Faculty and Guests

Jennifer Finney Boylan is the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University. Her column appears on the op-ed page of the New York Times on alternate Wednesdays. Author of sixteen books, her 2003 memoir She’s Not There was the first bestselling work by a transgender American. She serves on the Board of Trustees of PEN America, the nonprofit advocating for authors, readers, and freedom of expression. From 2011 to 2018 she served on the Board of Directors of GLAAD, acting as co-chair from 2013-17.

Jane Brox‘s fifth book, Silence, was published in January 2019, and was selected as an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review. Her previous book, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2010 by Time magazine.  She is also the author of Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm, Five Thousand Days Like This One, and Here and Nowhere Else. Brox’s essays have appeared in many journals and magazines, including the Georgia Review and NewYorker.com, and they’ve been anthologized in Best American Essays, The Norton Book of Nature Writing, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She has been awarded grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is on the faculty of Lesley University’s low-residency MFA Program and lives in Maine. 

Reyna Grande is the author of the bestselling memoir, The Distance Between Us, where she writes about her life before and after coming from Mexico to the United States as an undocumented immigrant. The much-anticipated sequel, A Dream Called Home, was released in October 2018. Her other works include the novels, Across a Hundred Mountains and Dancing with Butterflies, which were published to critical acclaim. Her books have been adopted as the common read selection by schools, colleges and cities across the country. Reyna has received an American Book Award, the El Premio Aztlán Literary Award, and the International Latino Book Award. In 2012, she was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, and in 2015 she was honored with a Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature. The young reader’s version of The Distance Between Us received a 2017 Honor Book Award for the Américas Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature, a 2016 Eureka! Honor Awards from the California Reading Association, and an International Literacy Association Children’s Book Award 2017. Currently, she teaches creative writing, travels across the country and abroad to give presentations about her books, and is at work on her next book.

Reginald Dwayne Betts transformed himself from a sixteen-year old kid sentenced to nine-years in prison to a critically acclaimed writer and graduate of the Yale Law School. He has written three collections of poetry, Bastards of the Reagan Era, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, and, most recently, Felon. His memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison won the 2010 NAACP Image Award. Named a 2018 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Betts’s writing has generated national attention and earned him a Soros Justice Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Ruth Lily Fellowship, and a New America Fellowship. Betts has been featured in the New York Times, New Yorker, and the Washington Post. He has also been interviewed on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, The Travis Smiley Show and others. He holds a B.A. from the University of Maryland; an MFA from Warren Wilson College, where he was a Holden Fellow; and, a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was awarded the Israel H. Perez Prize for best student note or comment appearing in the Yale Law Journal. He is a PhD in Law candidate at Yale University and as a Liman Fellow, he spent a year representing clients in the New Haven Public Defender’s Office.

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, Texas, 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 teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Carrboro, North Carolina, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice. 

Victoria Chang’s latest book of poems is OBIT, her middle grade verse novel, Love, Love, and a book of essays, are all forthcoming. Her other poetry books are Barbie Chang, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle.  Her children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, was named a New York Times Notable Book. She has also published a middle grade novel, Love, Love. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a MacDowell Fellowship. She serves as the program chair for Antioch’s low-residency MFA program in creative writing. She lives in Los Angeles with her family. 

Vievee Francis is the author of three books of poetry: Blue-Tail Fly; Horse in the Dark (winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize for a second collection); and Forest Primeval (winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the 2017 Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award). Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including Poetry, Best American Poetry 2010, 2014, 2017, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She has been a participant in the Cave Canem Workshops, a Poet-in-Residence for the Alice Lloyd Scholars Program at the University of Michigan, and teaches poetry writing in the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop (USA, UK, and Barbados). In 2009 she received a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and in 2010, a Kresge Fellowship. She serves as an associate editor of Callaloo and an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Jennifer Grotz, Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, is the author of three books of poetry: Cusp, The Needle, and most recently, Window Left Open. Also a translator, her Psalms of All My Days, translations from the French poet Patrice de La Tour du Pin, appeared in 2014. Rochester Knockings, by the Tunisian novelist Hubert Haddad, appeared in 2015. With the poet and translator Piotr Sommer, she has recently co-translated from the Polish Everything I Don’t Know, the selected poems of Jerzy Ficowski, forthcoming this spring from World Poetry Books. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, she teaches poetry and translation at the University of Rochester.

A. Van Jordan is the author of four collections: Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (2001); M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, (2005), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by the London Times; Quantum Lyrics, (2007); and The Cineaste, (2013). Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), a United States Artists Fellowship (2009), and a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry (2015). He has taught at a number of institutions including, Prince George’s Community College, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, The University of Texas at Austin, where he was tenured as an Associate Professor, Rutgers University-Newark where he served as the Henry Rutgers Presidential Professor, and at the University of Michigan, where he currently serves as the Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor. 

Matthew Olzmann is the author of two collections of poems, Mezzanines, which was selected for the Kundiman Prize; and Contradictions in the Design, both from Alice James Books. He’s been awarded fellowships from Kundiman, the Kresge Arts Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. His writing has appeared in Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Brevity and elsewhere. Currently, he teaches at Dartmouth College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Carl Phillips is the author of 15 books of poetry, most recently Pale Colors in a Tall Field (2020) and Wild Is the Wind (2018), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Other honors include the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the Academy of American Poets, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Phillips has also written two prose books: The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination (2014) and Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry (2004); and he has translated the Philoctetes of Sophocles (2004). He is Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.

Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Octopus Museum (2019). 2012’s Our Andromeda was a New York Times’ 100 Notable Book, a finalist for the Griffin International Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Prize. She received a 2018 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2013 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The Nation, New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark and lives in Verona, New Jersey. 

Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of four books of poems, Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey (BOA, 2021); The Trembling Answers (BOA, 2017), which won the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; To Keep Love Blurry (BOA, 2012); and Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems, (CLP, 2007), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry. He is also the author of a collection of essays, We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress. He edited Once and For All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz, teaches at New York University and the Bennington Writing Seminars, and works as Digital Director of the Paris Review.

Paisley Rekdal is the author of Appropriate: A Provocation, which examines cultural appropriation; a book-length essay, The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam, which won the 2016 AWP Nonfiction Prize; The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee;  the hybrid photo-text memoir Intimate; and six books of poetry: Nightingale, which re-writes many of the myths in Ovid’s The Metamorphoses; A Crash of Rhinos; Six Girls Without Pants; The Invention of the Kaleidoscope; Animal Eye, a finalist for the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Prize and winner of the UNT Rilke Prize; and Imaginary Vessels, finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Prize and the Washington State Book Award. She is the guest editor for Best American Poetry 2020. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship, and various state arts council awards. She teaches at the University of Utah and is Utah’s Poet Laureate.

Charles Baxter is the author of six books of stories and six novels. He was the general editor for The Art of … series for Graywolf press. His newest novel, The Sun Collective, was published in November, 2020. He has taught in the Warren Wilson MFA program for writers and at the University of Minnesota, and he lives in Minneapolis.

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh, and most recently, the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. He is a winner of the Whiting Award and his stories and essays have appeared recently in Best American Essays 2016, T Magazine, New Yorker, Yale Review, and Sewanee Review, among others. He is a critic at large for the Los Angeles Times and an editor at large for New Republic and Virginia Quarterly Review. He teaches at Dartmouth College. 

Peter Ho Davies’ books include A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself and The Fortunes, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Award and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He is also the author of The Welsh Girl, long-listed for the Booker Prize and a London Times bestseller, as well as two critically acclaimed collections of short stories. His fiction has appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and Granta and been anthologized in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. A recipient of the PEN/Macmillan and PEN/Malamud Awards, he was born in Britain to Welsh and Chinese parents and teaches at the University of Michigan.    

Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea; A Seahorse Year; The Sky Below; and Wonderland; and the nonfiction book The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between. She is a former Stegner Fellow, the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the winner of an Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation. Her essays, features, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New York Times Book Review, New Yorker, Boston Review, Bookforum, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among other publications. She was a Frederick Lewis Allen Room Fellow at the New York Public Library for 2016-17. She is an Associate Professor of Writing and Publishing Practices at Fordham University.

Lauren Groff is the author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers, Delicate Edible Birds, a collection of stories, and Arcadia, a New York Times Notable Book, winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, and finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award. Her third novel, Fates and Furies, was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kirkus Award. It won the 2015 American Booksellers’ Association Indies’ Choice Award for Fiction, was a New York Times Notable book and Bestseller, Amazon.com’s #1 book of 2015, and on over two dozen best-of 2015 lists. It also received the 2016 American Bookseller Association’s Indies’ Choice Award for Adult Fiction and, in France, the Madame Figaro Grand Prix de l’Héroïne. Rights have been sold in thirty countries. Her most recent collection of stories, Florida, was released in June 2018. It won the Story Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, Kirkus Prize, and the Southern Book Prize. Her work has appeared in journals including the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Tin House, One Story, and Ploughshares, and in the anthologies 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and five editions of the Best American Short Stories. In 2017, she was named by Granta Magazine as one of the Best of Young American Novelists of her generation. In 2018, she received a Guggenheim fellowship in Fiction and a Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She lives in Gainesville, Florida with her husband, two sons, and dog.

Margot Livesey grew up in a boys’ private school in the Scottish Highlands where her father taught, and her mother, Eva, was the school nurse. After taking a B.A. in English and philosophy at the University of York in England she spent most of her twenties working in shops and restaurants and learning to write. Her first book, a collection of stories called Learning By Heart, was published by Penguin Canada in 1986. Since then Margot has published nine novels: The Boy in the Field, Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona, The House on Fortune Street, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, and Mercury. The Hidden Machinery, a collection of essays on writing, was published by Tin House Books in 2017. Margot has taught at Boston University, Bowdoin College, Brandeis University, Carnegie Mellon, Cleveland State, Emerson College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tufts University, the University of California at Irvine, the Warren Wilson College MFA program for writers, and Williams College. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the N.E.A., the Massachusetts Artists’ Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts. Margot is currently teaching at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives with her husband, a painter, in Cambridge, MA, and goes back to London and Scotland whenever she can.

Ana Menéndez has published four books of fiction: Adios, Happy Homeland!; The Last War;  Loving Che; and In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, whose title story won a Pushcart Prize. She has worked as a journalist in the United States and abroad, lastly as a prize-winning columnist for The Miami Herald. As a reporter, she wrote about Cuba, Haiti, Kashmir, Afghanistan, as well as India, where she was based for three years. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Vogue, Bomb Magazine, New York Times and Tin House and has been included in several anthologies, including the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. A former Fulbright Scholar in Egypt, she now works at Florida International University in Miami.

Dinaw Mengestu, a recipient of the 2012 MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, was born in Ethiopia and raised in Illinois. His fiction and journalism have been published in the New Yorker, Granta, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times. Mengestu was chosen for the 5 under 35 Award by the National Book Foundation in 2007 and was named on the New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list in 2010. He is also the recipient of a Lannan Fiction Fellowship, The Guardian First Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other awards. He is the author of three novels: The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2008), How to Read the Air (2010), and All Our Names. His work has been translated into more than fifteen languages.

Elizabeth Nunez immigrated to the U.S. from Trinidad after completing high school. She is the award-winning author of a memoir and nine novels, four of them selected as New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her two most recent books are Not for Everyday Use, a memoir, and Even in Paradise, a novel.  Not for Everyday Use won the 2015 Hurston Wright Legacy Award for nonfiction and is an Oprah online book club selection. Even in Paradise, was an O, the Oprah Magazine and Essence Magazine selection. Nunez’s other novels are: Boundaries, nominated for the 2012 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Fiction; Anna In-Between which won the PEN Oakland Award for Literary Excellence and was long-listed for an IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award; Prospero’s Daughter which was 2006 Novel of the Year for Black Issues Book Review and for Mosaic Magazine. Her novel, Bruised Hibiscus, won an American Book Award, and Beyond `the Limbo Silence won the Independent Publishers Book Award.  Her other novels include Grace; Discretion, short-listed for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and When Rocks Dance. She is co-editor of the anthology Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad. Nunez is the co-founder of the National Black Writers Conference and was director for fourteen years. She is executive producer of the New York Emmy-nominated CUNY-TV series Black Writers in America and has served on the jury for national and international literary prizes/awards, including the international Dublin IMPAC Literary prize, the Ernest Gaines Literary prize, and the Fulbright Award for Creative Writing. Nunez received her PhD in English Literature from New York University and is currently a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, the City University of New York. 

Jess Row is the author of the novel Your Face in Mine, a book of essays, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination, and two collections of short stories, The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, and Granta, and he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Whiting Writers Award. He teaches writing at the College of New Jersey, serves on the curatorial board of the Racial Imaginary Institute, and is a senior dharma teacher in the Kwan Um School of Zen.

 

Marisa Silver’s most recent novel, The Mysteries, was published in May. She is the author of six other works of fiction, including the novels Mary Coin, a New York Times Bestseller, and Little Nothing, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker and The Atlantic.com, as well as other publications and has been included in Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry Prize Stories. Silver has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She teaches at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Laura van den Berg is the author of the story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth, and the novels Find Me and The Third Hotel, a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. She is the recipient of a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, a PEN/O. Henry Prize, MacDowell Colony and Civitella Ranieri fellowships, and is a two-time finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her most recent collection, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, was published by FSG in 2020 and named a “best summer read” by the New York Times, Time Magazine, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, and Entertainment Weekly, among others. Born and raised in Florida, Laura splits her time between Central Florida and the Boston area, where she is a faculty member of the creative writing program at Harvard.

Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the short story collection, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, the picture book I Am the Virgin Islands, the novel Land of Love and Drowning, and a collection of poems, Wife. BookPage listed her as one of the Fourteen Women to watch out for in 2014. Her writing has won the 2011 and the 2016 BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Fiction, the Forward/Felix Dennis Prize, Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, and an Academy of American Poet’s Prize. She has been listed by the Boston Globe as one of the sixteen cultural figures to watch out for and has received a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 award. A Fulbright Fellowship recipient, she has published in American Short Fiction, Best African American Fiction, Wall Street Journal, and other places. Her new novel Monster in the Middle is forthcoming in October 2021.

Paul Yoon is the author, most recently, of the novel, Run Me to Earth. His other works are Once the Shore, which was a New York Times Notable Book; The Mountain, which was a NPR Best Book of the Year; and Snow Hunters, which won the Young Lions Fiction Award.

Dean Bakopoulos’ first novel, Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon, was a New York Times Notable Book; A WGA screenwriter, Dean co-wrote the critically-acclaimed film adaptation. His most recent novel is the bestselling Summerlong, now in development as a television series. The winner of a Guggenheim and two NEA fellowships, Bakopoulos is writer-in-residence at Grinnell College and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program. He also teaches an MFA-level workshop in TV writing each fall at the University of Iowa. Bakopoulos is an executive producer of the HBO Max series, Made for Love, based on the novel by Alissa Nutting.