2025 Faculty and Guests

Camille T. Dungy is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden. She has also written Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and four 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 40 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.

Elisa Gabbert is the author of seven collections of poetry, essays, and criticism. Her most recent nonfiction books are Any Person Is the Only Self and The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays, both from FSG. Her other books include Normal Distance, The Word Pretty, and The Self Unstable. She writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared widely in publications including Harper’s, The Atlantic, Paris Review, New York Review of Books, The Believer, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Providence.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett was born to an American father and Japanese mother. American Harvest: God, Country and Farming in the Heartland won both the 2021 Northern California Book Award and the Nebraska Book Award, and is a tribute to the complicated and nuanced history of the United States and its people. Her memoir, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, was a finalist for the 2016 PEN Open Book Award. Her newest book, a novel, The Tree Doctor, has been on numerous most anticipated lists, including Kirkus, the Washington Post, and Oprah Daily. She lives in San Francisco and Tokyo, and teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars. She was a Fulbright Fellow to Japan for 2022-2023.

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District, winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, House of Lords and Commons, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, and School of Instructions: a Poem, a finalist for the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and the Griffin Poetry Prize. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, the Whiting Award, and a Donald Windham–Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, Hutchinson is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University.

Tomás Q. Morín is the author of the poetry collections Machete, Patient Zero, and A Larger Country, which was the winner of the APR/Honickman Prize. He is also the author of two books of prose, Where Are You From and Let Me Count the Ways, as well as co-editor of the anthology Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Poetry, and American Poetry Review. He teaches at Rice University. 

Valzhyna Mort is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Music for the Dead and Resurrected (2020), winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the UNT Rilke Prize. Her earlier collections are Factory of Tears and Collected Body. Mort is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lannan Foundation, among others. Her translation, together with Hanif Abdurraqib, of Motherfield by Julia Cimafiejeva, was longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize and the Derek Walcott Prize. Born in Minsk, Belarus, Mort teaches creative writing at Cornell University and writes in English and Belarusian. 

V. Penelope Pelizzon’s fourth book, A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye (2024) is a LitHub recommendation for 2024. Her first, Nostos, won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award;  her second, Whose Flesh Is Flame, Whose Bone Is Time, was a finalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. She is also coauthor of Tabloid, Inc., a critical study of film, photography, and crime narratives. Her recognitions include a Hawthornden Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and a Discovery/The Nation Award. She is a Professor of English at the University of Connecticut.

Carl Phillips’s latest book of poems is Scattered Snows, to the North (2024). His Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 (2022) won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. Other honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, and awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 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 on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts.

Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction, and seven books of poetry, most recently, West: A Translation, which won the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award. She is the editor and creator of the digital archive projects West, Mapping Literary Utah, and Mapping Salt Lake City. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and various state arts council awards. The former Utah poet laureate, she teaches at the University of Utah where she directs the American West Center. 

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, and is taught in many writing workshops. Christopher is a longtime member of the faculty and academic board of the Warren Wilson MFA program, a recent Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University, and currently chairs the writing panel for the National YoungArts Foundation. In 2015, Christopher 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 his forthcoming novel, Last Seen, he was awarded a 2024 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Christopher lives in Boston and Provincetown. 

Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, A Seahorse Year, The Sky Below, Wonderland, and The Complicities, and the nonfiction books The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between and The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry. She is a former Stegner Fellow in Fiction, the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction, 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, the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, Boston Review, Bookforum, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among other publications. She is a Professor of Writing and Publishing Practices at Fordham University. 

Danielle Evans is the author of two short story collections, The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Her first collection won the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright award, and the Paterson Prize; her second won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and was a finalist for the Aspen Prize, the Story Prize, the Chautauqua Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book prize. She has also been awarded the New Literary Project Oates Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a US Artists Fellowship. Her stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies including the Paris Review, A Public Space, Sewanee Review, and Best American Short Stories. She lives in Baltimore, where she is an Associate Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Amina Gautier is the author of four short story collections: At-Risk (2011), Now We Will Be Happy (2014), The Loss of All Lost Things (2016), and The Best That You Can Do (2024). She has received the Blackwell Prize, the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award, the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, International Latino Book Awards, the Kimbilio-Soft Skull Publishing Prize in Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and the Phillis Wheatley Award. A recipient of fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Camargo Foundation, the Château de Lavigny, Flamboyan Foundation, Fondazione Bogliasco, Le Maison Dora Maar, the MacDowell Colony, the Mellon Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, she teaches at the University of Miami.

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.

Victor LaValle is the author of the short story collection Slapboxing with Jesus, the novels The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, The Changeling, and Lone Women, and two novellas, Lucretia and the Kroons and The Ballad of Black Tom. He is also the creator and writer of two comic books Victor LaValle’s Destroyer and Eve. His novel The Changeling aired on Apple TV+. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the World Fantasy Award, British Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award, Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Shirley Jackson Award, American Book Award, and the key to Southeast Queens. He was raised in Queens, New York. He now lives in the Bronx with his wife, the writer Emily Raboteau, and their kids. He teaches at Columbia University.

Claire Messud is the author of six works of fiction, including The Emperor’s Children, The Last Life, The Woman Upstairs, The Burning Girl, The Hunters, and, most recently, This Strange Eventful History. A recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she teaches at Harvard University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Prettiest Star (2020), winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Fiction, the Southern Book Prize, and the Weatherford Award, and selected as a Kirkus Best Book of 2020 and a Best LGBT Book by O Magazine. His debut novel, The Evening Hour (2012) was a Lambda Award and Triangle Publishing Award finalist, and adapted into a feature film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020. His writing has appeared in publications including the Kenyon Review, The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, and Guernica. Carter is the recipient of the Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, and has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Carter has taught at Warren Wilson’s MFA program, and is an assistant professor of creative writing at North Carolina State University.

Laura van den Berg was born and raised in Florida. She is the author of six works of fiction, most recently the novel State of Paradise. Her books have been twice shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, a PEN/O. Henry Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Laura teaches fiction at Harvard University and lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and dog. Her next novel, Ring of Night, is forthcoming from FSG.  

Paul Yoon is the author of five works of fiction, including, most recently, The Hive and the Honey, for which he received the 2023-2024 Story Prize. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and Best American Short Stories. He lives in the Hudson Valley, New York, with his wife, the fiction writer Laura van den Berg, and their dog, Oscar.