Organic Weapon Arts) and Subways (Thrush Press). His works appeared in POETRY, New England Review, Harvard Review, Best of the Net, World Literature Today, The Common, and Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets. A Fulbright and New York Foundation for the Arts fellow, he co-founded Kundiman (www.kundiman.org), a nonprofit organization serving generations of writers and readers of Asian American literature. He lives with his husband in Queens, NY.
Jocelyn Lieu is the author of a 9/11 memoir titled What Isn’t There: Inside a Season of Change and a collection of stories, Potential Weapons. She received her MFA from Warren Wilson College and a BA, in English, from Yale College. A former journalist and news editor in Northern New Mexico, Jocelyn has taught fiction and nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College, Queens College, the Goddard Creative Writing M.F.A-Port Townsend, Drew University, The New School, and LIU Global. Jocelyn lives in downtown Manhattan and in Saugerties, New York, with her daughter and husband.
David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's magazine, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Magazine Writing, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and many other publications. He contributes as an essayist to NPR’s All Things Considered, and is the recipient of a Lambert Fellowship, a Media Award from GLAAD, and a National Magazine Award. He's the author of the novel The Art Fair, a collection of stories, Three Thousand Dollars, the best-selling nonfiction book, Absolutely American, which was a Time magazine Best Book of the Year, and most recently Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace, which was a New York Times bestseller and an NPR Best Book of the Year.
Sharon Mesmer's fiction collections are Ma Vie à Yonago (in French translation from Hachette Littératures, 2005), In Ordinary Time and The Empty Quarter (Hanging Loose 2005 and 2000). An excerpt of her story "Revenge" appeared in the just-released anthology I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues). Poetry collections are Greetings from My Girlie Leisure Place (Bloof Books), which was one of Entropy’s “Best of 2015,” The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose, 2008) and Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2008); previous collections are Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press, 1998) and the chapbooks Vertigo Seeks Affinities (Belladonna Books, 2006) and Crossing Second Avenue (ABJ Books, Tokyo, 1997). She has had print work in Poetry, New American Writing, Women's Studies Quarterly, West Wind Review, Abraham Lincoln and online work on the sites esque, The Wall Street Journal, Poets for Living Waters, and The Scream. A selection of her flarf poetry will appear in the forthcoming Postmodern American Poetry — A Norton Anthology. From 2003-2006 her column, “Seasonal Affect,” appeared in the French fashion magazine Purple; currently her music and book reviews can be found in The Brooklyn Rail. Her awards include a 2010 Fulbright Specialist grant, a 2009 Jerome Foundation/SASE grant (as co-recipient/mentor, with poet Elisabeth Workman, grantee), two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships (2007 and 1999), and the 1990 MacArthur Scholarship given through the Brooklyn College MFA poetry program by nomination of Allen Ginsberg.
Geoffrey Nutter is the author of five books of poems: Cities at Dawn, The Rose of January, Christopher Sunset, Water's Leaves & Other Poems, and Summer Evening. His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies such as Carnet de Route, Verse, Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, Fence, Xantippe, Best American Poetry 1997, and Iowa Anthology of New American Poetry. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize.
Meghan O'Rourke is the author of the memoir The Long Goodbye (Riverhead, 2011) as well as the poetry collections Once (2011) and Halflife (2007), which was a finalist for both the Patterson Poetry Prize and Britain's Forward First Book Prize. Her most recent collection, Sun in Days, appeared in September 2017. She was awarded a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Radcliffe Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and a Front Page Award for her cultural criticism, among other prizes. She is the poetry editor of T Magazine and formerly an editor at The New Yorker, Slate, and The Paris Review. Her essays and poems have appeared inThe New Yorker, Poetry, Atlantic Monthly, The Kenyon Review, Best American Poetry, and more. A graduate of Yale University, she teaches at Princeton and the NYU Creative Writing Program. She is the editor of The Yale Review and is currently working on a book about chronic illness.
Matthew Rohrer is the author of The Sky Contains the Plans (Wave Books, 2020), The Others (Wave Books, 2017), which was the winner of the 2017 Believer Book Award, Surrounded by Friends (Wave Books, 2015), Destroyer and Preserver (Wave Books, 2011), A Plate of Chicken (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), Rise Up (Wave Books, 2007) and A Green Light (Verse Press, 2004), which was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Satellite (Verse Press, 2001), and co-author, with Joshua Beckman, of Nice Hat. Thanks. (Verse Press, 2002), and the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. With Joshua Beckman and Anthony McCann he wrote the secret book Gentle Reader! It is not for sale. Octopus Books published his action/adventure chapbook-length poem They All Seemed Asleep in 2008. His first book, A Hummock in the Malookas was selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Oliver in 1994.
His poems have been widely anthologized and have appeared in many journals. He's received the Hopwood Award for poetry and a Pushcart prize, and was selected as a National Poetry Series winner, and was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Recently he has participated in residencies/ performances at the Museum of Modern Art (New York City) and the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle).
Matthew Rohrer was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was raised in Oklahoma, and attended universities in Ann Arbor, Dublin, and Iowa City. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at NYU and lives in Brooklyn.
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Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s new collection of short stories, American Estrangement, will be published in August, 2021, by W. W. Norton. He is the author of a memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, selected as one of the ten best books of the year by Dwight Garner of The New York Times, and the story collection, Brief Encounters With the Enemy, a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fiction Prize. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, Granta, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, and New American Stories, among other publications. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction and a Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers’ fiction fellowship. Saïd lives in New York City with his wife, the artist Karen Mainenti, and serves on the board of directors for the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and teaches creative writing at Columbia University, Hunter College and New York University, where he received an Outstanding Teaching Award.
Irini Spanidou is the author of three highly acclaimed novels: Fear, God’s Snake, and, most recently, Before. She has taught creative writing at New York University, Sarah Lawrence College and Brooklyn College. Her work has been translated into several languages, including her native Greek.
Darin Strauss is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Chang and Eng, The Real McCoy, More Than it Hurts You, the NBCC-winning memoir, Half a Life, the comic-book series, Olivia Twist, and most recently the acclaimed novel, The Queen of Tuesday: A Lucille Ball Story (Random House, 2020). A recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Library Association Award, and numerous other prizes, Strauss has written screenplays for Disney, Gary Oldman, and Julie Taymor. His work has been translated into fourteen languages and published in nineteen countries, and he is a Clinical Professor at the NYU Creative Writing Program.
Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of three books of poems, The Trembling Answers (BOA, 2017), which won the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; To Keep Love Blurry (BOA, 2012); and Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems, (CLP, 2007), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry. He also wrote Cradle Book: Stories and Fables (BOA, 2010) and the chapbook Ambivalence and Other Conundrums (Omnidawn, 2014). His first collection of essays We Begin in Gladness, was published by Graywolf in November, 2018. Teicher edited Once and For All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz (New Directions, 2016) and serves as a poetry editor for The Literary Review. He writes about books for many publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The LA Times, and NPR. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and children. He worked for many years at Publishers Weekly and is now Digital Director of The Paris Review.
Maria Venegas is the author of Bulletproof Vest, which was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Granta, The Guardian, New York Magazine, and Ploughshares. She has also written for The New York Times Book Review. She mentors children at Still Waters in a Storm, and teaches creative writing at New York University. She lives in Brooklyn.
She mentors children at Still Waters in a Storm, and teaches creative writing at New York University. She lives in Brooklyn.
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Rachel Zucker is the author of ten books, including SoundMachine (Wave Books, 2019). Her other books include a memoir, MOTHERs, and a double collection of prose and poetry, The Pedestrians. Her book Museum of Accidents was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell Colony and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Zucker teaches poetry at New York University. Zucker is the founder and host of the podcast Commonplace: Conversations with Poets (and Other People). She is currently working on an immersive audio project (also called SoundMachine). In 2016, Zucker wrote and delivered a series of lectures on the intersection of poetry, confession, ethics and disobedience as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. These lectures will be published in a collection called The Poetics of Wrongness.