Lucy Ives

Lucy Ives is a novelist and critic. She has received a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, the Vermont Book Award in Creative Nonfiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. Her most recent books are Life Is Everywhere: A Novel, one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022, and An Image of My Name Enters America: Essays, one of New York Magazine’s best books of 2024; both titles were published by Graywolf Press. A former editor-in-chief of the online magazine and arts platform Triple Canopy,Ives writes frequently on the intersections of art, media studies, and literature. Her short prose has appeared in Aperture, Frieze, Granta, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, and Vogue, among other journals. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a PhD in comparative literature from New York University, served as the 2023–25 Bonderman Assistant Professor of the Practice at Brown University, and teaches in Cornell University’s low-residency Image Text MFA Program.

In May 2026, Siglio Press published Ives’s first artist’s book, three six five: prompts, acts, divinations (an inexhaustible compendium for writing), a year’s worth of exercises for creative practice and philosophical reflection. Writing in The New Yorker, David O’Neill described the collection as “both a guide and a work of literature in its own right…resembl[ing] a devotional text or a mood ring. Inside, each of the 365 exercises breathes on its own page.” three six five is one of The New Yorker’s “Best Books of 2026 So Far,” was featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon, and is currently in its second printing.

Ives sees writing as a means of exploring human intimacy and the influence of surrounding social infrastructures. In her courses at Middlebury, she hopes to delve into topics related to the ethics of memoir and description, as well as the fraught line(s) between fact and fiction. Her approach is interdisciplinary and multi-genre, reflecting her love of archival research and visual art. Please come chat with her if you’re interested in essays (all sorts), autofiction, memoir, criticism, uncategorizable prose, and, of course, novels.