Faculty
Fiction Faculty
Chris Bachelder
Venita Blackburn
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Adrianne Harun
Vanessa Hua
Holly Goddard Jones
Katie Kitamura
Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Luis Alberto Urrea
Jess Walter
Poetry Faculty
Jericho Brown
Eduardo C. Corral
Tarfia Faizullah
Carl Phillips
Caki Wilkinson
Monica Youn
Nonfiction Faculty
Alexander Chee
Lacy M. Johnson
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
Elena Passarello
Playwriting Faculty
Nathan Alan Davis
Kirsten Greenidge
Talene Monahon
Liliana Padilla
Fiction
Chris Bachelder
Chris Bachelder is the author of four novels, including The Throwback Special, which won the Paris Review's Terry Southern Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He teaches at the University of Cincinnati.
Venita Blackburn
Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in the newyorker.com, Harper’s, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, the Paris Review and others. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize in fiction for her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. She is founder of the literary nonprofit Live, Write (livewriteworkshop.com), which provides free creative writing workshops for communities of color. Blackburn’s second collection of stories, How to Wrestle a Girl, will be published fall of 2021. She is an Assistant Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, and the Best American Short Stories. A story collection, Likes (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), was published in September 2020.
Adrianne Harun
Adrianne Harun is the author of two short story collections, The King of Limbo (Houghton Mifflin Mariner) and Catch, Release (Johns Hopkins University Press) and a novel, A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain (Penguin).
Vanessa Hua
Vanessa Hua, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, is author of A River of Stars, Deceit and Other Possibilities, and the forthcoming Forbidden City. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, she teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
Holly Goddard Jones
Holly Goddard Jones is the author of four books: Antipodes: Stories (Iowa 2022), The Salt Line (Putnam 2017), The Next Time You See Me (Touchstone 2013), and Girl Trouble (Harper Perennial 2009). She teaches in the MFA program at UNC Greensboro.
Katie Kitamura
Katie Kitamura's most recent novel is Intimacies. Longlisted for the National Book Award and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, it was one of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2021 and a Barack Obama recommended read. Her work has been translated into 19 languages and is being adapted for film and television.
Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, a New York Times Editor’s Choice. His first book, We Cast a Shadow, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize. Ruffin is the winner of several literary prizes, including the Iowa Review Award in fiction. A New Orleans native, Ruffin is a professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University, and the 2020-2021 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.
Luis Alberto Urrea
Luis Alberto Urrea, a Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist, is the author of 18 books, winning numerous awards for his poetry, fiction and essays. Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and American mother, Urrea is most recognized as a border writer, though he says, “I am more interested in bridges, not borders.” He is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
Jess Walter
Jess Walter is the author of ten books, most recently the story collection The Angel of Rome and the best-selling novels The Cold Millions and Beautiful Ruins. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and his short fiction has appeared three times in Best American Short Stories.
Poetry
Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta.
Eduardo C. Corral
Eduardo C. Corral is the author of Guillotine and Slow Lightning, which won the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. He teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.
Tarfia Faizullah
Tarfia Faizullah is the author of two poetry collections, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf 2018) and Seam (SIU 2014). Tarfia's work appears widely in periodicals both in the U.S. and abroad and is translated into several languages. In 2016, Tarfia was recognized by Harvard Law School as one of 50 Women Inspiring Change. Tarfia is a 2019 United States Artists Fellow, and lives in Dallas, TX.
Carl Phillips
Carl Phillips’s latest book of poems is Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 (FSG/US and Carcanet/UK, 2022). His third prose book, My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing, will be out from Yale University Press this fall. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Caki Wilkinson
Caki Wilkinson is the author of three poetry collections, most recently The Survival Expo (2021). Poems from this collection have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review and other magazines. She lives in Memphis and is an associate professor of English at Rhodes College.
Monica Youn
Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press 2016), which won the William Carlos Williams Award and was 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. A Guggenheim Fellow, she teaches at Princeton and in the MFA programs at NYU and Columbia.
Nonfiction
Alexander Chee
Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, all from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.
Lacy M. Johnson
Lacy M. Johnson is a Houston-based professor, curator, activist, and is author of the essay collection The Reckonings, the widely-acclaimed memoir The Other Side, and Trespasses: A Memoir. She teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University and is the Founding Director of the Houston Flood Museum.
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of THE FACT OF A BODY: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices ELLE, the Prix des libraires du Quebec, and the Prix France Inter-JDD. It has been translated into eleven languages and is in development with HBO. Their next book, BOTH AND NEITHER, is a genre-and-gender-bending work of memoir, history, cultural analysis, trans re-imaginings, and international road trip about life beyond the binary.
Elena Passarello
Elena Passarello’s essays have recently appeared in National Geographic, Audubon, McSweeney's, and Paris Review. She is the author of two collections, Let Me Clear My Throat and Animals Strike Curious Poses, both with Sarabande Books. Animals Strike Curious Poses has been translated into five languages and appeared on "Best Books" lists in The Guardian, Publisher's Weekly, and The New York Times Book Review, among others. Elena teaches at Oregon State University and appears weekly on Public Radio International’s Live Wire!
Playwriting
Nathan Alan Davis
Nathan Alan Davis's plays include: The High Ground (upcoming at Arena Stage), Nat Turner in Jerusalem (New York Theatre Workshop; Stavis Playwright Award), Dontrell Who Kissed the Sea (NNPN Rolling World Premiere; Steinberg/ATCA New Play Citation), and The Wind and the Breeze (Cygnet Theatre; Blue Ink Award, Lorraine Hansberry Award). He received a Windham-Campbell Prize in 2021. Other recent honors include: The Lark Venturous Fellow (2021-22), Steinberg Playwright Award (2020), Sundance at Ucross Fellow (2019), and Whiting Award (2018). Nathan is a Lecturer in Theater and Berlind Playwright-in-Residence at Princeton University. He is an alumnus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University Bloomington, and The Juilliard School.
Talene Monahon
Talene Monahon’s plays include Jane Anger (New Ohio; 2022 Off-Broadway Alliance Best New Play Nominee, New York Magazine Approval Matrix), How to Load a Musket (Less than Rent) and Frankie & Will (MCC). Her next play, about the children in the Salem Witch Trials, will be produced by Bedlam Theater in 2023.
Liliana Padilla
Liliana Padilla's work explores community, the body, power and healing. How to Defend Yourself, written and co-directed by Liliana, will be produced at New York Theatre Workshop in Winter 2022. How to Defend Yourself won the Yale Drama Series Prize, was an international Susan Smith Blackburn Prize Finalist and was featured on The Kilroy’s list. Liliana created Born 1000 Times, a visual book and time capsule of friendship, loss and change. Liliana’s work has been produced at the Humana Festival, Victory Gardens Theatre and the La Jolla Playhouse, and workshopped at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Hedgebrook and the Ojai Playwrights Conference. Liliana teaches at the acclaimed Sewanee Writers Conference. Liliana is a theatremaker, performer, teacher and creative doula. MFA Playwriting: UCSD, BFA Theatre: NYU.
