Faculty
Fiction Faculty
Chris Bachelder
Jamel Brinkley
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Adrianne Harun
Katie Kitamura
Jill McCorkle
Claire Messud
Jess Walter
Stephanie Powell Watts
Poetry Faculty
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. 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.
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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.
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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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
