Faculty
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Catherine Barnett is the author of four poetry collections, Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (2024 Graywolf); Human Hours (2018 Believer Book Award in Poetry and New York Times "Best Poetry of 2018" selection), The Game of Boxes (James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets) and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Beatrice Hawley Award). A Guggenheim fellow, she received a 2022 Arts and Letters Award in Literature, which honors exceptional accomplishment. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, and Harper’s, among many other places. She teaches in the NYU Program in Creative Writing and works as an independent editor.
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.
Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for many other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His second book, Cleanness, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and the Prix Sade, among others. A New York Times Notable Book, it was named a Best Book of 2020 by over thirty publications. A new novel, Small Rain, is forthcoming in 2024. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the 2021 Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of Mississippi, where he was the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence, and Grinnell College. He is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU.
Tess Gunty’s debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch, is a New York Times Bestseller and the recipient of the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction. It has been translated into a dozen languages. The novel also received the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize, the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and the British Book Award for Debut Fiction, The Rabbit Hutch was named one of twelve Essential Reads by The New Yorker, and a best book of the year by The New York Times, People, TIME, Oprah Daily, LitHub, the Chicago Tribune, Kirkus, and NPR. It is currently a finalist for the inaugural Inside Literary Prize and the Open Bank Vanity Fair Award for best new author in Spain. The novel has been optioned for film rights by Richard Brown and Fremantle. Tess is the youngest recipient of the National Book Award for fiction since Philip Roth won in 1960.
Tess holds an MFA in creative writing from New York University, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow and a Graduate Institute Research Fellow in Paris. Recently, she was a Paul La Farge fellow at MacDowell, where she worked on her second novel. She currently lives between Los Angeles and New York.
Terrance Hayes’s most recent publications include So to Speak (Penguin 2023), Watch Your Language (Penguin 2023), 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.
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.
Katie Kitamura’s most recent novel is Audition. She is also the author of 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 and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. In France, it won the Prix Litteraire Lucien Barriere, was a finalist for the Grand Prix de l’Heroine, and was longlisted for the Prix Fragonard. Her third novel, A Separation, was a finalist for the Premio von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book. Her two previous novels, Gone To The Forest and The Longshot, were both finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award.
Her work has been translated into 22 languages and is being adapted for film and television. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature, a Cullman Center Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Lannan, Santa Maddalena, and Jan Michalski foundations. Katie has written for publications including The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, Granta, BOMB, Triple Canopy, and Frieze. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.
Hari Kunzru is the author of seven novels, including Gods Without Men, White Tears, Red Pill and Blue Ruin. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, Harper’s and the New York Times. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. His work has been translated into twenty languages.
Deborah Landau (Director) is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Skeletons, which was named one of The New Yorker’s “Best Books of 2023.” Her other books include Soft Targets (winner of the 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. 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, New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, The Atlantic, The Nation, and three volumes 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. She is a Professor and Director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of Sidewalks, Faces in the Crowd, The Story of My Teeth, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship and the winner of DUBLIN Literary Award, two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, The Carnegie Medal, an American Book Award, and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Booker Prize. She has been a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney's, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She teaches at Bard College and is a visiting professor at Harvard University.
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 Army of Giants (Wave Books, 2024), 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.
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.
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.
Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted 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.
Ocean Vuong is the author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and went on to win the American Book Award, The Mark Twain Award, and The New England Book Award. The novel debuted for six weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and has since sold more than a million copies in 40 languages. A recipient of a MacArthur "Genius Grant", he is also the author of the poetry collections, Time is a Mother, a finalist for the Griffin Prize, and Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of the year, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, and the Thom Gunn Award. 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. Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, he attended Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a BA in Nineteenth Century American Literature. He subsequently received his MFA in Poetry from NYU, where he now serves as a tenured Professor in Modern Poetry and Poetics.
Kevin Young is the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose, including Stones, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; Brown; Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015, longlisted for the National Book Award; Book of Hours, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Jelly Roll: a blues, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry; Bunk a New York Times Notable Book, longlisted for the National Book Award and named on many “best of” lists for 2017; and The Grey Album, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award, a New York Times Notable Book, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.
The poetry editor of the New Yorker, where he hosts the Poetry Podcast, Young is the editor of eleven other volumes, including A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker, 1925-2025 and the acclaimed anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Society of American Historians, and was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020.
2025-2026 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.
Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Her latest novel, The Arsonists’ City, was a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year and most recently The Moon That Turns You Back. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, Literary Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist.
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.
Megan Fernandes is a South Asian American writer living in NYC. She was born in Canada and raised in the Philadelphia area. Her family are East African Goans. Fernandes has work published in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, Chicago Review, Boston Review, Rattle, PANK, The Common, Guernica, the Academy of American Poets, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others.
She is the author of The Kingdom and After (Tightrope Books, 2015) and Good Boys (Tin House, 2020). Her third book of poetry, I Do Everything I’m Told (Tin House), was published in summer 2023. Fernandes is an Associate Professor of English and the Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College where she teaches courses on poetry, creative nonfiction, and critical theory. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA in poetry from Boston University.
Kimiko Hahn (she/her) was born in Mount Kisco, New York. Her mother, Maude Miyako Hamai, was a Japanese American from Maui, Hawaii. Her father, Walter Hahn, was a German American from Wisconsin. Both of her parents were artists who met while studying in Chicago. Hahn grew up in Pleasantville, New York.
Hahn earned a BA from the University of Iowa, where she studied with Marvin Bell, Louise Glück, Charles Wright, and Rita Dove. She returned to New York and earned an MA in Japanese literature from Columbia University.
Hahn is the author of multiple books of poetry, including The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems (2024), Foreign Bodies (2020); Brain Fever (2014); Toxic Flora (2010); The Narrow Road to the Interior (2006), all from W. W. Norton, a collection that takes its title from Bashô’s famous poetic journal; The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), winner of the American Book Award; and Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award.
Hahn initiated the organization of a Chapbook Festival, sponsored by major literary organizations and held at the City University of New York Graduate Center for five years. She is a proponent of chapbooks and art books and has published several over the years: Brood (Sarabande Books, 2020), Brittle Process (Paper Nautilus, 2019), Resplendent Slug (Ghostbird Press, 2016), and Boxes with Respect (Center for Book Arts, 2011). In 2017, she and Tamiko Beyer collaborated on the chapbook Dovetail (Slapering Hol Press). Hahn has also written for film, with work appearing in Coal Fields, a 1985 experimental documentary by Bill Brand; Ain’t Nuthin’ But a She-Thing, a 1995 MTV special; and Everywhere at Once, a 2008 film based on Peter Lindbergh’s still photographs and narrated by Jeanne Moreau.
Hahn is the winner of the 2008 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the 2007 Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. She has also been supported by fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. From 2016–2019, she served as president of the board at the Poetry Society of America. In January 2023, Hahn was elected as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College of the City University of New York.
In 2023, Hahn was named a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and the winner of the 2023 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
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, was published by W. W. Norton & Company in July 2023.
Geoffrey Nutter is the author of A Summer Evening (winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize), Water’s Leaves & Other Poems (Winner of the 2004 Verse Press Prize), Christopher Sunset (winner of the 2011 Sheila Motton Book Award), The Rose of January (Wave Books, 2013), and Cities at Dawn (Wave Books, 2016), and Giant Moth Perishes (Wave Books, 2021). He recently traveled in China, giving lectures, workshops, and readings as a participant in the Sun Yat-sen University Writers’ Residency. Geoffrey’s poems have been translated into Spanish, French, and Mandarin. Soir d’été, a bilingual edition of his poems translated into French by poets Molly Lou Freeman and Julien Marcland, was recently published in France, and a German translation of his book Water’s Leaves & Other Poems will appear in 2021. He has taught poetry at Princeton, Columbia, University of Iowa, NYU, the New School, and 92nd Street Y. He currently teaches Greek and Latin Classics at Queens College. He runs the Wallson Glass Poetry Seminars in New York City.
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.
2025-2026 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.
Marcelle Clements is a novelist, essayist, and journalist. Her fourth and most recent book is a novel, Midsummer. She has written prizewinning essays and articles for numerous publications, including the New York Times, Esquire, Elle, and Rolling Stone. Since 1999, she has taught a seminar on Proust's In Search of Lost Time at NYU's College of Arts and Science, where she is a Collegiate Professor. Each spring, she leads workshops in Advanced Fiction and Advanced Creative Non-Fiction in the Creative Writing Program. She is a recipient of NYU's Golden Dozen Teaching Award.
George Michelsen Foy is a Franco-American novelist and essayist whose 14 novels have been published by Viking Penguin, Bantam Doubleday, University Press of New England, et al; His latest novel, The Last Green Light, was published in May, 2024 by Guernica Editions. Foy's non-fiction books include Run the Storm and Zero Decibels: The search for absolute silence (Scribner) and Finding North: How navigation makes us human (Flatiron/Macmillan). His stories and essays have appeared in Harper's Magazine, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Slate, Men's Journal, among others. He is the recipient of an NEA fellowship in fiction; his novel The Shift (Bantam Spectra) was shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick prize for literary futurism, and The Art & Practice of Explosion won honorary mention in Fore-word Journal's Novel of the Year contest for 2002. Foy was born on Cape Cod, semi-educated at the Sorbonne, London School of Economics, and Bennington College; as a working writer he was smuggled into Afghanistan by guerrillas and did stints as magazine editor, and as chief restroom cleaner for a chain of British service stations. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at NYU and lives in Brooklyn and Cape Cod.
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.
David Groff is the author of three books of poems: Theory of Devolution, selected by Mark Doty for the National Poetry Series; Clay, chosen by Michael Waters for the Louise Bogan Award; and most recently, Live in Suspense. His work has recently appeared in the Best American Poetry Blog, Cortland Review, HuffPost, New England Review, On the Seawall, Poem-a-Day, and Prairie Schooner, among other venues. An independent book editor, he also teaches poetry and publishing in the MFA creative writing program at the City College of New York. www.davidgroff.com
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.
Jen Levitt is the author of two poetry collections, So Long (2023) and The Off-Season (2016), both from Four Way Books. Her poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Boston Review, Tin House, TriQuarterly, The Yale Review and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.
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 critically acclaimed novels The Tiny One, The Brambles, and In the Orchard, all published by Alfred A. Knopf/Vintage. Her work has appeared in a variety of newspapers and magazines, a couple of anthologies, and her books have been named to numerous lists, including The New Yorker’s best books of the year, The New York Times notable, and Oprah’s Top Ten Summer Picks. She is a recipient of a New Jersey State Artist Fellowship, a Yaddo residency, the Maplewood Library Literary Award, and was on the shortlist for the £20,000 Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize. She went to Barnard College and received her MFA from Rutgers-Newark, where she was a Presidential Fellow, in 2017. She has taught at Barnard College, Rutgers-Newark, and NYU.
Michael Montlack is author of two poetry collections and editor of the Lambda Finalist essay anthology My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (University of Wisconsin Press). His poems recently appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, december, Poet Lore, Cincinnati Review, and phoebe. His prose has appeared in The Rumpus, Huffington Post and Advocate.com. He holds an MFA from New School and an MA from San Francsico State, both in Creative Writing, and his work has been a Best of the Net finalist and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2022 his poem won the Saints & Sinners Poetry Award (for LGBTQ writers). He lives in NYC.
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 and Sparkling Wine for Modern Times: A Drinker’s Guide to the Freewheeling World of Bubbles, both available from Ten Speed Press. His writing has appeared in Saveur, Food & Wine, The World of Fine Wine, and The Wall Street Journal Magazine, among many others. Formerly named the Champagne Louis Roederer Emerging Wine Writer of the Year, he was nominated as a finalist for the 2022 IACP Food Writing Awards from The International Association of Culinary Professionals. In addition to teaching in the Creative Writing Program at NYU, where he works as the Graduate Program Manager, he currently serves as a visiting lecturer in the Master's program at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. For more information, visit 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.