Kate Knapp Johnson, Director, Graduate Program in Poetry – BA, Sarah Lawrence College. Columbia School of the Arts. MFA, Sarah Lawrence College. NCPsyA, Westchester Institute. Special interests include Jungian studies and religion; author of When Orchids Were Flowers, This Perfect Life, Wind Somewhere, and Shade, which received the Gradiva Award; most recently published in Ploughshares, The Salt Journal, Luna, and The Sun; recipient of New York Foundation for the Arts Award. SLC, 1987-

Brian Morton, Director, Graduate Program in Fiction. Author of the novels The Dylanist, Starting Out in the Evening, A Window Across the River, and Breakable You; finalist, PEN/Faulkner Award; recipient, Guggenheim fellowship, Koret Jewish Book Award for Fiction, and Academy Award in Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters. SLC, 1998-

Vijay Seshadri, Director, Graduate Program in Creative Nonfiction – BA, Oberlin College. MFA, Columbia University. Author of Wild Kingdom and The Long Meadow, poetry collections; former editor at The New Yorker; essayist and book reviewer in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Threepenny Review, The American Scholar, and various literary quarterlies; recipient of the James Laughlin Prize of the Academy of American Poets, the MacDowell Colony’s Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement, The Paris Review’s Bernard F. Conners Long Poem Prize, a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grant, and area studies fellowships from Columbia University. SLC, 1998-

Gerry Albarelli – Author of Teacha! Stories from a Yeshiva (Glad Day Books 2001), which chronicles his experience as a non-Jew teaching English as a second language to Yiddish-speaking Hasidic boys at a yeshiva in Brooklyn. His stories have been published in numerous anthologies and reviews, including The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, Global City Review, The Breast, and the Fairleigh Dickinson Review. He is on the faculty of Eugene Lang College in NYC and works for the Columbia University Oral History Research Office, where he has initiated numerous documentary projects. He has conducted hundreds of life history interviews with, among others, gay cops, retired vaudevillians and showgirls, iron workers, immigrants, and, most recently, people affected by the events of September 11 and veterans recently returned from the war in Iraq. He worked as an educator and project designer on Columbia’s “Telling Lives Oral History Project.” This project, which was launched in eight classrooms in two middle schools in New York City’s Chinatown, culminated in seven books, two documentary films, and a multimedia exhibit. He served as editor of three of the books, producer of the documentaries, and curator of the exhibit. He is currently working on an oral history project and multimedia exhibit for the Bridgeport (Connecticut) Public Library as well as an oral history of the war in Iraq. His memoir, Mary, Queen of Immigrants, will be published in 2006.

Jo Ann Beard – BFA, MA, University of Iowa. Essayist and creative nonfiction writer; author of a collection of autobiographical essays, The Boys of My Youth, as well as various articles and essays in publications such as The New Yorker, Tin House, and Best American Essays; recipient of a Whiting Foundation Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. SLC, 2000-

Tina Chang – MFA, Columbia University. Poet; author of Half-Lit Houses and the forthcoming Of Gods & Strangers (Four Way Books, 2011); co-editor of the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (W.W. Norton, 2008). Poems have appeared in American Poet, Indiana Review, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, Sonora Review, among others. Recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Poets & Writers, as well as fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Djerassi, among others. SLC, 2005-

Rachel Cohen – BA, Harvard University (on leave 2011-2012). Writer for The New Yorker, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Slate, Parnassus, The Threepenny Review, McSweeney’s, and other publications; essays anthologized in the Pushcart Anthology and in Best American Essays. Her book, A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists was published in 2004 by Random House in the US and the UK, and Adelphi in Italy, won the PEN/Jerard Fund Award, and was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Prize and the PEN/Martha Albrand First Nonfiction Award. Cohen has been a fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and Bread Loaf, and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. She lives in Queens and is currently at work on a book about Bernard Berenson for Yale University Press.

Cynthia Cruz – MFA, Sarah Lawrence College. BA, Mills College. Poet; author of Ruin (Alice James Books); poems published in journals including American Poetry Review, AGNI, Grand Street, Boston Review, Paris Review, Colorado Review, and Denver Quarterly. Anthologized in Isn’t It Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets and The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries. Recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. SLC, 2007-

Thomas Sayers Ellis – MFA, Brown University. Poet; author of The Maverick Room, “The Good Junk” (from Take Three #1), two chapbooks, The Genuine Negro Hero and Song On, and the forthcoming Quotes Community: Notes for Black Writers. Co-founder of the Dark Room Collective and the recipient of a Mrs. Giles Whiting Writers Award as well as fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Grand Street, Tin House, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Callaloo, and The Best American Poetry, 1997 and 2001. SLC, 2006-

Carolyn Ferrell – BA, Sarah Lawrence College. MA, City College of New York. Author of the short story collection Don’t Erase Me, awarded the Art Seidenbaum Award of The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the John C. Zachiris Award given by Ploughshares, and the Quality Paperback Book Prize for First Fiction; stories anthologized in The Best American Short Stories of the Century; Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers; The Blue Light Corner: Black Women Writing on Passion, Sex, and Romantic Love; and Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present; recipient of grants from the Fulbright Association, the German Academic Exchange (D.A.A.D.), the City University of New York MAGNET Program, and the National Endowment for the Arts (Literature fellow for 2004). SLC, 1996-

Nick Flynn. His most recent book is The Ticking Is the Bomb, which the Los Angeles Times calls a “disquieting masterpiece.” His previous memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, was shortlisted for France’s Prix Femina, and has been translated into thirteen languages. He is also the author of two books of poetry, Some Ether, and Blind Huber, and a play, Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins, for which he received fellowships from, among other organizations, The Guggenheim Foundation and The Library of Congress. Some of the venues his poems, essays and non-fiction have appeared in include The New Yorker, the Paris Review, National Public Radio’s This American Life, and The New York Times Book Review. His film credits include artistic collaborator and “field poet” on the film Darwin’s Nightmare, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2006. SLC, 2010 -

Suzanne Gardinier – BA, University of Massachusetts-Amherst. MFA, Columbia University. Author of The New World, winner of Associated Writing Programs Award Series in poetry; Today: 101 Ghazals, and A World That Will Hold All the People, essays on poetry and politics; fiction in The Kenyon Review, The American Voice, and The Paris Review; recipient of The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Excellence in the Essay and of grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation. SLC, 1994-

Myla Goldberg – BA, Oberlin College. Author of Bee Season (New York Times Notable Book, winner of the Borders New Voices Prize, finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award), Wickett’s Remedy and The False Friend.  SLC, 2008-

Myra Goldberg – BA, University of California-Berkeley. MA, City University of New York. Author of Whistling and Rosalind: A Family Romance; stories published in journals including The Transatlantic Review, Ploughshares, Feminist Studies, The Massachusetts Review, The New England Review, and in the anthologies Women in Literature, Powers of Desire, The World’s Greatest Love Stories, and elsewhere in the US and France; nonfiction published in The Village Voice and elsewhere; recipient of Lebensberger Foundation grant. SLC, 1985-

Matthea Harvey – BA, Harvard College. MFA, University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Poet; author of Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (Alice James Books, 2000); Sad Little Breathing Machine (Graywolf, 2004); Modern Life (Graywolf, 2007); and a children’s book, The Little General and the Giant Snowflake (Tin House Books, 2009). Contributing editor for jubilat, meatpaper and BOMB. Recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize. Has taught at Warren Wilson, the Pratt Institute, and the University of Houston. SLC, 2004-

Ann Heppermann– Brooklyn based independent radio/multimedia documentary producer, transmission sound artist and educator. Her stories air nationally and internationally on National Public Radio, the BBC, and on numerous shows including: This American Life, Radio Lab, Marketplace, Morning Edition, Studio360 and many others. Ann is a Peabody award-winning producer who also has received awards from Associated Press, Edward R. Murrow, and the Third Coast International Audio Festival. She is a transmission artist with free103point9 and her work has been exhibited at UnionDocs, Chicago Center for the Arts, among other venues. She also is passionate about education and has taught classes and workshops at Duke Center for Documentary Studies, Smith College, Columbia University and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. For years she was the Director of Radio at Brooklyn College. Last year, along with Kara Oehler, Jesse Shapins and James Burns, she helped create Mapping Main Street — a collaborative documentary which invites the nation to document the more than 10,000 actual Main Streets across the United States through, stories, photos, videos and songs with radio stories which aired on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday. Currently, she is a fellow with the Rosalynn Carter for Mental Journalism Fellow and will be making a multimedia documentary about preteen anorexia for Ms. Magazine and NPR. SLC, 2010-

Kathleen Hill – Author, Who Occupies This House,an Editors’ Choice at The New York Times; Still Waters in Niger, nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune; the French translation, Eaux Tranquilles, shortlisted for the Prix Femina Etranger. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, and The Yale Review, among other publications, and have won a number of literary awards. “The Anointed,” published in DoubleTake, was included in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize XXV, and The Pushcart Book of Short Stories. SLC, 1991-1994; 1997-

David Hollander -- Author of the novel L.I.E. his short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in McSweeney’s, Post Road, Agni, The New York Times Magazine, Unsaid, Poets & Writers, The Collagist, and many others. His work has been adapted for film and frequently anthologized, most recently in Best American Fastasy. SLC, 2011 -

Cathy Park Hong – BA, Oberlin College. MFA, The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Poet; author of Translating Mo’um (Hanging Loose Press, 2002) and the forthcoming Dance Dance Revolution (W. W. Norton, 2007), which was chosen for the Barnard New Women’s Poets Series; recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Fulbright grant for South Korea; work has been published in Pushcart Prize Anthology, New Asian American Anthology, and the Next Generation, among others; essays and articles published in The Village Voice, The Guardian, Salon, and Christian Science Monitor. SLC, 2006-

Suzanne R. Hoover – BA, Sarah Lawrence College. MA and PhD, Columbia University. National Endowment for the Humanities Younger Humanist grant, 1972-73. Author of numerous scholarly articles, reviews and essays. Member of the Sarah Lawrence literature faculty from 1977-2000, taught courses in literary craft for many years, for both poets and fiction writers. Since 2005 has taught advanced fiction writing workshops at the Westport Writers Workshop in CT. SLC, 2008-

Marie Howe – BS, University of Windsor. MFA, Columbia University. Poet; author of The Good Thief, selected by Margaret Atwood for the National Poetry Series and The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W.W. Norton, 2008), a finalist for the LA Times book award; editor, with Michael Klein, of In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic; author of What the Living Do; recipient of the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poet Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Mary Ingram Bunting fellowship from Radcliffe College, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Artist Foundation, and the Guggenheim. SLC, 1993-

Mary LaChapelle – BA, University of Minnesota. MFA, Vermont College. Author of House of Heroes and Other Stories; stories published in Nimrod, Northern Lit Review, Redbook, and First; anthologized in the US, Japan, and England; recipient of awards from PEN/Nelson Algren, Whiting, Katherine Anne Porter, and a Bush Foundation fellowship. SLC, 1992-

Thomas Lux – BA, Emerson College. University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Author of The Glassblower’s Breath, Sunday, Half Promised Land, Like a Wide Anvil from the Moon the Light, Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy, The Drowned River, and Split Horizon; recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and the Kingsly Tufts Poetry Award. SLC, 1975-

Jeffrey McDaniel – BA, Sarah Lawrence College. MFA, George Mason University. Poet. Author of three books of poetry: Alibi School, The Forgiveness Parade, and, most recently, The Splinter Factory; poems published in many anthologies, including Best American Poetry, New (American) Poets, American Poetry: The Next Generation, New Younger American Poets, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry; poems translated into Spanish, Swedish, and Portuguese; recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Washington, DC, Commission for the Arts. SLC, 2001-

Mary Morris – BA, Tufts College. MPhil, Columbia University. Novelist, short story writer, and writer of travel literature. Author of the novels Crossroads, The Waiting Room, The Night Sky, House Arrest, Acts of God, and Revenge; the short story collections Vanishing Animals and Other Stories, The Bus of Dreams, and The Lifeguard Stories; the travel memoirs Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone, Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail; an anthology of the travel literature of women, Maiden Voyages and Angels and Aliens: A Journey West. The River Queen, a book about the Mississippi River, was published in 2007 (Henry Holt and Company). Recent work in Antaeus, Boulevard, and Epoch; recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Creative Artists Public Service Awards. SLC, 1994-

Dennis Nurkse –BA, Harvard University. Author of nine books of poetry (under “D. Nurkse”), including The Border Kingdom, Burnt Island, The Fall, The Rules of Paradise, Leaving Xaia, and Voices over Water; poems have appeared in The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly; recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, and two awards from The Poetry Foundation. SLC, 2004-

Stephen O’Connor – BA, Columbia University. MA, University of California-Berkeley. Author of Rescue, short fiction and poetry; Will My Name Be Shouted Out?, memoir and social analysis; Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed, history. Fiction and poetry have appeared in The New Yorker, Conjunctions, TriQuarterly, The Missouri Review, The Quarterly, Partisan Review, The Massachusetts Review, Fiction International, and elsewhere. Essays and journalism published in The New York Times, DoubleTake, The Nation, AGNI, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, and New Labor Forum, among others. Recipient of the Cornell Woolrich Fellowship in Creative Writing from Columbia University; the Visiting Fellowship for Historical Research by Artists and Writers from the American Antiquarian Society; and the DeWitt Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fellowship from the MacDowell Colony. SLC, 1997; 2002-

Kevin Pilkington, Writing Coordinator – BA, St. John’s University. MA, Georgetown University. Poetry collection, Spare Change, won the La Jolla Poets Press National Book Award. Author of five chapbooks, including Getting By, which was awarded the Ledge Poetry Prize and Ready to Eat the Sky, published by River City Publishing as part of their new poetry series selected by Andre Hudgins, and was a finalist for an independent Publishers Books Award. Work has appeared in many anthologies including Birthday Poems: A Celebration, Western Wind, Contemporary Poetry of New England, and a wide variety of journals including Poetry, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Boston Review, Yankee, Hayden’s Ferry, Columbia, Greensboro Review, The Louisville Review, Gulf Coast, and Valparaiso Review. Three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. SLC, 1991-

Victoria Redel – Author of two books of poetry and three books of fiction. She has a story collection and a collection of poetry forthcoming. Her latest novel, The Border of Truth (Counterpoint, 2007) was a 2007 Barnes & Noble Discovery Book. Loverboy (2001, Graywolf / 2002, Harcourt), was awarded the 2001 S. Mariella Gable Novel Award and the 2002 Forward Silver Literary Fiction Prize and was chosen in 2001 as a Los Angeles Times Best Book. Loverboy was adapted for a feature film directed by Kevin Bacon. Her fiction and poetry have been widely anthologized. Redel’s work has been translated into many languages. Her most recent collection of poems, Swoon (2003, University of Chicago Press), was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. SLC, 1996-

Martha Rhodes – Author of three poetry collections: Mother Quiet, Perfect Disappearance (winner of the 2000 Green Rose Prize, New Issues Press), and At the Gate. Poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, AGNI, Fence, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and other journals. Anthologized in The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia University Press) and The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology (University Press of New England), among others. Founding editor and director of Four Way Books, an independent literary press in New York City. SLC, 2005-

Nelly Reifler – BA, Hampshire College. MFA, Sarah Lawrence College. Author of short story collection See Through; fiction in magazines and journals including Bomb, Post Road, McSweeney’s, Nerve, and Black Book as well as in the anthologies 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11; Lost Tribe: New Jewish Fiction from the Edge; Found Magazine’s Requiem for a Paper Bag; and Tell: An Anthology of Expository Narrative (forthcoming in 2010). Recipient of a Henfield Prize in 1995, a UAS Explorations Prize in 1997, and a Rotunda Gallery Emerging Curator grant for work with fiction and art in 2001. Codirector of Pratt Institute’s Writers’ Forum, 2005-present; curator of Barbes reading series, Brooklyn; founder and president, Dainty Rubbish record company. SLC, 2002-

Joan Silber – BA, Sarah Lawrence College. MA, New York University. Author of three short-story collections, Ideas of Heaven (finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize), The Size of the World, and In My Other Life, and three novels, Lucky Us, In the City, and Household Words, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award; short stories anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize, and The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work; stories in The New Yorker, Paris Review, and Ploughshares; recipient of grants from National Endowment for the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts. SLC, 1985-1990; 1991-1992; 1995-

Alexandra Soiseth – BA, University of Saskatchewan; BAA, Ryerson University; MFA, Sarah Lawrence College. Assistant director of the MFA writing program at Sarah Lawrence. She has taught writing to a variety of students including undergraduate and graduate students, as well as high school students, seniors, and men and women in prison. She has been the recipient of a Canada Arts Council grant, an Ontario Arts Council grant, and is the former managing editor of and communications director for Global City Review, a New York City based literary magazine. Her work has appeared on babycenter.com, literarymama.com, and in McGill Street Magazine, The Ryersonian, and on the radio program LifeRattle, among others. Her memoir, Choosing You, was published in 2008 by Seal Press. SLC, 2000-

Alice Truax – BA, Vassar College. MA, Middlebury College. Editor at The New Yorker, 1992-2002. Book editor, 2001-present. Book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Vogue, The New York Review of Books. Edited books include Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Mostly True by Molly O’Neill, Aftermath by Joel Meyerowitz, The Surrender by Toni Bentley, Send by William Schwalbe and David Shipley, King’s Gambit by Paul Hoffman, and Violent Partners by Linda Mills. SLC, 2004-