People

Senior Faculty


                        
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E. L. Doctorow
E. L. Doctorow's novels include Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Waterworks, City of God, The March, and Homer & Langley. Read more...

                        
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Sharon Olds
Sharon Olds is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU. Her first book of poetry, Satan Says, received the San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Read more...

                        
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Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975. Her first novel, White Teeth, was the winner of The Whitbread First Novel Award, The Guardian First Book Award, The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and The Commonwealth Writers' First Book Award. Read more...

                        
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Yusef Komunyakaa
Yusef Komunyakaa's numerous books of poems include Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999; Talking Dirty to the Gods; Thieves of Paradise, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Magic City; Dien Cai Dau, which won The Dark Room Poetry Prize; I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award; and Copacetic. Read more...

Collegiate Professor and Lillian Vernon Distinguished Writer-in-Residence


                        
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Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of the bestselling novels Everything Is Illuminated, named Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times and the winner of numerous awards, including the Guardian First Book Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Prize, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and a book of non-fiction Eating Animals. Read more...

Distinguished Fiction Writer-in-Residence


                        
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Lorrie Moore
Lorrie Moore is the author of the short story collections Like Life, Self Help, and Birds of America, and the novels Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, Anagrams, and A Gate at the Stairs. Read more...

Distinguished Poets-in-Residence


                        
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John Ashbery
In spring 2009, poet John Ashbery joined the program to lead a series of non-credit graduate master classes. Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, on July 28, 1927. He is the author of more than twenty books of poetry. Read more...

                        
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Anne Carson
Anne Carson is an internationally acclaimed writer. Her books of poetry include Nox (2010), Decreation (2005), The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry... Read more...

                        
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Charles Simic
Charles Simic has published more than sixty books in the U.S. and abroad, among them Jackstraws, which was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times; Walking the Black Cat, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry; A Wedding in Hell, Hotel Insomnia, The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Selected Poems: 1963-1983 and Unending Blues. Read more...

Director


                        
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Deborah Landau
Deborah Landau is the author of two poetry collections: The Last Usable Hour, a Lannan Literary Selection published by Copper Canyon Press, and Orchidelirium, which won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Read more...

Graduate Faculty 2012-2013


                        
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Catherine Barnett
Catherine Barnett is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and a Pushcart. Read more...

                        
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Emily Barton
Emily Barton's first novel, The Testament of Yves Gundron (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Month, and received the Bard Fiction Prize. Read more...

                        
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Kimiko Hahn
Kimiko Hahn is the author of eight collections of poetry--including The Narrow Road to the Interior and Toxic Flora--as well as texts for film, most recently, the narrative for Everywhere at Once, Holly Fisher’s film based on Peter Lindbergh’s photos and narrated by Jeanne Moreau. Read more...

                        
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Major Jackson
Major Jackson is the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company (2010, Norton); Hoops (2006, Norton); and Leaving Saturn (2002, University of Georgia Press). Read more...

                        
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Marie Howe
Marie Howe, the current New York State Poet, is the author of three volumes of poetry: The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008); The Good Thief (1988); and What the Living Do (1998)... Read more...

                        
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David Lipsky

David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine.  His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Magazine Writing, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and many other publications. Read more...


                        
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Rick Moody
Rick Moody is the author of the novels The Four Fingers of Death, Garden State, which won the Pushcart Press Editors’ Book Award, The Ice Storm, Purple America, and The Diviner. Read more...

                        
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Brian Morton
Brian Morton is the author of the novels The Dylanist, Starting Out in the Evening, finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award, A Window Across the River, and most recently Breakable You. Read more...

                        
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Eileen Myles
Eileen Myles is the author of numerous books including Sorry, Tree (poetry, 2007), Tow w/ artist Larry C. Collins (2005), Skies (2001), on my way (2001), Cool for You (novel, 2000), School of Fish (1997), Maxfield Parrish (1995), Not Me (1991), and Chelsea Girls (stories, 1994). Read more...

                        
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Meghan O'Rourke
Meghan O'Rourke is the author of The Long Goodbye (Riverhead), a memoir about grief, and the poetry collections Once and Halflife (W.W. Norton). Read more...

                        
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Matthew Rohrer
Matthew Rohrer is the author of A Hummock in the Malookas, Satellite, A Green Light, Rise Up, and A Plate of Chicken. With Joshua Beckman he wrote Nice Hat. Thanks. and recorded the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. Read more...

                        
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Elissa Schappell
Elissa Schappell is the author of two books of fiction, Blueprints for Building Better Girls and Use Me, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Read more...

                        
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Brenda Shaughnessy

Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of two books of poems: Interior with Sudden Joy and Human Dark with Sugar, which won the 2007 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have been published in Bomb, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Read more...


                        
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Irini Spanidou
Irini Spanidou is the author of three highly acclaimed novels: Fear, God’s Snake, and, most recently, Before. She has taught creative writing at New York University, Sarah Lawrence College and Brooklyn College. Read more...

                        
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Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss is the author of the international bestseller Chang and Eng, and the New York Times Notable Book The Real McCoy, one of the New York Public Library's "25 Books to Remember of 2002." Read more...

                        
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Chuck Wachtel
Chuck Wachtel is the author of the novels Joe The Engineer , winner of the Pen/Hemingway Citation, The Gates, and 3/03, as well as a collection of stories and novellas: Because We Are Here. Read more...

                        
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Rachel Zucker
Rachel Zucker is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Museum of Accidents. Along with poet Arielle Greenberg, Zucker co-edited two anthologies: Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days and Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections. Read more...

Undergraduate Faculty 2012-2013


                        
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Chris Adrian
Chris Adrian is the author of a short story collection A Better Angel, and three novels, Gob's Grief, The Children's Hospital, The Great Night. Read more...

                        
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Mohammed Naseehu Ali
Mohammed Naseehu Ali, a native of Ghana, is a writer and musician. He is the author of The Prophet of Zongo Street, a short story collection. Read more...

                        
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Catherine Barnett
Catherine Barnett is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and a Pushcart. Read more...

                        
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Daphne Beal
Daphne Beal's first novel, In the Land of No Right Angles, was published by Vintage/Anchor in August, 2008. Her nonfiction has appeared in Vogue, McSweeney's, and The London Review of Books. Read more...

                        
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Charles Bock
Charles Bock is the author of the novel Beautiful Children, which was a New York Times bestseller and notable book of the year, and won the Sue Kaufmann Prize for best first novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Read more...

                        
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Marcelle Clements
Marcelle Clements' most recent novel is Midsummer. Her other books include The Dog Is Us, Rock Me, and The Improvised Woman. Read more...

                        
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Elaine Equi
Elaine Equi’s latest book is Click and Clone from Coffee House Press. Her other collections include Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems, The Cloud of Knowable Things, Surface Tension, Decoy, and Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award. Read more...

                        
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Miranda Field
Miranda Field was born and raised in London, England. Her first book, Swallow, won a Katharine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Award in Poetry... Read more...

                        
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Robert Fitterman
Robert Fitterman is the author of nine books of poetry including: Metropolis XXX: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, winner of the Small Press Traffic "Book of the Year Award" in 2003, and Metropolis 1-15, which received the Sun & Moon “New American Poetry Award” in 2000. Read more...

                        
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George Foy
George Foy is the author of eleven published novels and two nonfiction books, his latest being Zero Decibels. His most recent novel, The Art and Practice of Explosion, won... Read more...

                        
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Jean Gallagher
Jean Gallagher is the author of This Minute (winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize from Fordham University Press), Stubborn (winner of the FIELD Prize from Oberlin College Press), and Start (Oberlin College Press). Read more...

                        
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Tom Healy
Tom Healy is a writer, poet, and chairman of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, which oversees the Fulbright program worldwide. He was appointed to the Fulbright Board by President Barack Obama. Read more...

                        
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Ann Hood
Ann Hood is the author of eight novels, most recently, The Knitting Circle. She has also written a memoir, a book on the craft of writing, and a collection of short stories. Read more...

                        
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Dorothea Lasky
Dorothea Lasky is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: Thunderbird (Wave Books, 2012), Black Life (Wave Books, 2010), and AWE (Wave Books, 2007). Read more...

                        
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Maria Laurino
Maria Laurino is the author of the memoirs, Old World Daughter, New World Mother, a meditation on contemporary feminism, and the national bestseller, Were You Always an Italian?, an exploration of ethnic identity. Read more...

                        
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Jocelyn Lieu
Jocelyn Lieu is the author of a 9/11 memoir titled What Isn't There: Inside a Season of Change and a collection of stories, Potential Weapons. Read more...

                        
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Fiona Maazel
Fiona Maazel is the author of Last Last Chance (FSG, 2008) and a former managing editor of the Paris Review. Read more...

                        
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Sarah Manguso
Sarah Manguso is the author of the book-length essays The Guardians (2012) and The Two Kinds of Decay (2008), the story collection Hard to Admitand Harder to Escape (2007), and the poetry collections Siste Viator (2006) and The Captain Lands in Paradise (2002). Read more...

                        
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Maaza Mengiste
Maaza Mengiste was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University, where she teaches. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, The Granta Anthology of the African Short Story, and Lettre International, to name a few. Read more...

                        
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Sharon Mesmer
Sharon Mesmer's fiction collections are Ma Vie à Yonago (in French translation from Hachette Littératures, 2005), In Ordinary Time and The Empty Quarter (Hanging Loose 2005 and 2000). Poetry collections are The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose, 2008) and Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2008)... Read more...

                        
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Eliza Minot
Eliza Minot is the author of the novels The Tiny One and The Brambles, both published by Alfred A. Knopf. Her novels have been named to various lists, such as The New York Times Notable and the Booksense 76.... Read more...

                        
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Susan Minot
Susan Minot is the author of the novels Monkeys which won the Prix Femina Etranger in France in 1987, Folly, Evening, Rapture, a story collection Lust & Other Stories and a book of poetry, Poems 4 A.M. Read more...

                        
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John Murillo
An afro-chicano poet and playwright, John Murillo is the current Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He is the author of the poetry collection, Up Jump the Boogie (2010) and the choreo-play, TRIGGER Read more...

                        
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Eileen Myles
Eileen Myles is the author of numerous books including Sorry, Tree (poetry, 2007), Tow w/ artist Larry C. Collins (2005), Skies (2001), on my way (2001), Cool for You (novel, 2000), School of Fish (1997), Maxfield Parrish (1995), Not Me (1991), and Chelsea Girls (stories, 1994). Read more...

                        
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Geoffrey Nutter
Geoffrey Nutter is the author of three books of poems, Christopher Sunset, Water's Leaves & Other Poems, and Summer Evening. Read more...

                        
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Gregory Pardlo
Gregory Pardlo is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Read more...

                        
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Matthew Rohrer
Matthew Rohrer is the author of A Hummock in the Malookas, Satellite, A Green Light, Rise Up, and A Plate of Chicken. With Joshua Beckman he wrote Nice Hat. Thanks. and recorded the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. Read more...

                        
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Jess Row
Jess Row is the author of two collections of short stories, The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost. Read more...

                        
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Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the author of the memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free, which was selected as one of the best books of 2009 by Dwight Garner of the New York Times. Read more...

                        
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Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975. Her first novel, White Teeth, was the winner of The Whitbread First Novel Award, The Guardian First Book Award, The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and The Commonwealth Writers' First Book Award. Read more...

                        
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Irini Spanidou
Irini Spanidou is the author of three highly acclaimed novels: Fear, God’s Snake, and, most recently, Before. She has taught creative writing at New York University, Sarah Lawrence College and Brooklyn College. Read more...

                        
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Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss is the author of the international bestseller Chang and Eng, and the New York Times Notable Book The Real McCoy, one of the New York Public Library's "25 Books to Remember of 2002." Read more...

                        
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Justin Taylor
Justin Taylor is the author of the novel The Gospel of Anarchy and the story collection Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever--both New York Times Editor's Choice selections. Read more...

                        
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Craig Morgan Teicher
Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of three books: Brenda Is In The Room And Other Poems (Center for Literary Publishing, 2007), chosen by Paul Hoover as winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry; a collection of short stories and fables called Cradle Book (BOA Editions Ltd., 2010); and, most recently, To Keep Love Blurry: Poems (BOA, 2012). Read more...

                        
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Adam Wilson
Adam Wilson is the author of the novel Flatscreen, forthcoming from Harper Perennial in February 2012. He is the Editor of the international online newspaper, The Faster Times. Read more...

                        
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Joanna Yas
Joanna Yas has been the editor of Open City, a literary journal and book publisher, since 1999. Previously, she held positions at Ploughshares, Grand Street, Pakn Treger, and Zoetrope, and is a co-founder of Editrixie, an editorial services company. Read more...

                        
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Rachel Zucker
Rachel Zucker is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Museum of Accidents. Along with poet Arielle Greenberg, Zucker co-edited two anthologies: Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days and Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections. Read more...