2027 Faculty and Guests

Lauren Markham is a writer and journalist based in California whose work on environmental and social issues regularly appears in outlets such as Harper’s, Orion,the New York Review of Books, New York Times, and VQR, where she is a contributing editor. She is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life (2017), A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging (2024), which was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the California Book Award, and the Northern California Book Award, and Immemorial, longlisted for the Pen America Jean Stein Award and winner of the Northern California Book Award. She is currently working on her first novel. 

Elizabeth Rush is the author of The Quickening: Motherhood, Antarctica and Cultivating Hope in a Warming World and Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Rush’s work has appeared in a wide range of publications from the New York Times to Orion and Harpers. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, National Geographic, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Rush lives with her husband and children in Providence, Rhode Island, where she teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University.

Nathaniel Rich is the author of Cloudthief (2026) and three previous novels, all New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice selections. He has also written two works of nonfiction: Second Nature, which includes the story that serves as the basis for the film Dark Waters; and Losing Earth, a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. A Statement, a film adaptation of Losing Earth by the Academy-Award-winning director Tom McCarthy, will be released in 2027. Rich is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a frequent contributor to Harper’s and the New York Review of Books. A 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, he lives in New Orleans and teaches in the Program for Environmental Studies at Tulane University.

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Registers of Illuminated Villages (2018) and Seam (2014). Her writing has appeared widely in periodicals and magazines in the US and abroad and has been displayed at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere. Tarfia’s writing is translated into Spanish, Bengali, Persian, Chinese, Tamil, and other languages. Born in Brooklyn, NY to Bangladeshi immigrants and raised in Texas, Faizullah currently lives in Dallas.

John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie, finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award, and finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and the NAACP Image Award. His first full-length translation, Concerning the Angels is a book of poetry by the celebrated Spanish poet, Rafael Alberti. His other honors include the Four Quartets Prize from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from St. Mary’s College of Maryland, two Pushcart Prizes, two Larry Neal Writers Awards from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, an NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the New York Times, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.  Currently, he is professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College.

Nicole Sealey is author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, and an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She is also the author of Ordinary Beast, a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Sealey’s honors include the Princeton Arts and Hodder Fellowships from Princeton University, a Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from American Poetry Review, the Poetry International Prize, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She currently teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University.

Melissa Faliveno is the author of the novel Hemlock (2026) and the essay collection Tomboyland, named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, the New York Public Library, Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature, and Debutiful, and recipient of a 2021 Award for Outstanding Literary Achievement from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her work, which has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received notable selection in Best American Essays, has appeared in Esquire, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Prairie Schooner, Brevity, and Brooklyn Rail, among others, and in the anthologies Sex and the Single Woman (2022), Hit Repeat Until I Hate Music (2026),and Queer Flora, Fauna, and Funga: A Radical Forage Through Art and Writing (2026). She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina and lives in the woods outside Chapel Hill.  

Lydia Millet’s most recent book is Fair Ones: A Double Novel. Millet is the author of many fictions as well as a work of nonfiction called We Loved It All: A Memory of Life (2024). Her novel A Children’s Bible (2020) was a National Book Award finalist and a New York Times Book Review Best 10 Books of 2020; other books have been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, PEN Center USA, and as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in southern Arizona and works for the Center for Biological Diversity.