Faculty and Guests

Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of eighteen books, including the bestselling Mad Honey, co-written with Jodi Picoult. She is the Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University, and this year is a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.  For many years she was Contributing Opinion Writer for the New York Times, as well as the national co-chair of GLAAD, Inc., the nonprofit advocating for LGBTQ equality through the media. At present she is a Trustee of PEN America, as well as a member of the faculty of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. Jenny’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, Washington Post, LitHub, and in many other venues. She lives with her wife Deirdre in Maine, New York, Cambridge, and Ireland.

Elisa Gabbert is the author of six collections of poetry, essays, and criticism: Normal Distance; The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays, a New York Times Editors’ Pick and finalist for the Colorado Book Award; The Word Pretty; L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems; The Self Unstable; and The French Exit. She writes the “On Poetry” column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, the New Yorker, The Believer, the New York Times Magazine, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, A Public Space, The Nation, Paris Review Daily, American Poetry Review, and many others. Her next collection of nonfiction, Any Person Is the Only Self, will be out in 2024 from FSG.

David Treuer, bestselling author, is Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, three Minnesota Book Awards, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Bush Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, was a 2019 finalist for both the National Book Award and Carnegie Medal. He published his first major work of nonfiction, Rez Life, in 2012. His novels include Little (1995); The Hiawatha (1999); The Transition of Dr Apelles (2006), a Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post, Time Out, and City Pages; and Prudence (2015). His essays and stories have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Granta, Harper’s, Esquire, TriQuarterly, the Washington Post, Lucky Peach, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Orion, and Slate.com. He divides his time between his home on the Leech Lake Reservation and Los Angeles, where he is a Professor of English at University of Southern California.

Erin Belieu is the author of numerous poetry collections, all from Copper Canyon Press, including Black Box, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Slant Six, chosen as one of the New York Times’s Book Critics’ Favorite books of 2014, and 2021’s Come-Hither Honeycomb. Belieu’s poems have appeared in places such as the New Yorker, Poetry, the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and have been selected for multiple appearances in the Best American Poetry anthology series. A Rona Jaffe Fellow, winner of the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers award, and AWP’s George Garrett Prize, Belieu is the founder of the literary resistance network Writers Resist. With the poet Carl Phillips, she is presently co-editing an anthology, Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems That Matter Most, forthcoming from Copper Canyon in fall of 2023. Originally from Omaha, Nebraska, Belieu lives in Houston and is on the faculty of the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program.

Victoria Chang’s forthcoming book of poems, With My Back to the World will be published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Her latest book of poetry is The Trees Witness Everything (2022). Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory, was published in 2021. OBIT (2020), her prior book of poems was named a New York Times Notable Book, a Time Magazaine Must-Read Book, and received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was also longlisted for a National Book Award and named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and lives in Los Angeles and is the Acting Program Chair and faculty member within Antioch’s low-residency MFA Program. She is also the Poetry Editor for the New York Times Magazine.

Vievee Francis was born in San Angelo, Texas in 1963. A brief Americorps worker as a young woman in Metropolitan Detroit, she is currently the author of four books of poetry: Blue-Tail Fly (2006); Horse in the Dark, winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize for a second collection (2016); Forest Primeval, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the 2017 Kingsley-Tufts Award; and The Shared World, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press in 2022. She most recently received the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including Poetry, Best American Poetry (2010, 2014, 2017, 2019, 2020, and 2022), The Common, spin.com, and the landmark anthology, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. A Cave Canem participant and Callaloo Fellow, she has served as an Associate Editor for Callaloo, and is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.

Tomás Q. Morín is the author of the poetry collections Machete, Patient Zero, and A Larger Country, which was a runner-up for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award and received the APR/Honickman Prize. He is also the author of the memoir Let Me Count the Ways. He translated Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu, as well as the libretto Pancho Villa from a Safe Distance. With Mari L’Esperance he co-edited Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine. He is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry and a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in prose. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Poetry, Slate, and Boston Review. He teaches at Rice University and Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route, as well as two previous collections of poetry: Mezzanines, selected for the 2011 Kundiman Prize, and Contradictions in the Design. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olzmann’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry, the New York Times, the Pushcart Prizes, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Carl Phillips is the author of sixteen books of poetry, most recently Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 (2022) and Wild Is the Wind (2018), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Other honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, 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 American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (2022); and he has translated the Philoctetes of Sophocles (2004). He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Patrick Phillips is the author of four books of poems, including Song of the Closing Doors (2022) and Elegy for a Broken Machine (2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has also written a book of nonfiction, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (2016), which won an American Book Award and was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Smithsonian. His other honors include Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Carnegie Foundation fellowships, and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. Phillips teaches at Stanford University and is currently a fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library.

Dean Bakopoulos is the author of the novels Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon, My American Unhappiness, and Summerlong. The winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and NEA fellowships in both fiction and nonfiction, Bakopoulos is writer-in-residence at Grinnell College and on the faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. A WGA screenwriter, he co-wrote the film adaptation of his first novel and is co-creator and executive producer of the HBO/MAX series Made for Love. Bakopoulos is currently developing several new projects for film and television, including Goodwinter, which he co-created with his partner, writer Alissa Nutting, as well as with bestselling author Michael Perry and Grammy-winning musician Justin Vernon.

Christopher Castellani is the author of four novels, most recently Leading Men, for which he received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, among others. His book of essays on narration in fiction, The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story, was published by Graywolf in 2016. Christopher is on the faculty and academic board of the Warren Wilson MFA program and chairs the writing panel for the National YoungArts Foundation. He is the founder of GrubStreet’s Muse and the Marketplace conference and, in 2015, was awarded the Barnes and Noble/Poets & Writers “Writer for Writers” Award in recognition of his contributions to the literary community and his generosity toward fellow writers. For the 2022-2023 academic year, he is the Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University. He lives in Boston and Provincetown.

Alice Elliott Dark is the author of the novels Fellowship Point and Think of England, and two collections of short stories, In the Gloaming and Naked to the Waist. Her work has appeared in, among others, the New Yorker, Harper’s, DoubleTake, Ploughshares, A Public Space, Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O.Henry Awards, and has been translated into many languages. “In the Gloaming,” a story, was chosen by John Updike for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of The Century and was made into films by HBO and Trinity Playhouse. Her nonfiction reviews and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and many anthologies. She is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Associate Professor at Rutgers-Newark in the English department and the MFA program.

Tania James is the author of four works of fiction: Atlas of Unknowns; Aerogrammes: and Other Stories; The Tusk That Did the Damage, and the forthcoming Loot, all published by Knopf. Her stories have appeared in Freeman’s: The Future of New Writing, Granta, the New Yorker, O Magazine, and One Story, among others, and has been featured on Symphony Space Selected Shorts. The Tusk That Did the Damage was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. She is from Louisville, Kentucky and lives in Washington DC, where she is an associate professor in the MFA program at George Mason University. 

Emily Raboteau is the author of The Professor’s Daughter, a novel, and Searching for Zion, winner of a 2014 American Book Award and finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award in nonfiction. Her writing about race, place, and identity has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, New York Review of Books, McSweeney’s, Best American Short Stories, Ploughshares, The Believer, and elsewhere.  A contributing editor at Orion Magazine, she teaches creative writing at the City College of New York. Her next book, Lessons in Survival, forthcoming from Holt, is about social and environmental justice through the lens of motherhood.

Jess Row is the author of the novels The New Earth and Your Face in Mine, the essay collection White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination, and two collections of stories, The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost. He has received Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a Whiting Writers Award. Director of Creative Writing in the Department of English at New York University, he lives in New York City and Plainfield, Vermont. 

Luis Alberto Urrea is a Guggenheim Fellow, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the bestselling author of eighteen books including The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Queen of America, and The Devil’s Highway. His honors include a Pushcart Prize, an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, and an Edgar Award.  His most recent book, The House of Broken Angels was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Laura van den Berg was born and raised in Florida.  She is the author of five works of fiction, including The Third Hotel, a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020. She is the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Livings Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the novel, Monster in the Middle, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards in 2021, and on numerous Best of the Year lists. 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; and 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, a Fulbright Scholarship, and an Academy of American Poet’s Prize. Tiphanie is an outspoken activist on behalf of the Caribbean, having appeared on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman, and published a passionate op-ed in the New York Times on the US response to hurricanes in the Caribbean. Tiphanie is from the Virgin Islands and is an Associate Professor at Emory University in the Creative Writing Program and English Department.

Paul Yoon is the author of four works of fiction: Once the Shore, which was a New York Times Notable Book; Snow Hunters, which won the Young Lions Fiction Award; The Mountain, which was an NPR Best Book of the Year; and Run Me to Earth, which was one of Time Magazine’s Must-Read Books of 2020 and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. In 2021, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is based in New York and his new book, The Hive and the Honey, will be published by Scribner/Marysue Rucci Books in September 2023.