2026 Faculty and Guests

Toni Jensen is the author of Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land, a Dayton Peace Prize finalist and a New York Times Editors’ Choice book. Jensen’s essays have appeared in magazines such as Orion, Catapult, and Ecotone. She is also the author of the story collection From the Hilltop. Jensen has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas. She is Métis.

Paul Lisicky’s seven books include Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell, Later: My Life at the Edge of the World, The Narrow Door, Unbuilt Projects, The Burning House, Famous Builder,and Lawnboy. His work has appeared The Atlantic, Conjunctions, The Cut, Fence, the New York Times Book Review, and Ploughshares, among other publications. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as the Rose Dorothea Award from the Provincetown Library. He is a Professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Camden, where he is Editor of StoryQuarterly. He divides his time between Brooklyn and Southern Louisiana. 

Catherine Barnett is the author of four poetry collections, including Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space, Human Hours, The Game of Boxes, and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced. A Guggenheim fellow, she received an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, teaches in NYU’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and works as an independent editor. 

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. His fourth book of poems, The Galleons, was published by Milkweed Editions and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His earlier collections include The Darker Fall, Want, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize, and Chord, all published by Sarabande Books. Chord received the UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, the Kenyon Review, and the New Yorker. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University. His most recent book of poems, Moving the Bones, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2024.  

Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation,the New Yorker, New Republic, Paris Review, Poetry, and Best American Poetry.  Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal. He is also the editor of the anthology How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill (2023), and The Selected Shepherd (2024), a retrospective on the work of poet Reginald Shepherd. Brown is also the author of The Tradition (2019), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University, a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer’s Award, a Lannan Foundation residency in  Marfa, TX, the Bernard F. Conners Prize from the Paris Review,and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. Calvocoressi’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals including The Baffler, New York Times, POETRY, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and the New Yorker. Calvocoressi is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures. Works in progress include a non-fiction book entitled, The Year I Didn’t Kill Myself and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard. Calvocoressi was the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for 2022 - 2023. Calvocoressi teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice. Their new collection of poetry, The New Economy, is a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry.

Camille T. Dungy is the author of America, A Love Story (2026). She has also written the memoir Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers, and four other collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award. Dungy edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, the first anthology to bring African American environmental poetry to national attention. She also co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology and served as assistant editor for Gathering Ground: Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, 100 Best African American Poems, Best American Essays, The 1619 Project, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, over 50 other anthologies; plus dozens of venues including the New Yorker; Poetry, Literary Hub, Paris Review, and Poets.org. You may know her as the host of Immaterial, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise. A University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, Dungy’s honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both prose and poetry.

Patrick Phillips has published four collections of poems, including Elegy for a Broken Machine (2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Song of the Closing Doors (2022). He has also written a work of nonfiction, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, which was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Smithsonian, and won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Phillips has received support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Carnegie Foundation, and he was recently a fellow at New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars. He lives in San Francisco and teaches writing and literature at Stanford University.

Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of the novels Beautyland, Parakeet, and 2 a.m. at the Cat’s Pajamas, and the short story collections Safe as Houses and Exit Zero. Beautyland was an American Book Award winner, a National Book Critics Circle Finalist, a New York Times Notable 100 and a Time Magazine Top 10 Book of 2024. A 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction, she has received the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, The Iowa Short Fiction Award, and The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, Ireland. She has taught for NYU, The New School, and Institute for American Indian Arts, and is currently the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence at Yale University. 

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. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2021 United Artists Fellow, he is previously a recipient of the Whiting Award and a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Prose, as well as residencies from MacDowell, Civitella Ranieri and the VCCA. A contributing editor for the New Republic and an editor at large for VQR, his stories and essays have appeared recently in T Magazine, the Sewanee Review, and Harper’s, among others. He was the guest editor for Best American Essays 2022. He is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College, and lives in Vermont, where he is at work on a new novel. 

Brock Clarke is the author of ten books, most recently the short story collection Special Election, the novel Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe?, and the essay collection I, Grape; or The Case for Fiction. His individual stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Boston Globe, Ploughshares,Virginia Quarterly Review, Sewanee Review, One Story, The Believer, Georgia Review, New England Review, Cincinnati Review, and Southern Review, as well as in the annual Best American Essays, Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. He lives in Portland, Maine, and is the A. LeRoy Greason Professor of English and Creative Writing at Bowdoin College.

Maria Hummel is the author of five novels, most recently Goldenseal (2024), which was longlisted for the Clark Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, as well as Still Lives (2018), a Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick, and Motherland (2014), a San Francisco Chronicle book of the year. Her poetry collection House and Fire was selected by Fanny Howe for the APR/Honickman Prize. Hummel worked for many years as an arts editor and journalist, and has taught creative writing at Colorado College, Stanford University, and the University of Vermont, where she is now a professor.

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of four novels, three collections of short stories, a memoir, and a book on writing. Her stories have won three Pushcart Prizes, two National Magazine Awards, and have appeared in five editions of The Best American Short Stories. 

Chigozie Obioma was born in Akure, Nigeria. His novels, The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019) were shortlisted for The Booker Prize. He is also the author of The Road to the Country (2024), a Joyce Carol Oates Prize finalist. His novels have been translated into more than 29 languages. They have won awards including the inaugural FT/Oppenheimer Award for Fiction, the NAACP Image Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, and the LA Times Book Prize, and been nominated for many others. The Fishermen was adapted into an award-winning stage play by Gbolahan Obisesan that played in the UK and South Africa between 2018-2019. Obioma was named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2015 and is the Helen S. Lanier Professor of Creative Writing and English at the University of Georgia and the program director of the Oxbelly Fiction Writers retreat. He divides his time between the US and Nigeria.

Chinelo Okparanta is the author of Happiness, Like Water, Under the Udala Trees, Harry Sylvester Bird, and the forthcoming This Impossible Life. Her honors include two Lambda Literary Awards, an O. Henry Prize, and finalist selections for the International DUBLIN Literary Award, the NAACP Image Award in Fiction, the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative in Literature, among others. She has been long listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. In 2017 Okparanta was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, and in 2018 she served as a fiction judge for the U.S. National Book Awards. She is currently Associate Professor of English Literature and Director of the Creative Writing program at Swarthmore College.

Rion Amilcar Scott is the author of the story collections The World Doesn’t Require You and Insurrections, which was awarded the 2017 PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020,and McSweeney’s Quarterly, among other publications.

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. His latest novel, The Zebras of Tijuana, is forthcoming from Little, Brown & Co.

Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the novel, Monster in the Middle, which was published in 2021 and on numerous best of the year lists. It was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards and the Townsend Prize. Tiphanie is also the author of the poetry collection, Wife, which won the Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the United Kingdom’s Forward/Felix Dennis Prize for a First Collection, the novel, Land of Love and Drowning, which won the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award.  Land of Love and Drowning was also a finalist for the Orion Award in Environmental Literature and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.  She is the author of a collection of stories, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, which won her a listing as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 and the Bocas Prize in Fiction. Her writing has won the Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, an Academy of American Poet’s Prize, and two Fulbright Scholarships. Tiphanie is from the Virgin Islands and is Professor at Emory University.