2027 Faculty and Guests

Jennifer Croft won a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel The Extinction of Irena Rey, the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick, and the 2018 International Booker Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is also the winner of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and the author of the 2026 memoir Notes on Postcards. Her most recent translation is of Spanish author Lucía Solla Sobral’s You Will Eat Flowers (2027). She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with her husband and young twins. 

Melissa Febos is the national bestselling author of five books, including Abandon Me, Girlhood—which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, and The Dry Season. Her debut novel, The Critic, is forthcoming in 2028. Her awards and fellowships include those from the Guggenheim Foundation, LAMBDA Literary, the National Endowment for the Arts, The British Library, The Black Mountain Institute, MacDowell, the Bogliasco Foundation, The American Library in Paris, and others. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, New Yorker, The Sun, the New York Times Magazine, Best American Essays, The Year’s Best Sports Writing, Vogue, and the New York Review of Books. Febos is a Roy J. Carver Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program. She lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.

Eduardo C. Corral is the son of Mexican immigrants. He’s the author of Guillotine, published by Graywolf Press, and Slow Lightning, which won the Yale Younger Poets Competition. He’s the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. He teaches in the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis. 

Vievee Francis is the author of four books of poetry: The Shared World (2023); Forest Primeval (2015), winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Horse in the Dark (2012), winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize; and Blue-Tail Fly (2006). Forthcoming are a memoir, Ugly, and her fifth volume of poetry, Cleaning the Houses of the Dead. Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, textbooks, and anthologies including Poetry, Best American Poetry, spin.com, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. Born in West Texas and raised in Metropolitan Detroit, Francis, along with composer Jonathan Berger and artist Enrico Riley, wrote the libretto for the transdisciplinary opera The Ritual of Breath. She received a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. She has also been the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award and a Kresge Fellowship. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.

Sally Keith’s most recent book of poems, Two of Everything, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2024. Her previous collections of poetry include River House (2015); Fact of the Matter (2012); Dwelling Song (2004); and Design, winner of the 2000 Colorado Prize in Poetry. A Guggenheim Fellow, her poetry has appeared in the New York Times, New England Review, Conjunctions,and A Public Space. She teaches for Warren Wilson Low-Residency MFA and is Professor of English and Creative Writing at George Mason University’s MFA Program, where she co-edits Poetry Daily.

Sandra Lim’s latest collection of poetry is The Givens, which is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2027. Her previous books include The Curious Thing (2021); The Wilderness(2014), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize selected by Louise Glück; and Loveliest Grotesque (2006). Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York Review of Books, Yale Review, New Republic, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Jackson Poetry Prize, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Levis Reading Prize, as well as fellowships from MacDowell and the Hawthornden Foundation. In 2023, she was named Distinguished University Professor at UMass Lowell, where she teaches creative writing and literature. Born in Seoul, South Korea, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route as well as two previous collections of poetry. His next book An Oral History of the Flat Earth is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2027. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olzmann’s poems have appeared in the New York Times, Best American Poetry, Pushcart Prizes, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at Dartmouth College and is poetry editor for New England Review.

Carl Phillips’s books of poems include SIR (2027); Scattered Snows, to the North (2024), winner of the Zora/Legacy Award; and Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 (2022), which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. Other honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (2022). He lives in Massachusetts.

Charles Baxter is the author of sixteen books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His most recent novel is Blood Test: a Comedy, published by Pantheon/Vintage in 2024. He has taught at Wayne State, the University of Michigan, and the University of Minnesota. His fiction has been widely anthologized and translated. He lives in Minneapolis.

Jamel Brinkley is the author of Witness: Stories, winner of the Maya Angelou Book Award, and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. A Lucky Man: Stories was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and winner of a PEN Oakland Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His writing has appeared in A Public Space, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: All-Story, Paris Review, American Short Fiction, and the Yale Review, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories. He was a Carol Houck Smith Fellow (Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing), a Wallace Stegner Fellow (Stanford University), and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award (American Academy of Arts and Letters), the Rome Prize in Literature, and an O. Henry Award. Raised in Brooklyn and the Bronx, he divides his time between Iowa City and New York, and teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Christopher Castellani is the author of five novels, most recently Last Seen (2026), for which he received a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. For his fourth novel, Leading Men (2019), he received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell, and the Mass Cultural Council, among others. In 2016, Graywolf Press published The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story, Christopher’s book of essays on narration in fiction, which is taught in many writing workshops. He is a longtime member of the fiction faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers and serves as the chair of the Literary Arts panel at YoungArts. The current Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University, he lives in Boston and Provincetown, MA. 

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (2019) and The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (2022), which won the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize, the 2024 Clark Fiction Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Fiction. His short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, Sewanee Review, VQR, and A Public Space, and they have been anthologized in the O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories,and A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Princeton University. His second novel and story collection are forthcoming with Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG). 

Laila Lalami is the author of six books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; The Other Americans, which won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction; and The Dream Hotel, which was a national bestseller, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize, and was a finalist for the Edgar Award. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. Currently, she is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles.  

Margot Livesey grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands and has taught in numerous writing programs including Emerson College, Boston University, Bowdoin College and the Warren Wilson low residency MFA program. She is the author of a collection of stories and ten novels, including Eva Moves the Furniture, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, The Boy in the Field and, most recently, The Road from Belhaven. The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing was published in 2017.  She is an Emeritus Professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and goes back to Scotland whenever she can.

Dinaw Mengestu is the author of four novels, Someone Like Us (2024), All Our Names (2014), How To Read the Air (2010), and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007), all New York Times Notable Books. Mengestu is also a freelance journalist who has reported about life in Darfur, northern Uganda, and eastern Congo. His articles and fiction have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, and Rolling Stone. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lannan Fellowship for Fiction, The Guardian First Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. His work has been translated into more than fifteen languages. He holds a BA from Georgetown University and an MFA from Columbia University. He is the director of the Written Arts Program at Bard College and the director of the Center for Ethics and Writing. 

Hanna Pylväinen is the author of the novels We Sinners, which received the Whiting Award, and The End of Drum-Time, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Chicago Tribune, and the Wall Street Journal; she has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a Princeton Arts Fellowship, and a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, among others. Currently, she is the Zell Visiting Professor of Prose at the University of Michigan; she also teaches at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. Her third novel, Death Party, is forthcoming from Viking in 2027.

Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of The Five Wounds, winner of the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The novel was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, and the Lambda Literary Award. Her collection, Night at the Fiestas, won the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” award. Quade has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. She teaches at Princeton.

Emily Raboteau is a novelist, essayist, and critic whose most recent book, Lessons for Survival, was shortlisted for the Anisfield Wolf Award, the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, and the ASLE Book Award. Her previous books include Searching for Zion and The Professor’s Daughter. A contributing editor at Orion and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, Raboteau’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York Times, New York, The Nation, O, The Oprah Magazine, Ploughshares, Best American Travel Writing, Best American Science and Nature Writing, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing as a professor at the City College of New York (CUNY) and lives with her family in the Bronx.