Faculty
Fiction Faculty
Chris Bachelder
Jamel Brinkley
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Adrianne Harun
Vanessa Hua
Katie Kitamura
Jill McCorkle
Claire Messud
Jess Walter
Stephanie Powell Watts
Nonfiction Faculty
Alexander Chee
Amitava Kumar
Elena Passarello
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Playwriting 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. He was awarded a Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. He currently teaches at the University of Iowa.
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.
Vanessa Hua
Vanessa Hua is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of A River of Stars and Deceit and Other Possibilities. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, her honors include the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and Steinbeck Fellowship, among others.
Katie Kitamura
Katie Kitamura’s latest novel is Intimacies. She is also the author of 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 in the Creative Writing Program at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.
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Jill McCorkle
Jill McCorkle is the author of seven novels and four story collections; her latest novel is Hieroglyphics. 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.
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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.
Poetry
Tarfia Faizullah
Tarfia Faizullah is the author of two poetry collections Registers of Illuminated Villages and Seam. Her writing appears widely in the U.S. and abroad in the Daily Star, Hindu Business Line, BuzzFeed, PBS News Hour, Huffington Post, Poetry, Ms. Magazine, the Academy of American Poets, Oxford American, the New Republic, the Nation, Halal If You Hear Me, and has been displayed at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere.
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 Centennial Professor of English, Emeritus at Vanderbilt University.
Nate Marshall
Nate Marshall is the author and editor of numerous works including Finna, Wild Hundreds, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, and the audio drama Bruh Rabbit & The Fantastic Telling of Remington Ellis Esq. He teaches creative writing and literature at Colorado College.
Carl Phillips
Carl Phillips is the author of fifteen books of poetry, most recently Pale Colors in a Tall Field (FSG, 2020). His other books include Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018), The Tether (FSG, 2002), Double Shadow (FSG, 2012), and Silverchest (FSG, 2014). He recently published a chapbook, Star Map with Action Figures (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019).
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.
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.
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's writing about race and current events is often coupled with analysis of art, film, and pop culture. She is the author of The Fluency of Light and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, as well as the forthcoming book-length essay, Borealis, and Captioning the Archives, an image/text collaboration with her father. A 2020 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at University of Michigan.
Playwriting
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.
