Faculty and Guests

Jenny Boully is a Guggenheim Fellow and the author of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life. She has two books of nonfiction forthcoming from Graywolf Press, close cover / strike gently and Parallax. She teaches at Bennington College. 

Paul Lisicky’s seven books include Later: My Life at the Edge of the World, The Narrow Door, and Unbuilt Projects. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Conjunctions, The Cut, Fence, the New York Times, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Rose Dorothea Award from the Provincetown Library. He is a Professor of English in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden, where he is Editor of StoryQuarterly. His seventh book, The Sky in It: A Life with Joni Mitchell, is forthcoming from HarperOne. He lives in Brooklyn.

Catherine Barnett is the author of three poetry collections, Human Hours; The Game of Boxes; and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2022 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches graduate and undergraduate students in the Creative Writing Program at New York University and lives in New York City, where she also works as an independent editor. Her fourth book of poems, Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space, will be published by Graywolf Press in May 2024.

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. His most recent 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, 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, New Republic, Tin House, 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.

Carmen Giménez joined Graywolf as Publisher and Director in August 2022. She was previously the founder and publisher of Noemi Press and professor of English at Virginia Tech University. A queer Latinx poet, she is the author of six collections of poetry, including Be Recorder, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, and Milk and Filth, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Book Award in Poetry. She has been awarded fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the Hermitage Foundation.

Sally Keith’s forthcoming book of poems, Two of Everything, will be 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 is a professor of English and Creative Writing at George Mason University’s MFA Program, where she also co-edits Poetry Daily.   

Adrian Matejka was born in Germany and grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. He is the author of The Devil’s Garden (2003) which won the New York / New England Award and Mixology (2009), a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series. His third book, The Big Smoke (2013), was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Big Smoke was also a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Map to the Stars, was published by Penguin in 2017. His mixed-media collaboration with Nicholas Galanin and Kevin Neireiter inspired by Funkadelic, Standing on the Verge & Maggot Brain, was published in 2021. His most recent collection of poems, Somebody Else Sold the World (2021), was a finalist for the UNT 2022 Rilke Prize and the 2022 Indiana Authors Award. His first graphic novel Last On His Feet: Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century was published in February 2023 by Liveright. Among Matejka’s other honors are fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and a Simon Fellowship from United States Artists. He served as Poet Laureate of the state of Indiana in 2018-19 and is Editor of Poetry magazine.

Mark Wunderlich is the author of four books of poems, the most recent of which is God of Nothingness, published by Graywolf Press. His other books include The Earth Avails, which received the Rilke Prize, Voluntary Servitude, and The Anchorage, which received the Lambda Literary Award.  He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Amy Lowell Trust, and elsewhere. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, and have been widely anthologized. He is Executive Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars graduate writing program in Vermont.  

Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of the novels Parakeet (New York Times Editor’s Choice) and 2 a.m. at The Cat’s Pajamas, as well as the short story collection Safe as Houses. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, Electric Literature, Granta, Guernica, BOMB, among others. Bertino’s awards include the PEN/O. Henry Prize, The Pushcart Prize, The Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Mississippi Review Prize, The Center for Fiction NYC Emerging Writers Fellowship, and The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, Ireland. In 2021, “Disrupting Realism,” an online class she designed for Electric Literature to make graduate level resources available at no charge, was attended by thirteen hundred people. She teaches Creative Writing at Yale University. Her fourth book, the novel Beautyland, will be published in January 2024 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

Jamel Brinkley is the author of Witness: Stories (2023), a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Fiction, and A Lucky Man: Stories (2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham 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, Yale Review, Guernica, Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, Glimmer Train, The Believer, and Tin House, and has been anthologized twice in Best American Short Stories. His work has also received support from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Lannan Foundation. He was a Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and has received a PEN/O. Henry Award and the Rome Prize. Raised in Brooklyn and the Bronx, he teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for many other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His second book, Cleanness, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and the Prix Sade, among others. A New York Times Notable Book, it was named a Best Book of 2020 by over thirty publications. A new novel, Small Rain, is forthcoming in September 2024. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the 2021 Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

Ladee Hubbard is the author of two novels: The Talented Ribkins—which received both the Ernest J. Gaines Award and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction—and The Rib King. Her collection of short stories, The Last Suspicious Holdout, was published in March 2022. She is a recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship and has also received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the American Academy in Berlin, MacDowell and Hedgebrook, among other organizations. She earned a B.A. in English from Princeton University, an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a Ph.D. in Folklore and Mythology from the University of California, Los Angeles. She currently lives in New Orleans. 

Samantha Hunt is the author of The Unwritten Book: An Investigation that explores our relationships with the dead; The Dark Dark: Stories, and three novels: Mr. Splitfoot, a ghost story, The Invention of Everything Else about the inventor Nikola Tesla, and The Seas, Hunt’s first novel, about a young woman who suspects she might be a mermaid, which was republished by Tin House Books in 2018 and became a bestseller. Hunt’s work has been translated into twelve languages, including Pro-tactile ASL. Hunt’s honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Hunt has also been honored with the St. Francis Literary Prize, the Bard Fiction Prize, and the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Prize. Her works were shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Hunt lives in upstate New York and teaches at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Mat Johnson is a Philip H. Knight Chair of Humanities at the University of Oregon. His publications include the novels Invisible Things and Pym, the nonfiction novella, The Great Negro Plot, and the graphic novel Incognegro. Johnson is the recipient of the American Book Award, the United States Artist James Baldwin Fellowship, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.

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 nine novels, including Eva Moves the Furniture, The Flight of Gemma Hardy and The Boy in the Field.  The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing was published in 2017.  She is a professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and goes back to Scotland whenever she can.  Her new novel, The Road from Belhaven, was published in February, 2024.

Rebecca Makkai is the author of this year’s New York Times bestselling I Have Some Questions for You, as well as the novels The Great Believers, The Borrower, The Hundred-Year House, and the collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize among other honors. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca teaches graduate fiction writing at Northwestern University and Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English; and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. She lives in Chicago and Vermont.

Dinaw Mengestu, a recipient of the 2012 MacArthur Foundation 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 and was named on the New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list in 2010. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fiction Fellowship, The Guardian First Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other awards. He is the author of four novels: The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2008), How to Read the Air (2010), All Our Names (2013), and the forthcoming Someone Like Us. His work has been translated into more than fifteen languages. He is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of the Written Arts program and the Center for Ethics and Writing at Bard College.

Helen Schulman is a novelist, screenwriter, and short story writer. Her newest novel, Lucky Dogs, was published in summer 2023. She is also the author of the novels Come With Me (San Francisco Chronicle ten best books of 2019), This Beautiful Life (a New York Times and international bestseller), A Day At The Beach, P.S. (made into a motion picture starring Laura Linney, Gabriel Byrne, Paul Rudd and Marcia Gay Harden and for which she has screenwriting credit), The Revisionist, and Out Of Time (Barnes and Noble Discovery Award), as well as the short story collection Not A Free Show. She co-edited the anthology Wanting A Child with Jill Bialosky. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such places as Vanity Fair, Time, Vogue, GQ, the New York Times Book Review, A Public Space, and the Paris Review. She is the Fiction Chair at The Writing Program at The New School where she is a tenured Professor of Writing.  She is also the Executive Director of WriteOnNYC.com. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, Schulman has been a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, a Sundance Fellow, an Aspen Words Fellow, a Tennessee Williams Fellow (Columbia University), and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize.

Xochitl Gonzalez is the New York Times bestselling author of Olga Dies Dreaming. Named a Best of 2022 by the New York Times, TIME, Kirkus, Washington Post, and NPR, Olga Dies Dreaming was the winner of the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize in Fiction and The New York City Book Awards. Her new novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, is forthcoming in March 2024 with Flatiron Books. As a staff writer for The Atlantic, she was recognized as a 2023 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. A native Brooklynite and proud public school graduate, Gonzalez holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.