Faculty and Guests

Jennifer Ackerman has been writing about science and nature for more than three decades. Her most recent book, What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds, explores recent findings on the biology, behavior, and conservation of owls. An instant New York Times bestseller, it was selected as a best book of 2023 by the New York Times, The Economist, The Times (UK), and NPR’s Science Friday. Her previous book, The Bird Way, was a finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Jennifer’s bestselling The Genius of Birds has been translated into twenty-eight languages and was named one of the best nonfiction books of 2016 by the Wall Street Journal, a Best Science Book by NPR’s Science Friday, and a Nature Book of the Year by the Sunday Times (UK). Her other books include Birds by the Shore, Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream, and Chance in the House of Fate. Jennifer’s articles and essays have appeared in National Geographic, New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, and many other publications. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Institute, and a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Nathaniel Rich is the author of the award-winning Losing Earth and Second Nature, which features the story “Dark Waters,” adapted into a film starring Mark Ruffalo, and the novels King Zeno and Odds Against Tomorrow. Rich is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and teaches at Tulane University.

Abe Streep is the author of Brothers on Three: A True Story of Family, Resistance, and Hope on a Reservation in Montana, a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick and winner of the Montana Book Award and the New Mexico-Arizona General Nonfiction Book Award. He writes for publications including the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, ProPublica, and Outside, where he is a contributing editor. He is a recipient of the American Mosaic Journalism Prize and his writing has been anthologized in the Best American Sports Writing, and noted by the Best American Science and Nature Writing and the Best American Essays. 

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. With poet Nicole Sealey, he edited the anthology Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters and Poems, for and About One Mr. Komunyakaa. 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 was born in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the 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, 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. With poet John Murillo, she edited the anthology Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters and Poems, for and About One Mr. Komunyakaa. Her 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 the 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 teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University. 

Lydia Millet is the author of more than a dozen novels and short story collections as well as a work of nonfiction called We Loved It All: A Memory of Life (2024). Her other recent books include Dinosaurs (2022) and A Children’s Bible (2020), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction and one of the New York Times Book Review’s Best 10 Books of 2020. Millet has won fiction awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and PEN-Center USA, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; since 1999 she has also worked as a writer and editor at the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona. A new story collection, Atavists, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in April. 

Luis Alberto Urrea, a Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist, is the author of nineteen books, winning numerous awards for his poetry, fiction and essays. His latest novel, Good Night Irene, was an instant New York Times bestseller and is based on his mother’s service as a Red Cross “Donut Dolly” serving troops on the frontlines of the European theater in WWII. The Devil’s Highway, Urrea’s 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. His novel, The House of Broken Angels, was a 2018 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction award for his collection of short stories, The Water Museum, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Urrea’s novel Into the Beautiful North is a Big Read selection of the National Endowment of the Arts. He is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.