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.
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.
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.
Terrance Hayes’s most recent publications include American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin 2018) and To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018). To Float In The Space Between was winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin won the Hurston/Wright 2019 Award for Poetry and was a finalist the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, the 2018 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Hayes is a Professor of English at New York University.
Katie Kitamura’s most recent novel is Intimacies. One of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021 and one of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2021, it was longlisted for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Her third novel, A Separation, was a finalist for the Premio von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book. She is also the author of Gone To The Forest and The Longshot, both finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. Her work has been translated into 21 languages and is being adapted for film and television. A recipient of fellowships from the Lannan, Santa Maddalena, and Jan Michalski foundations, 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 six novels, including 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.
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, New York Review of Books, American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, and three editions of 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. Her fifth book of poems, Skeletons, will be published in spring '23. She is a Professor and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.
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.
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 joined the NYU Creative Writing Program as a tenured Professor in Fall 2021.
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 collections Time is a Mother (Penguin Press, 2022) and 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. Ocean Vuong will join the NYU Creative Writing Program as a tenured Professor in Fall 2022.
2022-2023 Visiting Graduate Faculty
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Nuar Alsadir's most recent book, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation, is a work of nonfiction published simultaneously in the US by Graywolf Press and in the UK by Fitzcarraldo Editions. She is also the author of two poetry collections: Fourth Person Singular, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and More Shadow Than Bird. Her work has been published in many journals, including Granta, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, BOMB, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Yale Review, and New York Magazine. She is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and a member of the curatorial board of The Racial Imaginary Institute. She works as a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York.
Cris Beam is an author of both fiction and nonfiction. Her latest book is I Feel You, which was released by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2018. Her prior book, To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), was a New York Times Notable Book and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan Prize. Her first book, Transparent (Harcourt, 2007), received a Lambda Literary award and a Stonewall Honor, and her second, I Am J (Little, Brown, 2011), was both a Kirkus and American Library Association Best Book and a Junior Library Guild Selection. Her work has appeared on This American Life and in The New York Times, The Atavist, The Huffington Post, The Awl, and The Guardian, among others. She has an MFA from Columbia and has taught creative writing at Columbia, NYU, and Bayview Women’s Correctional Facility.
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
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.
Kimiko Hahn is the author of ten books of poems, including: Foreign Bodies (W. W. Norton, 2020); Brain Fever (WWN, 2014), and Toxic Flora (WWN, 2010), both collections prompted by science; The Narrow Road to the Interior (WWN, 2006) a collection that takes its title from Basho’s famous poetic journal; The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), which received an American Book Award; Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992), which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award. As part of her service to the CUNY community, she initiated a Chapbook Festival that became an annual event co-sponsored by major literary organizations. Since then, she has added chapbooks to her publication list: Write it!, Brittle Process, Brood, Ragged Evidence, A Field Guide to the Intractable, Boxes with Respect, The Cryptic Chamber, and Resplendent Slug. In 2017, she and Tamiko Beyer collaborated on the chapbook Dovetail.
Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the N.Y. Foundation for the Arts. She has taught in graduate programs at the University of Houston and New York University, and is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York; she has also taught for literary organizations such as the Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem, and Kundiman.
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.
Jonas Hassen Khemiri is the author of six novels, seven plays, and a collection of plays, essays, and short stories. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages and his plays have been performed by more than hundred international companies. He received the Village Voice Obie Award for his first play Invasion! and in 2015 he was awarded the August Prize, Sweden's highest literary honor for the novel Everything I Don't Remember. In 2017 he became the first Swedish writer to have a short story published in The New Yorker and in 2020 his latest novel The Family Clause was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Prix Médicis Étranger, France’s highest honor for translated books. Khemiri is currently based in New York, as a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library.
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. His most recent book, The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial, will be published by W. W. Norton & Company in July, 2023.
Sally Wen Mao is the author of three collections of poetry, The Kingdom of Surfaces (Graywolf Press, 2023), Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). She earned her B.A. at Carnegie Mellon University and M.F.A. at Cornell University. The recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she was recently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library and a Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2021 and 2013, The Paris Review, Poetry, Harpers Bazaar, A Public Space, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, Guernica, and A Public Space, among others.
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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.
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.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of five books: When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness; The Ground; Heaven; The Circuit; and Living Weapon. He is also the author of a book-length translation, from the Catalan, of Salvador Espriu’s Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth. His books have been named a book of the year by The Washington Post, The Guardian (UK), NPR, and The Australian Review of Books. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the recipient of a Whiting Award, the GLCSA New Writers Award for Poetry, the PEN-Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, the Anisfield Book Prize for Poetry, the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award, and the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. His work has also been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the NAACP Outstanding Book Award for Poetry. He is the poetry editor of The New Republic.
Parul Sehgal is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She was previously a columnist and senior editor at The New York Times Book Review and a book critic for The New York Times. 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.
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s latest collection of short stories, American Estrangement, was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. 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, The Atlantic, Granta, McSweeney’s, and The New York Times, among other publications. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction and a Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers’ fiction fellowship. He is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and teaches creative writing at New York University, where he received an Outstanding Teaching Award.
Brandon Taylor is the author of the novel Real Life, which was a finalist for the 2020 Booker Prize, The National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and the 2021 Young Lions Fiction Award, and was named a NYT Editors’ Choice and NYT Notable Book. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, won the 2022 Story Prize and was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
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 latest novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, was 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 is a member of the founding faculty for the Randolph College low-residency MFA program in creative writing.
Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press 2016), which won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. It was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award, longlisted for the National Book Award, and named one of the best poetry books of 2016 by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and BuzzFeed. Her previous book Ignatz (Four Way Books 2010) was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been awarded the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bytter Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a Stegner Fellowship. A former constitutional lawyer, she is a member of the curatorial collective the Racial Imaginary Institute and is an associate professor of English at UC Irvine. Her fourth book FROM FROM is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in March 2023.
2022-2023 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.
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.
Cris Beam is an author of both fiction and nonfiction. Her latest book is I Feel You, which was released by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2018. Her prior book, To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), was a New York Times Notable Book and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan Prize. Her first book, Transparent (Harcourt, 2007), received a Lambda Literary award and a Stonewall Honor, and her second, I Am J (Little, Brown, 2011), was both a Kirkus and American Library Association Best Book and a Junior Library Guild Selection. Her work has appeared on This American Life and in The New York Times, The Atavist, The Huffington Post, The Awl, and The Guardian, among others. She has an MFA from Columbia and has taught creative writing at Columbia, NYU, and Bayview Women’s Correctional Facility.
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.
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.
George Michelsen Foy is an award-winning author and essayist, a professor of creative writing and former mariner. His 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. His latest non-fiction book, Run the Storm, an account of the mysterious disappearance of SS El Faro in 2015, was published by Scribner on Mayday, 2018.
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.
Hannah Kingsley-Ma is a writer and radio producer. Her work has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, The Believer, McSweeney's and Joyland, as well as on the CBC, KCRW, KQED, and KALW Public Radio. As a graduate of New York University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, she received the Jan Gabrial Fellowship and was the 2020–21 Axinn Foundation Writer-in-Residence. She has taught classes at Catapult and PEN America.
Maria Laurino is the author of the national bestselling memoir Were You Always an Italian?, an exploration of identity, class, and stereotypes, as well as Old World Daughter, New World Mother, a meditation on contemporary feminism. Her book The Italian Americans: A History was the companion to a national public television documentary. Her forthcoming book, The Price of Children, the story of the treatment of unwed mothers in Italy whose children were sent to America for adoption, will be published in Italy in 2023 by Longanesi. Laurino began her career as a journalist at the Village Voice and her work has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, Nation, and Salon; her essays have been widely anthologized including in the Norton Reader.
Raven Leilani’s debut novel Luster (2020) was awarded the Kirkus Prize, Dylan Thomas Prize, NBCC John Leonard Prize, VCU Cabell First Novel Prize, Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, among others. Her work has been published in Granta, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, The Cut, and New England Review, among other publications. Leilani received her MFA from NYU and was an Axinn Foundation Writer-in-Residence. She was also selected as a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. In 2022 she served as the John Grisham Fellow at the University of Mississippi and teaches creative writing at NYU.
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.
Eliza Minot is the author of the novels The Tiny One and The Brambles, both published by Knopf/Vintage. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines, a couple of anthologies, and her books have been named to various lists, including The New York Times Notable, Booksense 76, Nancy Pearl's, and Oprah's Top Ten Summer Picks. Her third novel, In The Orchard, will be published by Knopf in Spring 2023. She received her MFA in 2017 from Rutgers-Newark, where she was a Presidential Fellow, and has taught at Barnard College, NYU, and Rutgers-Newark.
Tim Murphy, an author of Irish-Lebanese descent, is the author of the novels Christodora (Grove, 2016), which was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal, and Correspondents (Grove, 2019), with a novel forthcoming from Viking in 2023. Murphy is a journalist on LGBTQ issues for publications including the New York Times, New York magazine, and The Nation.
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.
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.
Jess Row is the author of two collections of short stories, The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost, a novel, Your Face in Mine, and a collection of essays, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, Granta, n+1, and elsewhere, has been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories, and has won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA fellowship in fiction, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. In 2007, he was named a “Best Young American Novelist” by Granta. His nonfiction and criticism appear often in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Threepenny Review, and Boston Review, among other venues. He directs the undergraduate creative writing program in the Department of English at NYU and is an ordained senior dharma teacher in the Kwan Um School of Zen. He lives in New York City and Plainfield, Vermont.
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s latest collection of short stories, American Estrangement, was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. 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, The Atlantic, Granta, McSweeney’s, and The New York Times, among other publications. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction and a Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers’ fiction fellowship. He is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and teaches creative writing at New York University, where he received an Outstanding Teaching Award.
Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.” Her poems can be found in Poetry, Harper’s, Boston Review, Granta, Hyperallergic, jubilat, and the Brooklyn Rail. Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, which was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. She received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017. She currently teaches creative writing at Yale, NYU, and Columbia and lives in Brooklyn.
Zachary Sussman is the author of two books, The Essential Wine Book: A Modern Guide to the Changing World of Wine (2020) and Sparkling Wine for Modern Times: A Drinker’s Guide to the Freewheeling World of Bubbles (2021). His work has appeared in Saveur, Food & Wine, Wine & Spirits, The World of Fine Wine, and The Wall Street Journal Magazine, among many others. He is a regular contributor to PUNCH and was formerly named the Champagne Louis Roederer Emerging Wine Writer of the Year. In 2022 he was nominated as a finalist for the IACP Food Writing Awards from The International Association of Culinary Professionals. In addition to teaching, he manages the graduate program in Creative Writing at NYU. More info: www.zacharysussmanwine.com
I came to play Spiritfarer through my friend, the poet Jaz Sufi. One afternoon I was leaving my desk in the NYU Creative Writing Program and Jaz was sitting in the window of the parlor area with their dog Apollo. Whether it is actually uncommon that poets play video games, Jaz and I were energized to learn we both each often are playing several games at a time, alongside several books of various genre, and several TV series of varying bingeability. We got on the subject of “narrative” games we enjoyed. I would describe narrative games as those with greater emphasis on dialogue and/or in implicating the player in the moral and emotional arc of the game’s characters than on “things happening”, be it through choice-based or branching-decision narratives, or with strong existential themes. I told Jaz one of my favorite series of the type are the Life is Strange games, created by Don’t Nod Entertainment and Deck Nine, which I have described as “queer teenage or kid superheroes whose powers primarily originate out of trauma.” Jaz then suggested Spiritfarer, a particularly “non-demanding” game I did not know, but whose name immediately pricked my interest.
Spiritfarer is a game released in 2020 by Thunder Lotus Games, the premise of which is you play as a young woman named Stella, taking over from Charon in ferrying spirits across the “river” of the dead in the afterlife, helping them accomplish final “things they still have left to do” and come to terms with their life until they're ready to finally pass on and they ask you to take them to the “Everdoor,” a place with red, blood-like water, and Japanese maples so pink they’re almost white (The trees, the whole landscape near the Everdoor is bowed low, as if with baited breath and respect.) In this variation on the mythology, the river Styx is an ocean with islands to sail to and discover resources, challenges, and characters upon, and your humble ferry is a large wooden ship. This game, like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, was released while the world was reeling from Covid-19 and many people I knew were seeking comfort through the screen of their Nintendo Switch.
I arrived at this game while my paternal grandmother June Kikoku Mori was dying, though I somehow did not connect the game’s relevance to my grieving until several weeks into October, after she had passed. I was brushing my hair, staring off into my medicine cabinet when I told my partner Alexi, “I don’t think I’m processing my grandmother’s death.” Then it clicked— “Oh, except for the the game I’m playing where I help people process their deaths,” resulting in a much needed belly laugh and smile at myself in the mirror.
Stella is accompanied by her cat Daffodil, “sharing the burden” Charon says, as the new Spiritfarer.
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.
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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.