MFA in Writing Faculty

Ramona Ausubel
Fiction

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.

email writing@bennington.edu
Photo of Eula Biss
Nonfiction

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. 

email writing@bennington.edu
Photo of Peter Cameron by Orson Santos
Fiction

Peter Cameron is the author of seven novels and three collections of stories. His short fiction and poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Mademoiselle, Rolling Stone, Grand Street, The New Republic, and The Yale Review. Photo by Orson Santos.

email writing@bennington.edu
Photo of Garrard Conley by Brandon Taylor
Nonfiction

Garrard Conley is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Boy Erased and the novel All the World Beside, as well as the creator and co-producer of the podcast UnErased: The History of Conversion Therapy in America.

email writing@bennington.edu
Photo of Stacy D'Erasmo
Fiction

Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, A Seahorse Year, The Sky Below, Wonderland, and The Complicities; and the nonfiction books The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between and The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry.

email writing@bennington.edu
Photo of Bruna Dantas Lobato
Fiction

Bruna Dantas Lobato is a writer and translator. She was awarded the 2023 National Book Award in Translated Literature for The Words that Remain by Stênio Gardel. Originally from Natal, Brazil, she lives in Iowa and teaches at Grinnell College. Her debut novel, Blue Light Hours, is out now from Grove Atlantic.

email writing@bennington.edu
Image of Michael Dumanis
Director of Poetry at Bennington

The acclaimed poetry of Michael Dumanis weaves together memories of childhood, diaspora, and dislocation.

email mdumanis@bennington.edu
Image of Monica Ferrell
Fiction/Poetry

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.

email writing@bennington.edu
Photo of Carmen Giménez
Poetry

Carmen Giménez is Publisher and Director of Graywolf Press and author of six collections of poetry, including Be Recorder, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. 

email writing@bennington.edu
Photo of Samantha Hunt in blue sweater
Fiction

Samantha Hunt is the author of The Unwritten Book, essays about death and literature; The Seas about a girl who might be a mermaid; The Dark Dark, short fictions; Mr. Splitfoot, a ghost story; and The Invention of Everything Else about Nikola Tesla.

email writing@bennington.edu
Photo of Saeed Jones
Nonfiction/Poetry

Saeed Jones is the author of the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives, and the poetry collections Prelude to Bruise and Alive at the End of the World. He is the 2024-2025 artist-in-residence in the Media, Health and Medicine program at Harvard Medical School. His next book, Home Out There, a memoir, is forthcoming from Washington Square Press.

email writing@bennington.edu
Photo of Dana Levin
Poetry

Dana Levin is the author of five books of poetry, including Now Do You Know Where You Are. She co-edited Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master. She has received honors from the NEA, PEN, the Library of Congress, as well as from the Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations.

email writing@bennington.edu
Photo of Rebecca Makkai
Fiction

Rebecca Makkai is the author of the New York Times bestselling I Have Some Questions for You, as well as the novels The Great Believers (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal), The Borrower, and The Hundred-Year House, and the story collection Music for Wartime.

email writing@bennington.edu
Photo of Randall Mann by Ryo Yamaguchi
Poetry

Randall is the author of six collections of poetry, including Deal: New and Selected Poems. He is also the author of a book of criticism, The Illusion of Intimacy: On Poetry.

email writing@bennington.edu
Photo of Sabrina Orah Mark by Sarah Baugh
Fiction/Nonfiction/Poetry

Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections Tsim Tsum and The Babies, the story collection Wild Milk, and the essay collection Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales.

email writing@bennington.edu
Marie Mutsuki Mockett
Nonfiction

Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of “Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye,” American Harvest: God, Country and Farming in the Heartland, and the forthcoming novel The Tree Doctor.

email writing@bennington.edu
Image of Stuart Nadler
Fiction

Stuart Nadler is the author of three novels and a short story collection. His new novel, Rooms for Vanishing, will be published early next year. 

email writing@bennington.edu
Photo of Emily Nemens
Fiction

Emily Nemens is the author of the novels The Cactus League (2020) and Clutch, which will be published next year. Emily spent a dozen years editing literary quarterlies, including leading The Paris Review, which won its first American Society of Magazine Editors’ Award for Fiction under her tenure; she also served as co-editor of The Southern Review. She held the 2022-23 Picador Professorship at the University of Leipzig and teaches community-based fiction workshops. Photo by James Emmerman

email writing@bennington.edu
Photo of Lance Richardson
Nonfiction

Lance Richardson is the author of House of Nutter (2018) and True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, which will be published internationally in September 2025.

email writing@bennington.edu
Photo of Shawna Kay Rodenberg
Nonfiction

Shawna Kay Rodenberg is the author of the memoir Kin. She has been the recipient of a Jean Ritchie Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award, and her essays have appeared in Salon, The Village Voice, and Elle

email writing@bennington.edu
Photo of Moriel Rothman-Zecher by Andy Snow
Fiction

Moriel Rothman-Zecher is the author of the novels Before All the World, which was named an NPR Best Book of 2022, and Sadness Is a White Bird, for which he received the National Book Foundation's '5 Under 35' Honor, among other honors.

email writing@bennington.edu
Hugh Ryan
Nonfiction

Hugh (he/him) is a writer and curator. His first book, When Brooklyn Was Queer, won a 2020 New York City Book Award, was a New York Times Editors' Choice in 2019, and was a finalist for the Randy Shilts and Lambda Literary Awards. His second book, The Women's House of Detention, explores the forgotten history of the maximum security prison that once dominated life in Greenwich Village.

email writing@bennington.edu
Katy Simpson Smith
Fiction

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 four novels, most recently The Weeds. She received a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in New Orleans.

email writing@bennington.edu
Photo of Taymour Soomro by Jorge Monedero
Fiction

Taymour Soomro is the author of Other Names for Love and co-editor of Letters to a Writer of Color. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, the New York Times and elsewhere. He has degrees from Cambridge University and Stanford Law School and a PhD in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. Photo by Jorge Monedero.

email writing@bennington.edu
Craig Morgan Teicher
Nonfiction/Poetry

Craig Morgan Teicher is the Director of Special Projects for the Writing Seminars and the author of four books of poetry, most recently Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey. He was a 2021 Guggenheim fellow, and his next book of poems will be published in 2026.

email writing@bennington.edu
Image of Claire Vaye Watkins
Fiction
Claire Vaye Watkins was one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” and one of Granta's "Best Young American Novelists." She is the author of Gold Fame Citrus and Battleborn, which won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.
email cvwatkins@bennington.edu
call 802-440-4452
Mark Wunderlich
Executive Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars

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.

email mwunderlich@bennington.edu