Faculty
Fiction Faculty
Chris Bachelder
Venita Blackburn
Vanessa Hua
Holly Goddard Jones
Katie Kitamura
Michael Knight
Ayana Mathis
Jill McCorkle
Claire Messud
M.O. Walsh
Nonfiction Faculty
Amitava Kumar
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
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.
Venita Blackburn
Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared or are forthcoming in 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.
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.
Holly Goddard Jones
Holly Goddard Jones is the author of four books: Antipodes: Stories, forthcoming from Iowa in 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 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.
Michael Knight
Michael Knight is the author of three novels, three collections of short stories and a book of novellas. His fiction has appeared in places like The New Yorker, Oxford American, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Sewanee Review and The Southern Review and he teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee.
Ayana Mathis
Ayana Mathis received her MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop where she became the first African-American woman to hold the position of Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing. Mathis’s first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Knopf, 2012), was a New York Times Bestseller, a 2013 New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 and was long listed for the Dublin Literary Award and nominated for Hurston/Wright Foundation's Legacy Award. Her second novel, A Violent Woman, is forthcoming with Knopf.
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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.
M.O. Walsh
M.O. Walsh is the author of three books, including the novel My Sunshine Away, which was a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Pat Conroy Book Prize for Southern Fiction. His stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Southern Review, Oxford American, Garden and Gun, New York Times and others. His latest novel is The Big Door Prize. He currently directs the Creative Writing Workshop MFA program at the University of New Orleans.
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 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
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.
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 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
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.
