Program News

Ocean Vuong joins the NYU creative writing program faculty

The NYU Creative Writing Program is thrilled to announce that Ocean Vuong, whom our Director Deborah Landau identifies as "a major talent, an internationally celebrated writer, and an essential and singular literary voice," will join our faculty in fall 2022 as a Professor of Creative Writing. More details here. 

Ocean Vuong is the author of two collections of poetry—most recently, Time Is a Mother (Penguin Press, 2022)—as well as a New York Times bestselling novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press 2019), which has been translated into 36 languages. A previous collection of his verses, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), was the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Named by BuzzFeed Books as one of “32 Essential Asian American Writers,” Vuong was born in Saigon and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College and an MFA in poetry from NYU. Vuong’s writings have also been featured in the Atlantic, Granta, Harpers, the Nation, the New Republic, the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Paris Review, among other publications. A recipient of a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Vuong is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU and was previously an associate professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His appointment as a tenured faculty member in NYU’s Creative Writing Program begins September 1, 2022.  

Erin Townsend named '22-'23 Axinn Writer-in-Residence

We want to take a moment to congratulate Erin Townsend, our '22-'23 Axinn Writer-in-Residence! The Axinn Foundation Fellowship is awarded to a graduating student of exceptional promise. Nominations are solicited each year from the CWP fiction faculty; the final selection is made by the Axinn Committee in consultation with the program director and the GSAS Dean.

Claudia Rankine JOINS THE NYU CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM FACULTY

The NYU Creative Writing Program is thrilled to announce that the singular and brilliant Claudia Rankine will be joining our senior faculty in fall 2021 as a Professor of Creative Writing. A 2016 MacArthur Fellow--and one of the most essential and influential writers of our time--Rankine is an award winning poet, essayist, and playwright currently teaching at Yale. She will be a stellar addition to our acclaimed faculty at NYU, and we look forward to welcoming her to the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House next fall. More details here.

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. 

Update for Fall 2020

The University and the Graduate School have committed to providing as robust an onsite experience as possible in the fall. The plan is that graduate courses will be mounted in person while also being made accessible remotely to students who are unable to travel to New York. This is considered a “hybrid” mode.

With these guidelines in mind—and because all of our courses are small—the CWP will aim to offer all graduate workshops and craft classes in person in Fall ’20.

That said, we will make every effort to accommodate the needs of our community. Faculty who have requested and received accommodation to teach remotely will be given the option to do so. Students who are unable to make it to campus will be granted access to classes remotely, in accordance with the hybrid mode. We are working with NYU IT to acquire necessary equipment for our classrooms, and will do all we can to ensure the hybrid model will work seamlessly come fall.

Our plan is to hold only one class at a time in the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, and to maintain a “low-density” environment with only 12-15 students in the house at any one time.

Accordingly, we will be using all of the available time slots for our course scheduling this fall (M-F, morning/afternoon/evening).

All classes will be held in our largest classroom (#103). Students (and faculty) will be seated at maximum distance from one another; hand hygiene and mask wearing will be required.

Our popular Reading Series will be offered remotely; we will also continue to offer a robust array of colloquia, lectures, panel discussions, and special events for our community remotely throughout the fall semester.

We are hoping to provide the very best fall semester possible under the circumstances, and will be in touch with more updates as September nears.

REMEMBERING JEAN KENNEDY SMITH

The NYU Creative Writing Program mourns the loss of Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith, who was instrumental in founding and sustaining our cherished literary outreach programs. In 1984, along with Rose Styron and Professor Sharon Olds, Ambassador Kennedy Smith founded  NYU’s Goldwater Hospital Writing Workshop on Roosevelt Island, a weekly creative writing class uniting MFA fellows and the “Golden Writers,” a group of long-term Coler Hospital residents with severe disabilities. Building upon the Goldwater program's success, the Ambassador partnered with NYU again in 2008 to launch a new outreach program for recent veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now entering its thirteenth year, the NYU Veterans Writing Workshop serves as a national model of its kind, offering veterans in the New York City metropolitan area an opportunity to express themselves on paper, to cultivate a voice with which to bear witness and tell their stories, and to record their experiences in combat and afterward.


These essential and life-changing programs testify to Ambassador Kennedy Smith’s faith that creativity can flourish even in the most challenging circumstances. We honor her exceptional legacy as a visionary who enriched the lives of so many. She will be deeply missed.

We share here remembrances featured in The New York Times. 

NYU CREATIVE WRITING MFA PROGRAM NOW OFFERS CREATIVE NONFICTION

We are pleased to announce that the NYU Creative Writing MFA Program now offers a specialization in Creative Nonfiction in addition to Poetry and Fiction.

REMEMBERING PAULE MARSHALL

The NYU Creative Writing Program mourns the loss of Paule Marshall, a brilliant and beloved professor and mentor in our community for over a decade. Professor Marshall held the Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and Culture at New York University from 1995 until her retirement in 2008.

The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, she was a leading voice of her generation, whose distinguished career spanned over five decades. Her many books include the novels Brown Girl, Brownstones; The Chosen Place, The Timeless People; Praisesong for the Widow; Daughters; and The Fisher King, as well several collections of short fiction and a memoir.

We honor her remarkable legacy as a legendary writer and teacher who enriched the lives of so many. She will be deeply missed.

We share here remembrances featured in The New Yorker and The New York Times. 

JEFFREY EUGENIDES JOINS THE NYU CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM FACULTY

We’re proud and delighted to announce that Jeffrey Eugenides will be joining our faculty in September 2018 as a tenured full professor of Creative Writing, and the Lewis and Loretta Glucksman Professor in American Letters. Eugenides is a Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer who has taught at Princeton for many years (full bio below). He will be a brilliant addition to our stellar faculty, and we look forward to welcoming him to the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House in the fall.

Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan. He graduated magna cum laude from Brown University, and received an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University. 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.

NYU CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM PROFILED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

We are honored to share this New York Times' profile of our program and the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House.

NYU CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM REMEMBERS LILLIAN VERNON

The NYU Creative Writing Program mourns the passing of Lillian Vernon, a treasured member of our community and one of New York's great philanthropists and entrepreneurs. An invaluable supporter of NYU and the arts, she gave us the beautiful Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, a warm and welcoming home for our program, among many other gifts. For her extraordinary generosity we will always be grateful.