Levi Cain & Laura Kolbe

Date/time: Monday, November 13, 2023, 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Location: Mead Hall
Event flyer: Levi Cain & Laura Kolbe

Laura Kolbe is a writer, physician, and medical ethicist. Her debut poetry collection Little Pharma (University of Pittsburgh) won the 2021 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Her writing can be found in The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Yale Review, and has received support from the Calderwood Foundation, the Key West Literary Seminar, MacDowell, and the James Merrill House.

Levi Cain is a non-binary Queeribbean writer from New England. They have served as a poetry fellow for Mass Cultural Council and a fiction fellow for Sundress Academy of the Arts. Levi has been a finalist for the Limp Wrists’ Glitter Bomb Award, as well as a nominee for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net for poetry and short fiction. They are active within the Boston poetry community, having recently featured for the Trans Day of Visibility benefit for Harbor Camp, as well as Trans Resistance March. Their first chapbook, dogteeth, was published by Ursus Americanus Press in 2020.

Renée Branum and Jessie Gaynor

Date/time: Thursday, October 5, 2023, 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Location: Mead Hall
Event flyer: Renée Branum & Jessie Gaynor

Renée Branum’s stories and essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, Narrative Magazine, The Kenyon Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. Her story “As the Sparks Fly Upward” was included in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019. She holds MFAs in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Nonfiction from the University of Montana. She was awarded an NEA 2020 Prose Fellowship to aid in the completion of her first novel, Defenestrate. She lives in Cincinnati.

Jessie Gaynor is the author of The Glow. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The New Yorker, WSJ Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a senior editor at Literary Hub and she has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Rona Jaffe fellow. She lives in Richmond, Virginia with her family.

Ann Wallace

Date/time: Tuesday, April 18, 2023, 4:15 pm – 5:15 pm
Location: Mead Hall
Event flyer: Ann Wallace

Ann E. Wallace, CLA ’92,PhD, graduated from Drew with a degree in Art History and Studio Art. She is the 2023-2024 Poet Laureate of Jersey City, New Jersey. A survivor of ovarian cancer, woman with multiple sclerosis, and COVID longhauler, she has written on the experience and rhetoric of illness. Her work has appeared in HuffPost, Good Morning, America, Fox News Radio, and others. Wallace is Professor of English at New Jersey City University. She is author of the poetry collection Counting by Sevens (Main Street Rag, 2019) and of a recently completed manuscript Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul. She hosts and co-produces Saturday Morning Poetry for her local Native Plant Society on Instagram @npsnjhudsoncounty. Her published creative work can be found at AnnWallacePhD.com.

Lynn Steger Strong

Date/time: Thursday, April 13th, 2023, 4pm – 5pm
Location: Mead Hall
Event flyer: Lynn Steger Strong

Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the acclaimed novels Hold Still, Want, and Flight. Her nonfiction and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Columbia University and is currently the Visiting Fiction Writer at Bates College.

Patrick Phillips and Kannan Mahadevan

Date/time: Thursday, March 23rd, 2023, 4pm – 5pm
Location: Mead Hall
Event flyer: Phillips and Mahadevan

Patrick Phillips is currently a fellow of the Cullman Center for Writers at the New York Public Library and a Carnegie Foundation Fellow. His first book of nonfiction, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, was published by W. W. Norton and named a best book of the year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and the Smithsonian. Elegy for a Broken Machine appeared in the Knopf Poets series in 2015 and was a finalist for the National Book Award. ​Phillips is also the author of Chattahoochee, Boy, and Song of the Closing Doors, which was published by Knopf in 2022. He lives in San Francisco and teaches writing and literature at Stanford.​

Kannan Mahadevan earned an MFA in Fiction from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and is a former fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Racquet. He has taught creative writing workshops for the University of Iowa and the Berlin Writers’ Workshop and currently teaches a Short Fiction Workshop at Drew. He lives in Brooklyn.

Phillips’ books may be purchased from Drew’s bookstore either in person or online here.

Publishing Symposium

Date/time: Thursday, February 15th, 2023, 7pm
Location: Online (Zoom link on Event Flyer)
Event flyer: Publishing Symposium

Matt Ortile is the executive editor of Catapult magazine and was previously the founding editor of BuzzFeed Philippines. He’s also the author of the essay collection The Groom Will Keep His Name and co-editor of the nonfiction anthology Body Language. He’s received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and MacDowell; taught workshops for Kundiman and PEN America; and written for Esquire, Vogue, Condé Nast Traveler, and Out magazine. He is a graduate of Vassar College, which means he now lives in Brooklyn.

Lauren Wein, Vice President and Editorial Director
Before joining Avid Reader Press, where she oversees the imprint’s fiction and memoir program, Lauren Wein spent more than two decades as an editor at Grove Atlantic and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. At Avid, she’s published two Reese’s Book Club selections—Group by Christie Tate and Infinite Country by Patricia Engel, both New York Times bestsellers. Other recent publications include Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth, Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir, Hala Alyan’s The Arsonists’ City, and Chloe Cooper Jones’s Easy Beauty.

Tanya McKinnon is the principal literary agent at McKinnon Literary. She represents serious nonfiction, literary fiction, children’s books, and graphic novels. Since establishing her agency in 2014, she’s seen the publication of numerous New York Times bestsellers, as well as numerous award winners, including works by Imani Perry, Michael Eric Dyson, Tiya Miles, and George O’Connor. She acquires nonfiction in categories that include history, sociology, psychology, and popular culture; fiction that’s story- and character-driven with a strong voice; and books for young readers of all ages. She has a particular interest in multicultural and African American work.

Cara Blue Adams

Date/time: Tuesday 18 October 2022, 4pm
Location: Mead Hall

Cara Blue Adams  is the author of the short story collection You Never Get it Back (University of Iowa Press, 2021), named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and awarded the John Simmons Short Fiction Prize, judged by Brandon Taylor.

(Sponsored by the English Department, and generously funded by the Casement Fund).

Event flyer: Cara Blue Adams

Authors on Reproductive Freedom

Shelly Oria  is the author of New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) and the editor of Indelible in the Hippocampus, Writings from the MeToo Movement (McSweeney’s 2019), as well as the forthcoming I Know What’s Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom (McSweeney’s 2022). Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and on Selected Shorts at Symphony Space, received a number of awards, and been translated to several languages.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri is a writer, storyteller, and educator. A former fellow at the Center for Fiction, her work has appeared in publications such as Rolling Stone, Kenyon Review, n+1, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Boston Review, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, The Nation, The American Prospect, Salon, and Mother Jones. Onnesha has read and performed on stages for The Moth, Tedx, Lincoln Center, and more. She is the author of The Marginalized Majority: Claiming Our Power in a Post-Truth America, a Kirkus Best Book of the Year.

Kate Tarker is an American playwright who grew up in Germany. Her newest play, Montag, is premiering at Soho Rep in Fall 2022. Other plays include THUNDERBODIES (Soho Rep), Dionysus Was Such a Nice Man (The Wilma, FoolsFURY), and Laura and the Sea (Rivendell Theatre Ensemble). Kate is the recipient of a Jerome Fellowship, a MacDowell fellowship, The Vineyard’s Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, and Theater Masters’ Visionary Playwright Award, and she has been featured twice on the Kilroys List. She holds an MFA from Yale.

(Sponsored by the English Department, the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, and generously funded by the Casement Fund).

Event flyer: W@D_Authors on reproductive freedom_Sept22
From Drew Stories, about the event:  Click here.

A reading by Drew’s Creative Writing faculty (March 2022)
Emily Nemens debut novel, The Cactus League was called “a wonderful, necessary read to remind you how infinite and wild other people can be” (The Brooklyn Rail). It was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and named one of the best books of the year by NPR. Her fiction has also appeared in Gettysburg Review, n+1, Iowa Review.

Sara Martinholds a MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has been published by The Rumpus, Lit Hub, Adroit Journal, The Seattle Review, Penn Review, Columbia Journal and other publications. Sara recently completed a novel in verse called They Wake Up Swinging and is at work on a new project called Mocktails.

Andrew Martin is the author of the novel Early Work, a New York Times Notable book of 2018 and a finalist for the Cabell First Novelist Award, and the story collection Cool for America, which was longlisted for the 2020 Story Prize. His essays and fiction have appeared regularly in The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, and The Paris Review, and less regularly in The Atlantic, The Yale Review, The New York Times Book Review, and many other publications.

(Sponsored by the English Department, and generously funded by the Casement Fund).

Event flyer: Creative Writing Faculty Reading 2022

Publishing Symposium (Feb 2022)
Jenna Johnson, Editor in Chief at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has published a range of award-winning and bestselling titles, including Luster by Raven Leilani, Owls of the Eastern Ice by Jonathan Slaght, Severance by Ling Ma, The Turner House by Angela Flournoy, We the Animals by Justin Torres and James Beard Winner Save the Deli by David Sax. Jenna publishes fiction and narrative nonfiction, with particular interest in original and surprising voices.

Rebecca Gradinger joined the literary agency Fletcher & Company in 2009. She represents a variety of authors who write narrative nonfiction and literary fiction, including Maggie Shipstead, Francisco Cantú, Damon Tweedy, Courtney Maum, Noe Alvarez, Rachel Cargle, and others. She holds a BA from Barnard College and a JD from the George Washington University Law Center.

Denne Michele Norris is the Editor in Chief of Electric Literature. A 2021 Out100 Honoree, her writing has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, VCCA, and the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction, and appears in McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and ZORA. She co-hosts the critically acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot, and is hard at work on her debut novel.

(Sponsored by the English Department, and generously funded by the Casement Fund).

Event flyer: 2022 Publishing Symposium

Tiphanie Yanique (November 2021)
Tiphanie Yanique is a novelist, poet, essayist, and short story writer. Her poetry collection, Wife, won the 2016 Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the UK’s Forward/Felix Dennis Prize. Her novel, Land of Love and Drowning, won the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award from The Center for Fiction, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts & Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award. It was listed by NPR as one of the Best Books of 2014. She’s also the author of the short story collection How to Escape from a Leper Colony, which won her a listing as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5Under35. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Best African American Fiction, and the Best American Short Stories. Her latest novel, Monster in the Middle, published in October 2021. Tiphanie is from the Virgin Islands. She lives now with her family in Atlanta, where she is a tenured associate professor at Emory University.
Event flier: click here
From Drew Stories, about the event:  Click here

Javier Zamora (October 2021)
Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and migrated to the US when he was nine. He was a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard and has been granted fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and Stanford University. Unaccompanied is his first collection. He lives in Harlem where he’s working on a memoir.
Event flier: click here
From Drew Stories, about the event:  Click here

Lisa Taddeo (September, 2021)
Lisa Taddeo is an author, journalist and two-time recipient of the Pushcart Prize. Her first nonfiction book, Three Women, was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller, and is currently in pre-production as a series at Showtime with Shailene Woodley starring and Taddeo adapting and serving as executive producer. Animal, a national and international bestseller, is her debut novel.
Co-sponsored by Drew’s Women’s and Gender Studies program.
Event flyer: Click here
From Drew Stories, about the event:  Click here

Aimee Nezhukumatathil (April 2021)
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the New York Times best-selling author of World of Wonder: in Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments, finalist for the Kirkus Prize in non-fiction, and recently named the Barnes and Noble Book of the Year. She is also the author of four books of poetry, and is poetry editor of SIERRA, the national magazine  of the Sierra Club. Awards for her writing include a fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Council, Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for poetry, National Endowment of the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her writing has appeared in NYTimes Magazine, ESPN Magazine, and twice in Best American Poetry. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.
Event flyer: Click here
From Drew Stories, about the event:  Click here

Publishing Symposium (April 2021)
T Kira Mahealani Madden is a writer, photographer, and amateur magician. A recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Hedgebrook, Tin House, MacDowell, and Yaddo, she serves as the founding Editor-in-chief of No Tokens, a magazine of literature and art. Her fiction and nonfiction has been featured in Harper’s, New York Magazine, and others, and she is the author of the 2019 New York Times Editors’ Choice memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the LAMBDA Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College.

Callie Garnett, Senior Editor, joined Bloomsbury Publishing’s New York office in 2014 after completing a Masters in English at the University of Iowa. The books she has edited include Rachel Louise Snyder’s award-winning No Visible Bruises, T Kira Madden’s immensely beloved and critically acclaimed Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, and Anna North’s instant New York Times bestseller Outlawed (Reese Witherspoon’s January 2021 Book Club Pick). She acquires issue-driven narrative nonfiction, literary fiction and memoir, and cultural commentary. She is also a poet—her first full length collection, Wings in Time, comes out from The Song Cave this September.
(Sponsored by the English Department, and generously funded by the Casement Fund).
Event flyer: Click here

Courtney Zoffness (March 2021)
Courtney Zoffness writes fiction and nonfiction. She won the Sunday Times Short Story Award, the largest international prize for short fiction, as well as a Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellowship, the Arts & Letters Creative Nonfiction Prize, and residency fellowships from MacDowell. Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, The New York Times, Guernica, Longreads, and elsewhere. Her debut, Spilt Milk, was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by Publishers Weekly, LitHub, The Millions, Refinery29, and others. Courtney directs the Creative Writing Program at Drew University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Event flyer: Click here
From Drew Stories, about the event:  Click here and here

Emma Cline (February 2021)
Emma Cline is author of The Girls, an international bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her short story collection, Daddy, published in 2020. The recipient of the prestigious Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review, Cline’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Tin House, and elsewhere, and her fiction has been anthologized several times in Best American Short Stories. In 2017, Cline was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. In 2019, she was a finalist for the Sunday Times Short Story Award.
Event flyer: Click here
From Drew Stories, about the event:  Click here

Jamel Brinkley – November 2020
Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories (2018), a finalist for the National Book Award, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.
His writing has appeared in A Public Space, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, among other journals, and has been anthologized twice in The Best American Short Stories.
He was the 2016-2017 Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and a 2018-2020 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
Raised in Brooklyn and the Bronx, New York, he currently teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Photo credit: Arash Saedinia.
Event flier: Click here
From Drew Stories, about the event:  Click here

Mark Olshaker – April 2020
Mark Olshaker is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and author of twelve nonfiction books and five novels, including Einstein’s Brain and The Edge. His books with former FBI Special Agent and criminal profiling pioneer John Douglas, beginning with Mindhunter, have sold millions of copies and have been translated into many languages. Mindhunter is now a dramatic series on Netflix, directed by David Fincher. Their most recent books are The Killer Across the Table, which takes a deep dive into the process of interviewing serial killers in prison, which formed the basis for behavioral profiling; and The Killer’s Shadow, which relates the FBI’s hunt for Joseph Paul Franklin, the nation’s first racist and anti-Semitic serial killer.
Olshaker also has extensive experience with the other field of life-and-death detective work: medical mystery. His first novel was the critically acclaimed Einstein’s Brain, and his research with the Centers for Disease Control led to his novel Unnatural Causes and the nonfiction book Virus Hunter with Dr. C.J. Peters, CDC’s Chief of Special Pathogens. The New England Journal of Medicine compared it to Paul de Kruif’s classic Microbe Hunters. Olshaker’s book with epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm, Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs, was named the Number 1 Global Health Book of the Year by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in 2017.
Olshaker is past president of the Norman Mailer Society, a director of the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation, life member of the Writers Guild of America and former chairman of the Cosmos Club Foundation. He and his wife Carolyn, an attorney, live in Washington, D.C.
Event flier: Click here
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Mira Jacob – February 2020
Mira Jacob is the author and illustrator of Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations. Her critically acclaimed novel, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick, shortlisted for India’s Tata First Literature Award, and longlisted for the Brooklyn Literary Eagles Prize. It was named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle, and The Millions. Her writing and drawings have appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Tin House, Literary Hub, Guernica, Vogue, the Telegraph, and Buzzfeed, and she has a drawn column on Shondaland. She currently teaches at The New School, and she is a founding faculty member of the MFA Program at Randolph College. She is the co-founder of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn, where she spent 13 years bringing literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry to Williamsburg. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, documentary filmmaker Jed Rothstein, and their son.
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Publishing Symposium – November 2019

Andrew Martin, Cultural critic and author, Onnesha Roychoudhuri – Journalist and author, Eve Sanoussi C’14 – Associate editor – W.W. Norton

(Sponsored by the English Department, and generously funded by the Casement Fund)
Event flier: Click here

Writers Respond to #MeToo panel – October 2019

Assistant Professor Courtney Zoffness moderated a discussion with four authors, Shelly Oria, Samantha Hunt, Syreeta McFadden, and Hossannah Asuncion, all of whose work appears in McSweeney’s forthcoming multi-genre anthology Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement.
Event flier: Click here
From Drew Stories, about the event: here

Student Prizewinners Reading – April 2019

Event flier: Click here

Mitchell S. Jackson – March 2019

Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel, The Residue Years, won The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for The PEN/Hemingway Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and The Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. He is also the author of the forthcoming memoir Survival Math (Scribner), where his family and friends reflect larger cultural issues, including race, prison and drug addiction. His honors include a Whiting Award, and fellowships from TED and the Lannan Foundation, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Salon, and Tin House, among other publications. He teaches at NYU.
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From Drew Stories, about the event: here

Erika L. Sánchez – March 2019

Erika L. Sánchez is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. She is a poet, novelist, and essayist living in Chicago. Her debut poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, was published by Graywolf in July 2017, and was a finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award. Her debut young adult novel, I am not your perfect Mexican Daughter, published by Knopf Books for Young Readers, is a New York Times Bestseller and was a National Book Awards finalist. She received a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellowship and a 2019 NEA Fellowship in Creative Writing.
Event flier: Click here
From Drew Stories, about the event: here

Drew Creative Writing Faculty Reading – January 2019

Drew Creative Writing Faculty Reading featuring Hannah Beresford, Andrea Chapin, and Courtney Zoffness
Event flier: Click here
From Drew Stories, about the event: here

Jennifer Egan is the author of A Visit From the Goon Squad, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and the National Book Critics Award. Her other books include The Keep, Look at Me, The Invisible Circus, and the short fiction collection Emerald City. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, GQ, Zoetrope, and Ploughshares, and her award-winning nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine.  Her newest novel, Manhattan Beach, was published in October 2017 and was a New York Times bestseller. Egan is the newly-appointed president of the PEN American Center. She lives in Brooklyn.

Event flier: Click here
From Drew Stories, about the event: here

Nicole Sealey and John Murillo – March 2018

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From Drew Stories, about the event: here

Junot Diaz – January 2018

Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award.  A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He is the cofounder of Voices of Our Nation Workshop.

Event flier: Click here

Jacqueline Woodson is the New York Times bestselling author of Another Brooklyn, which was a 2016 finalist for the National Book Award.  Her 2014 bestseller, Brown Girl Dreamin, won the National Book Award and was the recipient of the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor Award, the NAACP Image Award and the Sibert Honor Award. Woodson was named Young People’s Poet Laureate (2015-2017) by the Poetry Foundation.  She is the author of more than two dozen award-winning books for young adults, middle graders and children; among her many accolades, she is a four-time Newbery Honor winner, a three-time National Book Award finalist, and a two-time Coretta Scott King Award winner.

Ben Marcus

Ben Marcus is the author of the novels The Flame Alphabet and Notable American Women, and the short story collections The Age of Wire and String and Leaving the Sea. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, the Paris Review, and the New York Times. Ben is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, three Pushcart Prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at Columbia University.

Michael Patrick MacDonald

Michael Patrick MacDonald is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, All Souls: A Family Story From Southie and the acclaimed Easter Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion. He has received an American Book Award, A New England Literary Lights Award, and a fellowship at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Center, and he’s a Senior Contributing Editor for the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. He is the Author-in-Residence at Northeastern University’s Honors Department.

Cam Terwilliger

Cam Terwilliger’s writing can be found online in American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and Narrative, where he was named one of Narrative’s “15 Under 30.” In print, his writing appears in West Branch, Post Road, and Gettysburg Review, among others. His work has been supported by fellowships and scholarships from the Fulbright Program, the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the New York Council on the Arts, and the Bread Loaf, Tin House, and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. Before coming to Drew, he taught previously at Emerson College, Louisiana State University, and Coastal Carolina University. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Courtney Zoffness

Courtney Zoffness won the 2016 American Literary Review Prize in Fiction and the StoryQuarterly Fiction Prize. She has been awarded fellowships from the Center for Fiction and the MacDowell Colony, and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. Her fiction and literary nonfiction have appeared recently in The Rumpus, Indiana Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Common, and elsewhere. She has taught at nearly a dozen institutions, including Yale University and the University of Freiburg in Germany, where she was a writer-in-residence. Currently she co-directs the creative writing program at Drew, where she’s a Visiting Assistant Professor.

Nathan McClain

Nathan McClain is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017), a recipient of scholarships from The Frost Place and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a graduate from Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. A Cave Canem fellow, his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Ploughshares, Hunger Mountain, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Southern Humanities Review. He currently lives in Brooklyn.

Publishing Panel

Patrick Phillips

Patrick Phillips’ first book of nonfiction, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, was published by W. W. Norton in September of 2016. His third book of poems, Elegy for a Broken Machine, was published in 2015 by Alfred A. Knopf, and named a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry. A past fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggennheim Foundation, Phillips is the author of two earlier collections, Boy and Chattahoochee, and translator of When We Leave Each Other: Selected Poems by the Danish writer Henrik Nordbrandt. His work has appeared in many magazines, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Poetry, Ploughshares, and The Nation, and his honors include the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. Phillips lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at Drew University.

Marie-Helene Bertino

Marie-Helene Bertino’s debut novel 2AM at the Cat’s Pajamas was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” pick and an NPR Best Book of 2014. Her collection of short stories Safe as Houses won The Iowa Short Fiction award in 2012. Marie-Helene’s stories have appeared in Granta, Guernica, American Short Fiction, Five Chapters, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and been anthologized in Mississippi Review’s Anthology 30 and The Pushcart Prize Anthology XXXIII. Her creative non-fiction has been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and the Lonely Planet 2015 Anthology, among others. Her work has been translated into six languages. Marie-Helene teaches in the Creative Writing Program at NYU and in the low-residency M.F.A. program at The Institute for Indian American Arts in Santa Fe. She lives in Brooklyn.

Colum McCann

Colum McCann is the author of six novels and three short story collections, including the National Book Award winner Let the Great World Spin, the bestselling Transatlantic, and most recently, Thirteen Ways of Looking. Born in Dublin, Ireland, McCann has earned numerous international honors including a French Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French government, a Best Foreign Novel Award from China, the International Dublin Impac Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Oscar nomination. McCann’s fiction has been published in over 35 languages and appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Best American Short Stories, and Esquire—which named McCann the “Writer of the Year” in 2003. The co-founder of the non-profit story exchange organization Narrative 4, McCann teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College and lives in New York City.

Mary Gaitskill

Mary Gaitskill is the author of the novels The Mare, Veronica, which was nominated for the 2005 National Book Award, National Critic’s Circle Award, and LA Times Book Award, and Two Girls, Fat and Thin. She is also the author of the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner in 1998, and Don’t Cry. Gaitskill’s stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction and a Cullman Research Fellowship at the New York Public Library.

Kirstin Valdez Quade

Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of Night at the Fiestas, a New York Times Notable Book, which received a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation, the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. She teaches at Princeton.

Jennifer Grotz

Jennifer Grotz is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Window Left Open. Also a translator of French and Polish, her most recent translation is Rochester Knockings, a novel by Tunisian-born writer Hubert Haddad. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Nation, and in four volumes of Best American Poetry. Director of the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference and assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, she teaches at the University of Rochester.

Jess Row

Jess Row’s first book, The Train to Lo Wu, a collection of short stories set in Hong Kong, was published in 2005; his second collection of stories, Nobody Ever Gets Lost, appeared in 2011. His first novel, Your Face in Mine, was published in August 2014 and was recently released in paperback. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Ploughshares, Granta, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere, have been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories, and have won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award. He has also received an NEA fellowship in fiction and a Whiting Writers Award. In 2007, he was named a “Best Young American Novelist” by Granta. Jess is an associate professor of English at The College of New Jersey.

Said Sayrafiezadeh

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the author of Brief Encounters with the Enemy, which was shortlisted for the 2014 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fiction Prize, and the critically acclaimed memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, The New York Times and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. He is the recipient of a 2010 Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction and a 2012 fiction fellowship from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Playwriting fellowships include New York Foundation for the Arts, New York Theatre Workshop and Sundance Theatre Lab. His play, “All Fall Away,” was produced in London at Theatre 503. He lives in New York City and teaches creative writing at Hunter College and New York University, where he received a 2013 Outstanding Teaching Award.

April 2015

April 2015

Patrick Phillips’ Elegy for a Broken Machine is forthcoming in 2015 from Alfred A. Knopf. A recent Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellow in poetry, he is the author of two earlier collections, Boy and Chattahoochee, and translator of When We Leave Each Other: Selected Poems of Henrik Nordbrandt. His work has appeared in many magazines, including Poetry, Ploughshares, and The Nation, and his honors include the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Drew University.

Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the short story collection, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, published by Graywolf Press in 2010, the picture book I Am the Virgin Islands, published by Little Bell Caribbean in 2012) and the novel Land of Love and Drowning, published by Riverhead/Penguin on July 10th. BookPage listed her as one of the 14 Women to watch out for in 2014. Her writing has won the 2011 BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Fiction, Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, and an Academy of American Poet’s Prize. She has been listed by the Boston Globe as one of the sixteen cultural figures to watch out for and by the National Book Foundation as one of the 5 Under 35. Her writing has been published in Best African American Fiction, The Wall Street Journal, American Short Fiction and other places. Yanique is also the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship.

Tiphanie grew in the Hospital Ground/Round da Field neighborhood of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. She graduated from All Saints Cathedral School and the Rising Stars Youth Steel Orchestra program. Both her mother and grandmother were librarians in the Virgin Islands. Tiphanie is now an assistant professor in the MFA and Riggio Honors programs at the New School in New York City. She lives with her husband, son and daughter. They split their time between Brooklyn and St. Thomas.  tiphanieyanique.com

March 2015

Featuring readings by Drew’s Creative Writing faculty

Eduardo C. Corral is a CantoMundo fellow. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2012, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Slow Lightning, his first book, won the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. He’s the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.  eduardocorral.com

Eugene Cross is the author of the short story collection “Fires of Our Choosing,” which was long listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and was named the Gold Medal winner in the Short Story category by the Independent Publisher Book Awards. He has taught creative writing at Penn State, Northwestern, University of Chicago, and Columbia College Chicago. His stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Narrative Magazine, American Short Fiction, Story Quarterly, TriQuarterly, and Callaloo, among other publications. His work was also listed among the 2010 Best American Short Stories’ 100 Distinguished Stories. He is the recipient of scholarships from the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, as well as fellowships from Yaddo and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. eugenecross.com.

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. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 1; Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction; and The Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens. Currently, she is the Distinguished Writer in Residence at the M.F.A Program in Creative Writing at Long Island University, Brooklyn. She lives in downtown Manhattan and in Saugerties, New York.

Courtney Zoffness’ writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Indiana Review, Washington Square, Fish Prize Stories, and others, as well as several creative writing anthologies. She also published extensive reportage while managing editor of The Earth Times. Her honors include a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarship, teaching fellowships at Yale University, and a writer-in-residence post at the Black Forest Writing Seminars in Freiburg, Germany. A 2013-14 NYC Emerging Writing Fellow at the Center for Fiction, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and sons. courtneyzoffness.com

February 2015

Deji Olukotun graduated from the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town, where he was taught by South African writers André Brink, Mike Nicol, Andre Wiesner, and Henrietta Rose-Innes. He also holds degrees from Yale College and Stanford Law School.

His novel Nigerians in Space, a thriller about brain drain from Africa, was published by Unnamed Press in 2014.

His work has been featured in Vice, Slate, GigaOm, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Atlantic, Guernica, The Millions, World Literature Today, ESPN, Chimurenga, Global Voices, Joyland, Words Without Borders, Alternet, Huffington Post, PEN America, The London Magazine, Molussus, The Beat, and Men’s Health. In 2013, he served as a juror for the Neustadt Festival of International Literature.

Deji is an attorney with a background in human rights and technology. He has traveled to over 25 countries and offers deep work experience in South Africa, Myanmar, and Haiti. He currently works at the digital rights organization Access, where he drives campaigns on net neutrality and surveillance. Before that, he fought for free expression and the defense of writers around the world at PEN American Center with support from the Ford Foundation.

Deji writes because he has to.  He can be found online at returnofthedeji.com.

November 2014

Phil Klay is a graduate of Dartmouth College and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. He served in Iraq’s Anbar Province from January 2007 to February 2008 as a Public Affairs Officer. After being discharged he went to Hunter College and received an MFA. His story “Redeployment” was originally published in Granta and is included in Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Granta, Tin House, and elsewhere.

In 2014 Klay was named a National Book Foundation ’5 Under 35′ honoree, and his short story collection Redeployment is the winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction.  He can be found online at philklay.com.

In partnership with Writers@Drew, the Andrew W. Mellon Arts and the Common Good Grant presents David Keefe, Director of Combat Paper NJ.  Keefe is also a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who, through Combat Paper NJ, helps teach other veterans papermaking and printmaking techniques to visually communicate their military experiences.  He will give a presentation about his organization, and join Klay for a Q&A following the event.  Combat Paper NJ can be found at the Printmaking Center of NJ.  Keefe’s personal work can be found at davidkeefe.net.

September 2014

Eugene Cross is the author of the short story collection “Fires of Our Choosing,” which was long listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and was named the Gold Medal winner in the Short Story category by the Independent Publisher Book Awards. He has taught creative writing at Penn State, Northwestern, University of Chicago, and Columbia College Chicago. His stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Narrative Magazine, American Short Fiction, Story Quarterly, TriQuarterly, and Callaloo, among other publications. His work was also listed among the 2010 Best American Short Stories’ 100 Distinguished Stories. He is the recipient of scholarships from the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, as well as fellowships from Yaddo and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He can be found online at eugenecross.com.

April 2014

Readings by the 2014 winners of the following writing and poetry prizes:

The Academy of American Poets’ Prize

The Goin Prize in Creative Writing

The Chapman Prize in Poetry

April 2014

Jayne Anne Phillips is the author of numerous books, including Lark and Termite, which was a National Book Award Finalist, and Quiet Dell, which was published to critical acclaim last year. Her book Machine Dreams, a New York Times best seller, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of twelve Best Books of the Year. Phillips is currently the Director of the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark University.  jayneannephillips.com

March 2014

Eduardo C. Corral is a CantoMundo fellow. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2012, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Slow Lightning, his first book, won the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. He’s the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.  eduardocorral.com

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. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 1; Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction; and The Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens. Currently, she is the Distinguished Writer in Residence at the M.F.A Program in Creative Writing at Long Island University, Brooklyn. She lives in downtown Manhattan and in Saugerties, New York.

Patrick Phillips’ third book, Elegy for a Broken Machine, is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf in 2015. He is also the author of Boy and Chattahoochee, and translator of When We Leave Each Other: Selected Poems of Henrik Nordbrandt. His honors include Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the 2005 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Drew University.  patrickthemighty.blogspot.com

Hirsh Sawhney is the editor of Delhi Noir, a critically acclaimed anthology of original fiction published by Akashic Books and HarperIndia. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Guardian, and the Times Literary Supplement. He was recently a Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University and is currently completing a novel.  hirshsawhney.com

Courtney Zoffness’ fiction has appeared in The Rumpus, Indiana Review, Washington Square, Tampa Review, the international Fish Prize Stories anthology, and elsewhere. The former managing editor of The Earth Times, she’s also published a range of nonfiction and reportage. Courtney was a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholar, a teaching fellow at Yale University, and a writer-in-residence at the Black Forest Writing Seminars (Freiburg, Germany). She’s taught writing and literature at nearly a dozen institutions—in nearly as many cities. Currently she’s a 2013 Emerging Writing Fellow at the Center for Fiction in New York, and lives in Brooklyn.  courtneyzoffness.com

March 2014

Caryl Phillips began writing for the theatre and his plays include Strange Fruit (1980), Where There is Darkness (1982) and The Shelter (1983). He won the BBC Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Play of the year with The Wasted Years (1984). He has written many dramas and documentaries for radio and television, including, in 1996, the three-hour film of his own novel The Final Passage. He wrote the screenplay for the film Playing Away(1986) and his screenplay for the Merchant Ivory adaptation of V.S.Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur (2001) won the Silver Ombu for best screenplay at the Mar Del Plata film festival in Argentina.

His novels are: The Final Passage (1985), A State of Independence (1986), Higher Ground (1989), Cambridge(1991), Crossing the River (1993), The Nature of Blood (1997), A Distant Shore (2003), Dancing in the Dark(2005), Foreigners (2007), and In the Falling Snow (2009). His non-fiction: The European Tribe (1987), The Atlantic Sound (2000), A New World Order (2001), and Colour Me English (2011). He is the editor of two anthologies: Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (1997) and The Right Set: An Anthology of Writing on Tennis (1999). His work has been translated into over a dozen languages.

He was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1992 and was on the 1993 Granta list of Best of Young British Writers. His literary awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and Britain’s oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for Crossing the River which was also shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. A Distant Shore was longlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize, and won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize; Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN/Beyond the Margins Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of the Arts, and recipient of the 2013 Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence.

He has taught at universities in Ghana, Sweden, Singapore, Barbados, India, and the United States, and in 1999 was the University of the West Indies Humanities Scholar of the Year. In 2002-3 he was a Fellow at the Centre for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Formerly Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Columbia University, he is presently Professor of English at Yale University. He is an Honorary Fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford University.

A regular contributor to The Guardian and The New Republic, his latest book, Colour Me English – Selected Essays, was published in July 2011.  carylphillips.com

November 2013

Brenda Shaughnessy’s most recent collection of poetry is Our Andromeda, (Copper Canyon Press, September 2012.)  She’s also the author of Human Dark with Sugar, which was a finalist for the 2008 NBCC Award, and Interior with Sudden Joy.

Her poems have appeared in Harpers, McSweeney’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Slate.com and elsewhere.  She is Poetry Editor-At-Large at Tin House Magazine, and is Assistant Professor of English and in the M.F.A. Program at Rutgers-Newark.  She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son, and daughter. brendashaughnessy.com

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.  His collection of short stories and fables, called Cradle Book, was published in spring 2010 by BOA Editions Ltd.  His next book, To Keep Love Blurry: Poems, will be published by BOA in September 2012.

His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many publications, including The New Yorker, The Nation, The Best American Poetry 2009, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, A Public Space, Jubilat, Seneca Review, Forklift Ohio, Octopus, La Petit Zine, Fairy Tale Review, Verse, and Colorado Review.  His reviews of poetry and fiction, and profiles of poets, appear widely in places like NPR.org, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Poets & Writers, Poets.org, Time Out New York, Boston Review and Bookforum.

He is Director of Digital Operations and Poetry Reviews Editor of Publishers Weekly,a poetry editor of The Literary Review, a contributing editor of Pleiades, and a Vice President of the National Book Critics Circle.  He also teaches at The New School and New York University and lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife and children.  craigmorganteicher.com

April 2013

Angelo Nikolopoulos’ first book of poems, Obscenely Yours, is a winner of the 2011 Kinereth Gensler Award and is forthcoming from Alice James Books in April 2013. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2012, Best New Poets 2011, Boston Review, Fence, The Los Angeles Review, The New York Quarterly, Tin House, and elsewhere. He is a winner of the 2011 “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Contest and the founder of The White Swallow, a queer reading series in Manhattan. He lives in New York City.  Please visit the following website for more information about Obscenely Yours.

April 2013

Readings by the 2013 winners of the following writing and poetry prizes:

The Academy of American Poets’ Prize

The Goin Prize in Creative Writing

The Chapman Prize in Poetry

March 2013

Reza Aslan is the author of the international bestseller No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, which has been named by Blackwell Publishers as one of the 100 most important books of the last decade. It’s now available in thirteen languages, and was re-released with new content to coincide with the tenth anniversary of 9/11. He is also the author of How to Win a Cosmic War, a contributing editor to The Daily Beast, and a member of many prominent foreign relations and policy councils. He is also the editor of two volumes: Tablet and Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East, and Muslims and Jews in America: Commonalties, Contentions, and Complexities. These literary anthologies use the arts to bridge the gap of understanding between East and West, and to strengthen Jewish and Muslim relations.

Reza Aslan appears regularly in the media, on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report among other high profile outlets. In the corporate realm, Aslan is President and CEO of Aslan Media Inc., which runs BoomGen Studios, a unique media company focused entirely on entertainment about the Greater Middle East and its Diaspora communities. He has degrees in Religion from Santa Clara University, Harvard, and UC Santa Barbara, as well as a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa, where he was named the Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction.  rezaaslan.com

February 2013

David Gessner is the author of eight books, including My Green Manifesto, The Tarball Chronicles, Sick of Nature,The Prophet of Dry Hill, and Return of the Osprey, which was chosen by the Boston Globe as one of the top ten nonfiction books of the year and the Book-of-the-Month club as one of its top books of the year. The Globe called it a “classic of American Nature Writing.” In 2006 he won a Pushcart Prize; in 2007 he won the John Burroughs Award for Best Natural History Essay; and in 2008 his essay, “The Dreamer Does Not Exist,” was chosen for The Best American Nonrequired Reading. His work has appeared in many magazines and journals including The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, Outside, The Georgia Review, The Harvard Review, and Orion. He has taught environmental writing at Harvard, and is currently an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he founded the national literary journal, Ecotone.  davidgessner.com

November 2012

Kathleen Graber is the author of two collections of poetry, Correspondence (Saturnalia Books, 2006) and The Eternal City (Princeton University Press, 2010), which was a finalist for The National Book Award, The National Book Critics Circle Award, and the winner of The Library of Virginia Literary Award for Poetry.  She is a recipient of fellowships from The Rona Jaffe Foundation, The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Guggenheim Foundation.  She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Sean Nevin is the author of Oblivio Gate (Southern Illinois University Press) and A House That Falls (Slapering Hol Press). His honors include a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry, and two fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts.  His poetry and interviews have recently been featured on NPR’s nationally syndicated shows ‘The Story with Dick Gordon’ and ‘Speaking of Faith’ with Krista Tippett. He directs the MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation at Drew University.

April 2012

Readings by the 2012 winners of the following writing and poetry prizes:

The Academy of American Poets’ Prize

Co-Winner: Kathleen Burke
Co-Winner: John Dabrowski
Finalist: Geoffrey Edelstein
Finalist: Mallory Mortillaro

The Goin Prize in Creative Writing

Winner: John Dabrowski
Finalist: Kathleen Burke
Finalist: Dana Lenoir

The Chapman Prize in Poetry

Winner: Shandy Walton
Finalist: Melissa Caparruva
Finalist: Paul Meister

March 2012

Matthew Shaer is the author of Among Righteous Men (John Wiley and Sons, 2011). He is a contributing writer at New York magazine, and a fellow with the Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund. His writing and reporting have appeared in Harper’s magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and The Los Angeles Times, among other publications. From 2006 to 2009, he was a staff reporter at The Christian Science Monitor, and before that, he was an editor at The Boston Globe. He lives in Brooklyn.

John McIntyre is the editor of Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps. His work has appeared in the American Scholar and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications.

Courtney Zoffness’ work has appeared in the Indiana Review, Washington Square, Tampa Review, Saint Ann’s Review, Redivider, The Fish Prize Stories anthology, and elsewhere, and was twice nominated for Best New American Voices. She received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Vermont Studio Center, was the fiction writer-in-residence at the University of Freiburg in Germany, and a Davenport College teaching fellow at Yale University in 2009 and 2011. A former journalist who served as Managing Editor of the United-Nations-sponsored Earth Times, she’s also published a variety of features and reviews in Our Town, Ladies’ Home Journal, New York’s daily Metro, and elsewhere. In addition to working at Drew, she teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania.

February 2012

William Giraldi is a Writer, Editor, Essayist, Drew Grad, and the author of the acclaimed novel Busy Monsters.  He teaches at Boston University and is Senior Fiction Editor for AGNI. His nonfiction and fiction have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Georgia Review, Bookforum, Southern Review, The Believer, Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers, Yale Review, The American Scholar, Antioch Review, TriQuarterly, and Salmagundi. His essay on amateur bodybuilding, “Freaky Beasts,” received a Pushcart Prize and was listed among Most Notable Essays in Best American Essays 2010. His essay “The Physics of Speed” was a finalist for a 2011 National Magazine Award. Giraldi lives in Boston with his wife and son.

November 2011

Priscilla Becker’s first book of poems, Internal West, won The Paris Review book prize and was published in 2003. Her poems have appeared in Fence, Open City, Boston Review, The Paris Review, Raritan, American Poetry Review, Cousin Corinne, The Brooklyn Rail, Verse, and The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets; her fiction in The Literary Review; her music reviews in The Nation and Filter magazine; her book reviews in The New York Sun; and her essays in Cabinet magazine, and Open City. Her essays have also been anthologized by Soft Skull Press, Anchor Books, and Sarabande. She teaches poetry at Pratt Institute, Columbia University, and in her apartment. Her second book, Stories That Listen, was released from Four Way Booksin October 2010.

Kevin Prufer is the author of several volumes of poetry, the most recent of which are In a Beautiful Country (Four Way Books, 2011) and National Anthem (Four Way Books, 2008), named one of the five best poetry books of the year by Publishers Weekly and a finalist for The Poets Prize. He’s also Editor of, among others, Until Everything is Continuous Again: Essays on the Work of W. S. Merwin (Word Farm, 2012), New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008), Dunstan Thompson: on the Life & Work of a Lost American Master (Pleiades Press, 2010), and New Young American Poets (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000). The recipient of three Pushcart prizes, grants from the Lannan Foundation and the NEA, and numerous awards from the Poetry Society of America, he is Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston and Editor-at-Large of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.

October 2011

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. Her work has appeared in the anthologies 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 1; Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction; and The Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens; as well in as journals including the Asian Pacific American Review, the Denver Quarterly, and the Hamilton Stone Review.

Patrick Phillips first book, Chattahoochee, received the 2005 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and his second, Boy, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2008.  He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the U.S. Fulbright Commission, and his recent honors include a 2011 Pushcart Prize, and the 2011 Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America.  He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Drew University.

Hirsh Sawhney is the editor of Delhi Noir, an anthology of fiction published by Akashic Books and Harper Collins India. Joyce Carol Oates selected his short story “A Bag For Nicholas” for her New Jersey Noir anthology. Hirsh’s writing has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Financial Times, and The Guardian. He is an Associate Editor at Wasafiri Magazine and a Contributing Editor for The Brooklyn Rail, and is currently completing his first novel.

Jason Schneiderman is the author of Sublimation Point, a Stahlecker Selection from Four Way Books, and Striking Surface, winner of the 2009 Richard Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press.  His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, and Tin House.  A graduate of the MFA program at NYU, he is completing his doctorate at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.