MFA in Writing Faculty

Benjamin Anastas's recent work as a literary journalist appears in the Oxford American, Travel + Leisure, Bookforum, and other magazines. 

Ramona Ausubel’s fifth book, The Last Animal, a novel, will be out in April, 2023 from Riverhead Books. Her previous books are Awayland: Stories, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, A Guide to Being Born and No One is Here Except All of Us.

Doug Bauer’s novels, essays, journalism, and anthologies have won wide praise for their stylistic precision, clarity, and ability to capture the texture and grit of American life. He's been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in both fiction and creative non-fiction and has won the PEN/New England award for non-fiction. His latest novel, The Beckoning World, was published in November.

April Bernard writes poetry and fiction. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whitney Humanities Center Fellowship, and the Walt Whitman Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her essays appear in numerous journals, including The New York Review of Books and Book Post. Her sixth book of poems, The World Behind the World, will be pubished by W.W. Norton in spring 2023.

Eula Biss is the author of four books, most recently Having and Being Had. Her book On Immunity was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review. 

Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark, which won the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. 

Susan Cheever’s work includes biographies of E.E. Cummings and Louisa May Alcott, a memoir of her father, John Cheever, five novels, and many newspaper and magazine essays. She is a National Book Critic's Circle Award nominee, a Boston Globe Winship Medal winner, a Guggenheim fellow, long listed for the PEN John Kenneth Galbraith award, and part of a Pulitzer Prize winning team at Newsday. She has served on the boards of Yaddo and the Author's Guild.

Monica Ferrell is the author of three books of fiction and poetry, most recently the collection You Darling Thing (Four Way, 2018), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and Believer Book Award in Poetry.

David Gates has written two novels and two collections of short stories. He's been a Guggenheim fellow and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He's taught at Columbia, the New School and the University of Montana, and was a longtime editor and writer at Newsweek.

Manuel Gonzales is the author of The Miniature Wife and Other Stories, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the John Gardner Prize for Fiction, and the novel The Regional Office is Under Attack!

Amy Hempel is the award-winning author of Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home, and The Dog of the Marriage. She was awarded the Yaddo Artist Medal in 2018.

Alice Mattison is the author of many critically acclaimed novels and story collections, as well as a book about writing. The New York Times describes her prose as “so crisp that along with all the pleasures of fiction she manages to deliver the particular intellectual satisfactions of an essay or a documentary.”

Jill McCorkle is the author of 11 books—four story collections and seven novels—five of which have been selected as New York Times Notable Books. She is the winner of the New England Book Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, and the North Carolina Award for Literature.

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of seven books: Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, The Giant’s House, Niagara Falls All Over Again, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, Bowlaway, and the forthcoming collection of short stories The Souvenir Museum.  

Deirdre McNamer is the author of five novels: Aviary, Red Rover, My Russian, One Sweet Quarrel and Rima in the Weeds. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The New York Times, Outside magazine and other venues. She is a recent recipient of a Montana Governor's Arts Award.

Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey. He was a 2021 Guggenheim fellow.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett was born to an American father and Japanese mother. Her memoir, “Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye,” was a finalist for the 2016 PEN Open Book Award. American Harvest: God, Country and Farming in the Heartland (Graywolf) explores Mockett’s experience across “the divide,” and is a tribute to the complicated and nuanced history of the United States and its people.

Stuart Nadler's most recent novel, The Inseparables (Little, Brown), was published in July 2016, and was named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus, and a finalist for a Mark Twain Prize for the American Voice. In 2012, he was a recipient of the 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation. Since 2016, he has been a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Derek Palacio is the author of the novella How to Shake the Other Man and the novel The Mortifications. 

Hugh Ryan is a writer, historian, and curator in New York City. His current project, entitled The Women's House of Detention, is a queer history of the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village. It is the story of one building: the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired.

Katy Simpson Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She is the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835, and the novels The Story of Land and Sea, Free Men, and The Everlasting, a New York Times Best Historical Fiction Book of 2020.

Clifford Thompson's most recent books are Big Man and the Little Men and What it Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man's Blues, which was selected by TIME Magazine as "one of the most anticipated books" of 2019.

Peter Trachtenberg is the author of 7 Tattoos, The Book of Calamities, Another Insane Devotion, and the forthcoming The Last Artists in New York, as well of essays and short fiction published in The New Yorker, Harper's, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He's the recipient of Whiting and Guggenheim fellowships and the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction.

Toya Wolfe grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago’s South Side. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago. Last Summer on State Street is her debut novel.

Mark Wunderlich is author of three critically acclaimed books of poetry, and his poems, interviews, reviews, and translations have appeared in journals such as Slate, The Paris Review, and Poetry, and in more than 30 anthologies. His most recent book, God Of Nothingness, was published by Graywolf in 2021.

Blanchfield is the author of three books of poetry and prose, most recently Proxies. A collection of essays—part cultural close reading, part dicey autobiography—Proxies was awarded a 2016 Whiting Award in Nonfiction, and was named a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Memoir and the PEN USA Literary Award in Nonfiction.

Chelsea Hodson is the author of the book of essays Tonight I'm Someone Else and the chapbook Pity the Animal.

Gregor Pardlo is the winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His collection, Digest, was also shortlisted for that year's NAACP Image Award and was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.