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People

Senior Faculty
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E. L. Doctorow
E. L. Doctorow's many novels include Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, LoonLake, World’s Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Waterworks, and City of God. 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. 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. 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. Her second novel, The Autograph Man, won The Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize. Read more...

Distinguished Global Professor of Creative Writing
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Breyten Breytenbach
Breyten Breytenbach, a native of South Africa, is a distinguished painter and a writer of more than 30 books of poetry, numerous novels, short story compilations, essays and dramatic works. 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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Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, including the bestsellers The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of two short story collections, Men and Cartoons and The Wall of the Sky, Wall of the Eye, and a collection of autobiographical essays, The Disappointment Artist. Read more...

Distinguished Poets-in-Residence
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Anne Carson
Anne Carson is an internationally acclaimed writer. Her books of poetry include 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...

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, most recently A Worldly Country (Ecco, 2007); Where Shall I Wander (2005); Chinese Whispers (2002); Your Name Here (2000); Girls on the Run: A Poem (1999); Wakefulness (1998); Can You Hear, Bird (1995); And the Stars Were Shining (1994); Hotel Lautrémont (1992); Flow Chart (1991); and April Galleons (1987). Read more...

Graduate Faculty 2009-2010
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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...
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Eamon Grennan
Eamon Grennan is the author of several volumes of poetry including Wildly for Days, What Light There Is, As if it Matters, and Relations: New and Selected Poems. His latest collection is Matter of Fact. His Leopardi: Selected Poems won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and he has published a collection of critical essays, Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the Twentieth Century. Read more...
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Edward Hirsch
Edward Hirsch is the author of seven books of poetry including Special Orders, Lay Back the Darkness, On Love, Earthly Measures, and The Night Parade. He is also the author of the prose volumes The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration, Responsive Reading, the national bestseller... 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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David Lipsky

David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine.  He's a graduate of Brown University and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Best American Short Stories, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and many others. Read more...

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Brian Morton
Brian Morton is the author of the novels The Dylanist, Starting Out in the Evening, finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award, A Window Across the River, and most recently Breakable You. 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. She is the recipient of the 2008 May Sarton Poetry Prize. Read more...
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Matthew Rohrer
Matthew Rohrer is the author of Rise Up (2007) and A Green Light (2004), which was short listed 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), and is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Hopwood Award for Poetry and an M.F.A from the University of Iowa 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. Her work has been translated into several languages, including her native Greek. 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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Chuck Wachtel
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. Read more...

Undergraduate Faculty 2009-2010
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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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Daphne Beal
Daphne Beal's first novel, In the Land of No Right Angles, was published by Vintage/Anchor in August, 2008. Her nonfiction has appeared in Vogue, McSweeney's, and The London Review of Books. Read more...
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Anne Carson
Anne Carson is an internationally acclaimed writer. Her books of poetry include 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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R. Currie
R. Currie is an artist living and working in New York and elsewhere. Read more...
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Rachel DeWoskin
Rachel DeWoskin is the author of the novel Repeat After Me and the memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing. She holds a B.A. from Columbia University in English and an M.A. from Boston University in poetry. Read more...
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Jennifer Egan
Jennifer Egan is the author of three novels, The Invisible Circus, Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award, and the bestselling The Keep, and a short story collection, Emerald City. Read more...
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Elaine Equi
Elaine Equi is the author of Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems as well as numerous other collections of poetry including 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 novels and one nonfiction book. His most recent novel, The Art and Practice of Explosion, won honorary mention in Foreword's Best Novel of the Year competition... 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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Deborah Landau
Deborah Landau is the author of Orchidelirium, which won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and Blue Dark (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press). Her poems, essays, and reviews appear in Read more...
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Maria Laurino
Maria Laurino is the author of Were You Always an Italian?, a national best-selling memoir about ethnic identity, as well as the forthcoming memoir Old World Daughter, New World Mother: An Education in Love and Freedom (W.W. Norton, 2009). Read more...
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Paul Lisicky
Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, and the forthcoming Lumina Harbor. 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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Geoffrey Nutter
Geoffrey Nutter is the author of two books of poems, Water's Leaves & Other Poems and Summer Evening. Read more...
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Susan Orlean
A staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992, Susan Orlean is the acclaimed author of The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, My Kind of Place, Lazy Little Loafers, The Orchid Thief, and Saturday Night Read more...
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Jonathan Rabb
Jonathan Rabb is the author of the novels Rosa, The Book of Q, The Overseer, and the forthcoming Shadow and Light to be published with FSG in 2009. Read more...
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Matthew Rohrer
Matthew Rohrer is the author of Rise Up (2007) and A Green Light (2004), which was short listed 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), and is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Hopwood Award for Poetry and an M.F.A from the University of Iowa Read more...
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Mark Rudman
Mark Rudman is the author of seven volumes of poetry and three of prose. He is the winner of The National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for Rider, the Max Hayward Award for his translation of Boris Pasternak's My Sister--Life, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill Foundations, the National Endowment on the Arts, and the New York State Council of the Arts. 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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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. Her work has been translated into several languages, including her native Greek. 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... Read more...
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Chuck Wachtel
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. Read more...