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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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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...
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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...

Distinguished Global Professor of Creative Writing

Distinguished Poets-in-Residence
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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...

Lillian Vernon Distinguished Writer-in-Residence
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Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis's books include a novel, The End of the Story (1995), four full-length story collections—Varieties of Disturbance (2007), Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2002), Almost No Memory (1997), and Break It Down (1986)—and several small-press and limited-edition volumes. 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 and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Read more...

Distinguished Fiction Writer-in-Residence
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Aleksandar Hemon
Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and three collections of short stories: The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Love and Obstacles, which was published in 2009 by Riverhead Books. Read more...

Distinguished Visiting Poet
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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...

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

Graduate Faculty 2011-2012
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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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Susan Choi
Susan Choi's first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, and her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Read more...
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Mary Gaitskill
Mary Gaitskill is the author of the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To (nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award) and Don’t Cry, and the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Veronica, which was nominated for the National Book Award. Read more...
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Major Jackson
Major Jackson is the author of two collections of poetry: Hoops (Norton: 2006), a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literature, and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia: 2002), winner of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Read more...
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Meghan O'Rourke
Meghan O'Rourke is the author of Halflife (W.W. Norton). A poetry editor for The Paris Review, she is also the culture critic for Slate magazine and a founding editor of the web site Double X. 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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Rohrer, Matthew
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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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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Craig Morgan Teicher
Craig Morgan Teicher is a poet, critic, and freelance writer. His first book of poems, Brenda Is In The Room And Other Poems, was chosen by Paul Hoover as winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry and was published by the Center for Literary Publishing. 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 2011-2012
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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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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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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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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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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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Jennifer Gilmore
Jennifer Gilmore is the author of the novels Something Red (Scribner, 2010) and Golden Country (Scribner, 2006). Golden Country was a New York Times Notable Book of 2006, an Amazon Top Ten Debut Fiction of 2006 Read more...
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Tom Healy
Tom Healy is the author of the poetry collection What the Right Hand Knows. His poems and essays about contemporary artists have appeared in... Read more...
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Aleksandar Hemon
Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and three collections of short stories: The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Love and Obstacles, which was published in 2009 by Riverhead Books. 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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Marie Howe
Marie Howe is the author of three volumes of poetry, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008); The Good Thief (1998); and What the Living Do (1997), and is the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1994). Read more...
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Adrianne Kalfopoulou
Adrianne Kalfopoulou is the author of the poetry collections Passion Maps (2009), Cumulus (2009), and Wild Greens (2002), and the memoir, Broken Greek (2006). Read more...
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Dorothea Lasky
Dorothea Lasky is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: AWE (Wave Books, 2007) and Black Life (Wave Books, 2010). She is also the author of numerous chapbooks, including Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), Tourmaline (Transmission Press, 2008), The Hatmaker's Wife (2006), Art (H_NGM_N Press, 2005), and Alphabets and Portraits (Anchorite Press, 2004). 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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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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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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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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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
John Murillo is the author of the poetry collection, Up Jump the Boogie. A graduate of New York University's Creative Writing Program, he has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The New York Times, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. 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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Meghan O'Rourke
Meghan O'Rourke is the author of Halflife (W.W. Norton). A poetry editor for The Paris Review, she is also the culture critic for Slate magazine and a founding editor of the web site Double X. Read more...
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Troy Patterson
Troy Patterson is the television critic at Slate , where he also writes widely about art, entertainment, media, and culture. Read more...
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John Reed
John Reed is the author of the novels, A STILL SMALL VOICE (Delacorte Press), THE WHOLE (MTV / Simon & Schuster), the SPD bestseller, SNOWBALL’S CHANCE (Roof), ALL THE WORLD’S A GRAVE: A NEW PLAY BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (Penguin/Plume), and TALES OF WOE (MTV Press). He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and is the Books Editor of the Brooklyn Rail. He has been published in Open City, Artnet, Paper Magazine, Popmatters, New York Press, Brooklyn Rail, Timeout New York, Artforum, Bomb Magazine, Playboy, Art in America, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal. Currently he is a member of the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. Read more...
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Rohrer, Matthew
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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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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Elissa Schappell
Elissa Schappell is the author of Use Me, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and co-editor with Jenny Offill of the anthologies The Friend Who Got Away and Money Changes Everything. Read more...
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Helen Schulman
Helen Schulman is the author of the short story collection, Not a Free Show, and four novels, most recently A Day at the Beach. She has been a Sundance Fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts recipient and a Pushcart-Prize-winner. 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...
Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor has written on movies, books, popular culture and politics for a variety of publications including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Dissent, The Nation, the New Yorker, the New York Observer, Lapham's Quarterly and others. 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. His work has appeared in journals, magazines and websites such as the New York Times Book Review, Tin House, Bookforum, NPR.org, and the Oxford American. With the poet Jeremy Schmall he co-edits The Agriculture Reader, an arts annual. For more: http://www.justindtaylor.net/ Read more...
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Craig Morgan Teicher
Craig Morgan Teicher is a poet, critic, and freelance writer. His first book of poems, Brenda Is In The Room And Other Poems, was chosen by Paul Hoover as winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry... 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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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...