Faculty

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.

Jamel Brinkley

Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories, a finalist for the National Book Award. His fiction has been anthologized twice in The Best American Short Stories. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was also awarded a 2018-2020 Wallace Stegner Fellowship in fiction at Stanford University.

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 is forthcoming from FSG in September 2020.

Adrianne Harun

Adrianne Harun is the award-winning author of two short story collections, The King of Limbo and Catch, Release, and a novel, A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain.

Katie Kitamura

Katie Kitamura is the author of three novels: A Separation (finalist for the Premio von Rezzori), Gone to the Forest, and The Longshot (both finalists for the Young Lions Fiction Award). Her work has been translated into sixteen languages. She teaches at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.

mccorkle_jill_author_CMYK (c) Tom Rankin

Jill McCorkle

Jill McCorkle is the author of seven novels and four story collections; her latest novel Hieroglyphics will be published in 2020. Her work has appeared in numerous periodicals and four of her short stories have been selected for Best American Short Stories. She currently teaches in the Bennington College Writing Seminars and at NC State University.

Claire Messud

Claire Messud’s five novels include The Emperor’s Children, a New York Times Book of the Year in 2006; The Woman Upstairs; and, most recently, The Burning Girl, a finalist for the LA Times Book Award in Fiction. She is also the author of a book of novellas, The Hunters. A memoir-in-essays, Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write, will be published in the fall of 2020. She teaches creative writing at Harvard University.

Jess Walter

Jess Walter is the author of eight books. His novel Beautiful Ruins was the #1 New York Times bestseller, on the list for more than a year. He was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award for The Zero and won the 2005 Edgar Allan Poe award for Citizen Vince.

Stephanie Powell Watts

Stephanie Powell Watts won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence for her debut story collection, We Are Taking Only What We Need (2012), also named one of 2013’s Best Summer Reads by O: The Oprah Magazine. Her short fiction has been included in two volumes of the Best New Stories from the South anthology and honored with a Pushcart Prize.

Erica Dawson

Erica Dawson is the author of three books of poetry: When Rap Spoke Straight to God; The Small Blades Hurt; and Big-Eyed Afraid. She directs the University of Tampa’s Low-Residency MFA, and, at UT, is an associate professor of English and Writing.

Mark Jarman

Mark Jarman has published eleven books of poetry, most recently The Heronry, and three collections of essays on poetry. Honors for his work include a Guggenheim Fellowship, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award from the San Francisco Foundation, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and The Nation magazine. Jarman is currently Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

Marilyn Nelson

Marilyn Nelson, a three-time finalist for the National Book Award, is the author or translator of numerous poetry books for adults and children, most recently, How I Discovered Poetry and American Ace. She was awarded the Frost Medal in 2012 and elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2013. In 2017, she received the NSK Neustadt Prize in Children’s Literature and the NCTE Award for Excellence in Children’s Poetry. She is a former poet laureate of the state of Connecticut.

Carl Phillips

Carl Phillips is the author of 14 books of poetry, most recently Wild Is the Wind, winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A four-time finalist for the National Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, his other honors include the Lambda Literary Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets, for which he served as Chancellor from 2006-2012. He is Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches creative writing.

A.E. Stallings

A.E. Stallings is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Like, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has translated Lucretius’ philosophical epic, The Nature of Things, and Hesiod’s almanac, Works and Days. A MacArthur fellow, she lives in Athens, Greece.

Monica Youn

Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press 2016), which won the William Carlos Williams Award, was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and was longlisted for the National Book Award.

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.

Amitava Kumar

Amitava Kumar is the author of several works of nonfiction and two novels. His most recent book Immigrant, Montana: A Novel was on the list of most “notable books of the year” at the New York Times and The New Yorker. Barack Obama named Immigrant, Montana among his favorite books of the year.

Elena Passarello

Elena Passarello’s essays have recently appeared in Tin House, Paris Review, and Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018. Her latest collection, Animals Strike Curious Poses, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and won the Oregon Book Award. Elena teaches at Oregon State University and appears weekly on Public Radio International’s LiveWire!

Aisha Sabatini Sloan

Aisha Sabatini Sloan is the author of The Fluency of Light and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit. She is a Visiting Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the Helen Zell Writers' program at the University of Michigan.

Naomi Iizuka

Naomi Iizuka’s plays include 36 Views, Polaroid Stories, Anon(ymous), Good Kids, and Language of Angels. Her plays have been produced at Berkeley Rep, the Goodman, the Guthrie, Actors Theatre of Louisville, and the Public Theatre, among others. She is an alumna of New Dramatists and the recipient of a PEN/Laura Pels Award, an Alpert Award, and a Whiting Award. Iizuka heads the MFA playwriting program at the University of California, San Diego.

Dan O’Brien

Dan O’Brien’s plays include The Body of an American, The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage, The Cherry Sisters Revisited, The Voyage of the Carcass, The Dear Boy, and many others. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama and Performance Art, the Horton Foote Prize for Outstanding New American Play, the inaugural Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama, two PEN America Awards for Drama, and the L. Arnold Weissberger Award. He is also a librettist and an award-winning poet.

Liliana Padilla

Liliana Padilla makes plays about sex, intersectional communities, and what it means to heal in a violent world. Their play, How to Defend Yourself won the 2019 Yale Drama Prize, is a 2018-19 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize Finalist, and was on the 2019 Kilroys List. Liliana's work has been developed with OSF, Ojai Playwrights Conference, Victory Gardens, INTAR, Hedgebrook, Seattle Rep, the Playwrights Center and San Diego REP. MFA: UC San Diego, BFA: NYU Tisch. They are also a director, actor, and community builder who looks at theatre as a laboratory for how we might be together.

Lloyd Suh

Lloyd Suh is the author of The Chinese Lady, Charles Francis Chan Jr., American Hwangap, and others. He is a recipient of the Helen Merrill Award and the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. He serves as Director of Artistic Programs at The Lark, and on the Dramatists Guild Council.