NEW YORK UNIVERSITYARTS AND SCIENCECOLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCEGRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCE
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Graduate Program Faculty

Graduate Visiting Faculty


Permanent Faculty

E. L. Doctorow’s many novels include Welcome to Hard Times (1960), The Book of Daniel (1971), Ragtime (1975), LoonLake (1980), World’s Fair (1985), Billy Bathgate (1989), The Waterworks (1994), and City of God (2000).  His play Drinks Before Dinner (1978) was originally produced at the New York Shakespeare Festival Theater.  His latest collection of essays is titled Reporting The Universe (2003).  His most recent book of short stories is Sweet Land Stories (2004) and his latest novel is The March, winner of the 2005 Pen/Faulkner award.  His work has garnered the National Book Critics Circle Award three times, the National Book Award, the Pen/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, and the William Dean Howells medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  In 1998 he received the National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Clinton.  His novel Ragtime was made into a musical which opened on Broadway in January, 1998.  Professor Doctorow currently holds the Lewis and Loretta Glucksman Chair of English and American Letters at New York University.

Yusef Komunyakaa’s numerous books of poems include Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part 1 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004); Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999 (Wesleyan University Press, 2001); Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000); Thieves of Paradise (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989 (1994), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Magic City (1992); Dien Cai Dau (1988), which won The Dark Room Poetry Prize; I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award; and Copacetic (1984).  Komunyakaa's prose is collected in Blues Notes: Essays, Interviews & Commentaries (University of Michigan Press, 2000). He also co-edited The Jazz Poetry Anthology (with J. A. Sascha Feinstein, 1991) and co-translated The Insomnia of Fire by Nguyen Quang Thieu (with Martha Collins, 1995). His honors include the William Faulkner Prize from the Universite Rennes, the Thomas Forcade Award, the Hanes Poetry Prize, fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Louisiana Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam, where he served as a correspondent and managing editor of the Southern Cross. In 1999 he was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Yusef Komunyakaa was recently appointed as the Senior Distinguished Poet in the Graduate Writing Program at NYU.

Paule Marshall is the author of five novels:  Daughters; Praisesong for  the Widow; The Chosen Place, The Timeless People; Brown Girl, Brownstones; and most recently The Fisher King.  She has also published two collections of short fiction, Soul Clap Hands and Sing; and Reena and Other Stories, and her short stories have been published in numerous anthologies, including The Brooklyn Reader; Literature:  A Contemporary Introduction; and Calling the Wind:  A 20th Century Anthology of African-American Short Stories.  A MacArthur Fellow and past winner of the Dos Passos Prize for Literature, Professor Marshall has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of California at Berkeley, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and Yale University.  She was designated a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library in 1994.  Professor Marshall holds the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and Culture.

Sharon Olds, Erich Maria Remarque professor and permanent faculty member in the Creative Writing Program, is a previous director of the Program.  Her first book of poetry, Satan Says, received the San Francisco Poetry Center Award.  Her second book, The Dead and the Living, was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.  She is also the author of The Gold Cell (1987), The Father (1992), The Wellspring (1996), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999) and The Unswept Room (2002).  Her latest collection is Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002 (2004).  She received a Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Grant in 1993, part of which was designated for the NYU workshop program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island. In 1997, she received the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award.  From 1998-2000 she was the New York State Poet Laureate.

Distinguished Poet-in-Residence

Philip Levine is the author of 16 collections of poetry including Not This Pig; Red Dust; They Feed They Lion; 1933; The Names of the Lost; Ashes: Poems New and Old; 7 Years from Nowhere; One for the Roses; What Work Is, for which he received the National Book Award for Poetry, The Simple Truth, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and The Mercy.  His most recent book is Breath (2004). He has also published a collection of essays, The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography, edited The Essential Keats, and co-edited and translated two books: Off the Map: Selected Poems of Gloria Fuertes and Tarumba: The Selected Poems of Jaime Sabines. Mr. Levine has also been the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, the Lenore Marshall Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Frank O'Hara Prize, and two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships. For two years he served as chair of the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, and he was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000. For more than 30 years he taught English and Creative Writing at California State University in Fresno. He is the distinguished Poet-in-Residence in the Creative Writing Program at NYU.

Distinguished Global Professor in Creative Writing

Breyten Breytenbach A native of South Africa, Breyten Breytenbach is a distinguished painter and a writer of more than 30 books of poetry, numerous novels, short story compilations, essays and dramatic works. A committed opponent of apartheid, Professor Breytenbach was a political prisoner in South Africa from 1975 – 1982 serving two terms of solitary confinement. His most renowned non-fiction work is the four-volume memoir of his South African odyssey. A Season in Paradise; The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist; Return to Paradise; and Dog Heart: A Memoir. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.  Known as the finest living poet of the Afrikaans language, Professor Breytenbach's verse volumes include The Iron Cow Must Sweat; Footscript and most recently Lady One (2002). His most recent dramatic work is The Play (2001).  He has had solo exhibitions of his artwork in numerous cities around the world and a recent exhibit of his prints and paintings were displayed at NYU's La Maison Francaise in Fall 2002. He has been honored with numerous international literary and art awards, including the APB Prize, CAN Award (five times) Allan Paton Award for Literature, Rapport Prize, Hertzog Prize, Reina Prinsen-Geerling Prize, Van der Hoogt Prize, Jan Campert Award and Jacobus van Looy Prize for Literature and Art. Professor Breytenbach has taught at the University of Natal, Princeton University and the University of Cape Town.  He is currently the Distinguished Global Professor of Creative Writing at NYU.

Clinical Associate Professor

Matthew Rohrer is the author of Rise Up (2007) and A Green Light (2004), which was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin International Poetry Prize.  He is also the author of A Hummock in the Malookas (W.W. Norton, 1994), a winner of the National Poetry Series, Satellite (2001), and Nice Hat. Thanks (2002, with Joshua Beckman), the recipient of a Hopwood Award for Poetry and an M.F.A from the University of Iowa.

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." His work has been translated into fourteen languages, and he teaches writing at New York University, for which he won a 2005 "Outstanding Dozen" teaching award. Also a screenwriter, Darin sold the rights to Chang and Eng to Disney, and is currently adapting the novel for the screen with the actor Gary Oldman. Another screenplay on which he collaborated is in pre-production at Paramount Studios. His new novel More Than It Hurts You, will be published in June 2008, with a book of short-stories and non-fiction essays, Truth and Lies, set to come out later in the year. Darin was awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction writing.

Chuck Wachtel’s books include Because We Are Here, a collection of short stories and novellas, and the novels Joe the Engineer, which won the PEN/Hemingway Citation and The Gates. He is also the author of The Coriolis Effect and, most recently, What Happens to Me, a collection of poems and short prose. He has taught at Purdue University, Sarah Lawrence College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He is currently an associate clinical professor of creative writing at NYU.

Distinguished Visiting Faculty

Each year the permanent faculty is joined by a rotating group of illustrious writers. In the past fifteen years, these have included: Andre Aciman, Elizabeth Alexander, Agha Shahid Ali, Yehuda Amichai, Margaret Atwood, Robert Bly, Joseph Brodsky, Wesley Brown, Peter Carey, Anne Carson, Nicholas Christopher, Edwidge Danticat, Toi Derricotte, Mark Doty, Cornelius Eady, Mary Gaitskill, Allen Ginsberg, Eamon Grennan, Jessica Hagedorn, Kimiko Hahn, Donald Hall, Michael Harper, Marie Howe, Thomas Keneally, Phillis Levin, William Matthews, Mary Morris, Brian Morton, Marilyn Nelson, Edna O’Brien, Michael Ondaatje, Caryl Phillips, Jayne Anne Phillips, Marie Ponsot, Mona Simpson, Irini Spanidou, Robert Stone, Jean Valentine, Derek Walcott, Susan Wheeler, and C.K. Williams.

2007-2008 Graduate Visiting Faculty