Creative Writing Faculty Through the Years

Glenda Adams was an Australian novelist and short story writer who won the Miles Franklin Award for Dancing on Coral. Her essays and stories have appeared in Meanjin, The New York Times Book Review, Panorama, Quadrant, Southerly, Westerly, and The Village Voice, among other magazines.

Dilruba Ahmed’s debut book, Dhaka Dust, won the Bakeless Literary Prize. Ahmed is the recipient of The Florida Review’s Editors’ Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference fellowship and scholarship. Her work has been widely anthologized.

Jane Alison's first novel, The Love-Artist, has been translated into seven languages. It was followed by The Marriage of the Sea, a New York Times Notable Book. Her novel Natives and Exotics was one of 2005's recommended readings by Alan Cheuse of NPR.

Tanya Barrientos is a journalist, speechwriter, novelist, and winner of the Pew Fellowship in the Arts. For two decades, Barrientos was a journalist with the Philadelphia Inquirer. She was named the Inquirer’s youngest national correspondent. Her novels are Frontera Street and Family Resemblance.

Frank Bidart first books—Golden State and The Book of the Body—gained critical attention and praise, but his reputation as a poet of uncompromising originality was made with The Sacrifice. His later works include Desire, Star Dust, and Watching the Spring Festival.

Linda Bierds' collections of poems include Flights of the Harvest Mare; Heart and Perimeter; The Ghost Trio; The Seconds; First Hand; Flight: New and Selected Poems; and Roget's Illusion. Bierds is the recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Poetry Society of America, and the MacArthur Foundation.

Robin Black’s story collection is If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, One Story, The Georgia Review, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, and The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. I (Norton, 2007). She is a Leeway Foundation and MacDowell Colony grant recipient.

Ben Downing's biography of Janet Ross was published in 2013 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His collection of poems is The Calligraphy Shop, and he continues to publish poems in The Atlantic, The New Criterion, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He is co-editor of Parnassus: Poetry in Review.

Nancy Doyne's screenplays include What Maisie Knew, based on the novel by Henry James and The Eustace Diamonds based on the novel by Anthony Trollope. Teleplays for television include adaptations of a short story by Frederic Brown as well as an adaptation of an EC Comic.

Nomi Eve is the author of the novels The Family Orchard and Henna. Her short stories and book reviews have appeared in  Glimmer Train Stories, The Village Voice Literary Supplement and Conjunctions.

Lauren Feldman's plays include Amaneusis, Another Kind of Silence, The Egg-Layers, A People, Fill Our Mouths, Grace, or the Art of Climbing, several ensemble-devised works and a dozen short plays and an autobiographical solo piece.

Tom Ferrick, Jr., is a journalist with 40 years experience as a reporter, editor and columnist, and winner of a Polk Award, a World Hunger Award, and a Pulitzer Prize as a member of a team of Inquirer reporters for coverage of the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island.

Daisy Fried is the author of Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and She Didn't Mean to Do It, which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. For her poetry, she's received Guggenheim, Hodder and Pew Fellowships, and a Pushcart Prize.

Susan Gregory

Dipika Guha’s plays include The Betrothed, Passing, and The Rules. Her plays have been developed at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, WordBRIDGE, New Century Theatre Company, Seattle Rep, Ars Nova and Tobacco Theatre (UK) among others.

Amy Herzog received the 2008 Helen Merrill award for emerging playwrights. Her plays include Opportunity, The Wendy Play, Hungry, Willing and In Translation. Her work has been produced at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, Ensemble Studio Theater (EST), and the Yale School of Drama. 

Cordelia Jensen's young adult novel in verse, Skyscraping, was voted a 2016 Best Fiction for Young Adults book by the American Library Association, a Best LGBTQ Book for Youth by Booklist, and a Los Angeles Public Library's Best Books for Teens award. 

Karl Kirchwey is the author of six books of poems: A Wandering Island, Those I Guard, The Engrafted Word (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), At the Palace of Jove, The Happiness of This World: Poetry and Prose (2007), and Mount Lebanon. He received grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the NEA, and a Rome Prize in Literature in 1994-95.

Ann Kjellberg is an editor at The New York Review of Books and the founding editor of Little Star, a magazine of poetry and prose. She is also the literary executor of the poet Joseph Brodsky and a former book editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Yusef Komunyakaa's Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Komunyakaa's works include Warhorses; Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part 1; Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999; Talking Dirty to the Gods; Thieves of Paradise; The Chameleon Couch; Testimony: A Tribute to Charlie Parker; and Emperor of Water Clocks.

Marc Lapadula's plays include Dancer, Not by Name, Two Shakes, Last Order, The Rains Change, and In Uniform Thanksgiving, which have been produced in New York (off-Broadway), England, Pennsylvania and Iowa. He produced Angel Passing, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the grand prize at WorldFest Houston.

Annie Liontas' debut novel, Let Me Explain You, was featured in the New York Times Book Review as Editor's Choice. She is the co-editor of the anthology A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors and the recipient of a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.

J.D. McClatchy’s collections of poetry include Star Principal, The Rest of the Way, The Ten Commandments, Pulitzer Prize-nominate Hazmat, and Mercury Dressing. He received an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters for his collection The Rest of the Way, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and the NEA.

Adrienne Miller was the literary editor of Esquire from 1997-2006, where she oversaw the fiction and book sections, and edited essays and narrative nonfiction features. She was a founding editor of McSweeney’s. She is the author of the novel The Coast of Akron,  named a book of the year in the Chicago Tribune and Newsday.

Elizabeth Mosier is the author of The Playgroup, and My Life as a Girl. Her work has appeared in 50 Women Over Fifty, 1966: A Journal of Creative Nonfiction, Hayden's Ferry Review, Creative Nonfiction, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She received fellowships from The Millay Colony for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Paul Muldoon is the author of 12 collections of poetry: One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, Maggot, Horse Latitudes, Moy Sand and Gravel, Hay, The Annals of Chile, Madoc: A Mystery, Meeting the British, Quoof, Why Brownlee Left, Mules, and New Weather. He has also published innumerable smaller collections, works of criticism, opera libretti, books for children, song lyrics and radio and television drama. His poetry has been translated into 20 languages.

Catherine Murdock studied screenwriting for several years before penning the story of a Wisconsin farm girl turned football player. Houghton Mifflin published the YA novel Dairy Queen in 2006 and its sequel, The Off Season, the following year. She is also the author of the fairy tale Princess Ben.

Carol Muske-Dukes is the author of eight books of poems; the most recent is Twin Cities. Earlier books of poems include Sparrow (a National Book Award finalist) and others. She has published four novels, including Channeling Mark Twain. She is also an essayist and anthology editor. Many of her books have been NY Times Most Notable Books.

Hilary Plum is the author of the novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets. Her book-length essay is Watchfires. She is a book-review editor with the Kenyon Review. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Seneca Review, Fence, Bookforum, and the Massachusetts Review.

Marie Ponsot’s collections of poetry include Easy (a National Book Critics Circle Award-winner and Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize finalist), The Bird Catcher, The Green Dark, True Minds, and Springing: New and Selected Poems. She has translated more than 30 books into English from French.

Cynthia Reeves's novella, Badlands, was the winner of Miami University Press’s Novella Prize. Her fiction, essays and poetry have appeared in Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Ontario Review, Potomac Review, and the experimental prose anthologies Wreckage of Reason.

Marco Roth is a founding editor of n+1 magazine and the author of the memoir The Scientists: A Family Romance.

 

 

Karen Russell won the 2012 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her first novel, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2012 Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Sonia Sanchez is the author of more than 16 books including Homecoming, We a BaddDDD People, Love Poems, I’ve Been a Woman, A Sound Investment and Other Stories, Homegirls and Handgrenades, Under a Soprano Sky, Wounded in the House of a Friend, Does Your House Have Lions?, Like the Singing Coming off the Drums, Shake Loose My Skin, and Morning Haiku.

Rachel Simon is the award-winning author of six books and a nationally-recognized public speaker on issues related to diversity and disability. Her titles include the bestsellers The Story of Beautiful Girl and Riding the Bus with My Sister. Her work has been adapted for theater, NPR, the Lifetime Channel, and Hallmark Hall of Fame.

Daniel Smith is the author of the memoir Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety. Smith’s essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The American Scholar, The Atlantic, Granta, n+1, New York, The New York Times Book Review, and The New York Times Magazine.

Christian TeBordo is the author of the short story collection The Awful Possibilities, and the novels We Go Liquid, Better Ways of Being Dead, and The Conviction and Subsequent Life of Savior Neck.

Susan Gregory Thomas is a writer, journalist, and author of In Spite of Everything: A Memoir and Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds. She has written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Marie Claire, Vogue, The Washington Post, and Time.

J.C. Todd, a 2014 Pew Fellow in the Arts, is author of the poetry collection What Space this Body. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner and The Virginia Quarterly Review, and her translations have been anthologized in New European Poets.

Daniel Torday is the author of the novel The Last Flight of Poxl West, winner of the 2015 National Jewish Book Award. Torday's novella,The Sensualist, won the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction. His fiction, essays and criticism have appeared in Esquire Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, n+1, Harvard Review and The New York Times.

Rachel Wetzsteon published three collections of poetry during her lifetime: National Poetry Series winner The Other Stars, Home and Away, and Sakura Park. A fourth collection of poetry, Silver Roses, was published posthumously.

 

Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon has had more than 23 of her plays produced; her stage credits include 13 productions and she is a contributing poet to 26 poetry anthologies.