Kate Knapp Johnson

Director, Graduate Program in Poetry

B.A., Sarah Lawrence College. Columbia School of the Arts. M.F.A., 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-

Mary LaChapelle

Director, Graduate Program in Fiction

B.A., University of Minnesota. M.F.A., Vermont College. Author of House of Heroes and Other Stories; stories published in Nimrod, Northern Lit Review, Redbook, and First; anthologized in the U.S., Japan, and England; recipient of awards from PEN/Nelson Algren, Whiting, Katherine Anne Porter, and a Bush Foundation fellowship. SLC, 1992-

Vijay Seshadri

Director, Graduate Program in Creative Nonfiction

B.A., Oberlin College. M.F.A., 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’sBernard 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 initiatednumerous 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

B.F.A., M.A., 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 Guggenheimfellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. SLC, 2000-

Laure-Anne Bosselaar

Author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf and Small Gods of Grief, awarded the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry. A New Hunger was published by Ausable Press in early 2007. Her poems have appeared in The Washington Post, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, AGNI, Harvard Review, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and many others. Editor of four anthologies: Night Out: Poems about Hotels, Motels, Restaurants and Bars; Outsiders: Poems about Rebels, Exiles and Renegades; Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the Cities; and Never Before: Poems About First Experiences. She translates American poetry into French and Flemish poetry into English. With her husband, poet Kurt Brown, she translated a selection of poems entitled The Plural of Happinessby the Flemish poet, critic, and essayist Herman de Coninck. SLC, 2001-

Kurt Brown

B.A., University of Connecticut. M.A., University of Colorado. Special interests include jazz, cooking, and travel; author of Return of the Prodigals, More Things in Heaven and Earth, Fables from the Ark, and Future Ship; editor of a number of anthologies of poetry, including Verse & Universe: Poems About Science and Mathematics; recently published in Nightsun, Nimrod, Powhatan Review, New York Quarterly, and Harvard Review; Bruce McEver Visiting Chair in Writing at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia. SLC, 2005-

Melvin Jules Bukiet

B.A., Sarah Lawrence College. M.F.A., Columbia University. Author of Sandman’s Dust, Stories of an Imaginary Childhood, While the Messiah Tarries, After, Signs and Wonders, Strange Fire, and A Faker’s Dozen; editor of Neurotica and Nothing Makes You Free. Works have been translated into half a dozen languages and frequently anthologized; winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award and other prizes; stories published in Antaeus, The Paris Review, and other magazines; essays published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and other newspapers. SLC, 1993-

Tina Chang

B.A., State University of New York-Binghamton. M.F.A., Columbia University. Poet; author of Half-Lit Houses (Four Way Books, 2004). Poems published in journals including American Poet, Indiana Review, The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, Sonora Review, and in many anthologies including Identity Lessons, Poetry Nation, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, Poets 30: Poets in Their Thirties. Recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, among others. SLC, 2005-

Rachel Cohen

A.B., Harvard University. Author of A Chance Meeting, a nonfiction book tracing a chain of 30 American writers and artists who knew or influenced or met one another over the period from the Civil War to the civil rights movement, published by Random House, spring 2004; winner of the 2003 PEN/Jerard Fund Award. Essays in The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, McSweeney’s, DoubleTake, Parnassus, and Modern Painters and in 2003 Best American Essays and 2003 Pushcart Prizeanthologies. Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony. SLC, 2003-

Stephen Dobyns

Author of more than 30 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including a recent book of poems, Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides; his book Cemetery Nights won the Poetry Society of America’s 1987 Melville Cane Award; received a Guggenheim fellowship and three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships; has taught at a dozen colleges and universities including the University of Iowa, Boston University, and the M.F.A. Program at Warren Wilson College; recently published his first collection of short stories, Eating Naked: Stories, two stories appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1995 and 1999; poetry collection, The Porcupine’s Kisses, was published by Penguin in fall 2002. SLC, 2003-

Thomas Sayers Ellis

M.F.A., 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

B.A., Sarah Lawrence College. M.A., 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-

Suzanne Gardinier

B.A., University of Massachusetts-Amherst. M.F.A., 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 ReviewAward for Literary Excellence in the Essay and of grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation. SLC, 1994-

Myra Goldberg

B.A., University of California-Berkeley. M.A., 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 book anthologies Women in Literature, Powers of Desire, The World’s Greatest Love Stories, and elsewhere in the U.S. and France; nonfiction published in The Village Voiceand elsewhere; recipient of Lebensberger Foundation grant. SLC, 1985-

Matthea Harvey

B.A., Harvard College. M.F.A., The 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 (Soft Skull, 2007). She is a contributing editor for jubilat and BOMB, and has taught at Warren Wilson, the Pratt Institute, and the University of Houston. SLC, 2004-

Amy Hempel

B.A, San Jose State University. Author of four collections of short stories: Reasons To Live; At The Gates Of The Animal Kingdom; Tumble Home; The Dog Of The Marriage; and of The Collected Stories (2006) which was a finalist for the PEN-Faulkner Award and one of the New York Times’ “Ten Best Books of the Year.” Her fiction has been widely published and anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a United States Artists Inaugural Fellowship, and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. SLC, 2007-

Joshua Henkin

B.A., Harvard College. M.F.A., University of Michigan. Author of the novel Swimming Across the Hudson; short stories in DoubleTake, Ploughshares, Southern Review, North American Review, Boulevard, and elsewhere; nonfiction in The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Mother Jones, and elsewhere; grants from PEN and the Michigan Council of the Arts. SLC, 2000-

Kathleen Hill

B.A., Manhattanville College. M.A., Columbia University. Ph.D., University of Wisconsin. Author of the novel, Still Waters in Niger; finalist in French translation, Prix Femina. Recent fiction published in DoubleTake, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review; anthologized in Best American Short Stories and Pushcart. Recipient of New York Foundation for the Arts grant and National Endowment for the Arts Award. SLC, 1991-1994; 1997-

Cathy Park Hong

B.A., Oberlin College. M.F.A., 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-

Marie Howe

B.S., University of Windsor. M.F.A., Columbia University. Poet; author of The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, (W.W. Norton, Jan 2008) and The Good Thief, selected by Margaret Atwood for the National Poetry Series; 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 Artists Foundation, and the Guggenheim. SLC, 1993-

Thomas Lux

B.A., 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

B.A., Sarah Lawrence College. M.F.A., 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, D.C., Commission for the Arts. SLC, 2001-

Ernesto Mestre

B.A., Tulane University. Author of two novels: The Lazarus Rumba and The Second Death of Unica Aveyano. His fiction has been collected in various anthologies, including Best American Gay Fiction 1996, A Whistler in the Nightworld: Short Fiction from the Latin Americas, and Cubanisimo!: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature. SLC, 1999-

Mary Morris

B.A., Tufts College. M.Phil., 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-

Brian Morton

B.A., Sarah Lawrence College. 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-

Dennis Nurkse

B.A., Harvard. Author of nine books of poetry, including The Border Kingdom (Knopf, forthcoming), Burnt Island, The Fall, The Rules of Paradise, Leaving Xaia, and Voices Over Water. Poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Times Literary Supplement (London), and Best American Poetry; recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships,two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, a Tanne Foundation Award, the Leila Wallace Fellowship from the MacDowell Colony, and the Bess Hokin Prize and Frederick Bock Prize from The Poetry Foundation. (Published as “D. Nurkse.”) SLC, 2004-

Stephen O’Connor

B.A., Columbia University. M.A., 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 Quarterly, Partisan Review, The Massachusetts Review, Fiction International, and elsewhere. Essays and journalism have been published in The New York Times, DoubleTake, The Nation, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, and Tri-Quarterly, 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

B.A., St. John’s University. M.A., 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

B.A., Dartmouth College. M.F.A., Columbia University. Recent novel The Border of Truth was a Barnes and Noble Discovery book; Novel Loverboy was a recipient of the S. Mariella Gable Award and the Forward Silver Literary Fiction Prize. Author of Where the Road Bottoms Out (short fiction); Already the World (poetry) selected by Gerald Stern for the Tom and Stan Wick Award; recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; work appears in many anthologies including the Heath Introduction to Fiction; recent work published in journals including Epoch, Antioch Review, and The Harvard Review. 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. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Agni, Fence, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and other journals, and have been anthologized in The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Aizenberg and Belieu, eds., Columbia University Press) and The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology(Michael Collier, ed., University Press of New England), among other anthologies. She teaches in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Founding editor and the director of Four Way Books, an independent literary press in New York City.

Lucy Rosenthal

B.A., University of Michigan. M.S., Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. M.F.A., Yale School of Drama. Fiction writer, critic, editor, playwright; author of the novel The Ticket Out and editor of anthologies Great American Love Stories, World Treasury of Love Stories, and The Eloquent Short Story: Varieties of Narration; reviews and articles published in The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune Book World, Ms., Saturday Review, The New York Times Book Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review; plays produced at Eugene O’Neill Memorial Theater Center, Waterford, Conn.; recipient, Pulitzer Fellowship in Critical Writing; served on Book-of-the-Month Club’s Editorial Board of judges and as the Club’s senior editorial adviser. SLC, 1988-

John Burnham Schwartz

Author of three novels, Bicycle Days, Reservation Road, and Claire Marvel. Writing has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, DoubleTake, Vogue, and Newsday. Past winner of the Lyndhurst Foundation Award whose work has been translated into 11 languages. Taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and at Harvard University and is currently deputy director of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference.

Joan Silber

B.A., Sarah Lawrence College. M.A., New York University. Author of two short-story collections, Ideas of Heaven (finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize) 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-

Alice Truax

Vassar College. An editor for two decades at The New Yorker, has published widely in periodicals such as The New York Times and The New York Review of Books.

Lawrence Weschler

Graduate of Cowell College of the University of California at Santa Cruz (1974). Was for over 20 years (1981-2002), until his recent retirement, a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. Two-time winner of the George Polk Award (for Cultural Reporting in 1988 and Magazine Reporting in 1992) and the recipient of the Lannan Literary Award (1998). Books of political reportage include The Passion of Poland (1984); A Miracle, a Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (1990); and Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas (1998). Taught, variously, at Princeton, Columbia, UCSC, Bard, Vassar, NYU, and Sarah Lawrence. Currently director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, where he has been a fellow since 1991, and where he is publishes a semi-annual journal of writing and visual culture, Omnivore. Contributing editor to McSweeney’s and the Threepenny Review; (recently retired) chair of the Sundance (formerly Soros) Documentary Film Fund; and director of the Ernst Toch Society, dedicated to the promulgation of the music of his grandfather, the noted Weimar emigré composer.

Penny Wolfson

B.A., M.F.A., Sarah Lawrence College. Has written and spoken extensively on the subject of disability. Won a National Magazine Award in 2002 for her essay “Moonrise,” which was also included in Best American Essays, and published a memoir of the same name (St. Martin’s). Her writing has appeared in publications including The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, City Limits, Chelsea, and Print magazine and will be included in the forthcoming anthology Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies. Recipient of residency, Hall Farm Center for the Arts. SLC, 2003-

Carol Zoref

B.A., M.F.A., Sarah Lawrence College. Fiction writer and essayist; recipient of fellowships and grants from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Hall Farm Center for Arts, and In Our Own Write; winner of I.O.W.W. Emerging Artist Award; and finalist for the Henfield and American Fiction Awards and Pushcart Prize. SLC, 1996-