Brooklyn College MFA Program

MFA Faculty

Julie Agoos, professor and coordinator of the Poetry Program; MA, Johns Hopkins. Agoos publishes widely in journals and is the author of three collections of poems, Property (Ausable/Copper Canyon, 2008), Calendar Year (Sheep Meadow, 1996) and Above the Land (Yale University Press, 1987), for which she won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award.

Jonathan Baumbach is the author of On the Way to My Father’s Funeral: New and Selected Stories; Reruns; B; D-Tours: A Novel; Seven Wives; and The Life and Times of Major Fiction. His stories have appeared in Boulevard, Fiction International, and Confrontation, among other places, and have been included in the O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, and Best of Esquire.

Erin Courtney's plays include Demon Baby, Summer Play, Downwinders, Owls, Quiver and Twitch, and have been produced or developed by Clubbed Thumb, The Public Theater, The Flea, The Actors' Theater of Louisville, The Vineyard and BRIC, and Soho Rep. She has been a resident at the MacDowell colony, a recipient of a NYSCA grant and a MAP Fund grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Her play Demon Baby will be included in the anthology New Downtown Theater edited by Mac Wellman and Young Jean Lee (University of Minnesota Press). She is an affiliated artist with Clubbed Thumb, a member of 13P, as well as the co-founder of the Brooklyn Writer's Space.

Michael Cunningham's novels include A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, and The Hours, all published by Farrar Straus & Giroux. The Hours won the 1999 PEN Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, DoubleTake, and other periodicals, and he has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as the Whiting and Guggenheim foundations. His new novel, Specimen Days, was published by Farrar Straus in June 2005.

Myla Goldberg is the author of the bestselling Bee Season, which was a New York Times Notable Book for 2000, winner of the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, winner of the Borders New Voices Prize, and a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award, the NYPL Young Lions award, and the Barnes & Noble Discover award. It has been adapted to film and widely translated. Her essay collection, Time's Magpie, explores all her favorite places in Prague, where she lived for a year in the early nineties. She has also written the novel Wickett's Remedy, and Catching the Moon, a children's book. Her short stories have appeared in McSweeneys and Harpers. Her book reviews have appeared in the New York Times and Bookforum. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband Jason Little and their daughters.

Amy Hempel is the author of four collections of stories. Her first story, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried," is one of the most extensively anthologized of the last quarter century. Her most recent publication, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (2006), won the Ambassador Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She won the 2008 Rea Award for the Short Story and the 2009 PEN/Malamud Award for the Short Story. Her work has appeared in Harper's, Vanity Fair, GQ, The Yale Review, and many other publications, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Puschcart Prize, and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and an inaugural fellowship from the United States Artists Foundation. She has taught at Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, Princeton and other colleges and universities. Born in Chicago, she has lived in New York City since the mid-'70s.

Joshua Henkin's first novel, Swimming Across the Hudson, was published in 1997. His story collection, But She’s a Nice Girl and I Wish Her the Best, is forthcoming. His stories have appeared in Triquarterly, The New England Review, DoubleTake, and The Yale Review, among other places. His story “Turbulance” was included in the Best American Short Stories 2001, and was featured on “Selected Shorts” on National Public Radio in 2002.

Sharon Mesmer is the recipient of two NYFA poetry fellowships (1999, 2007), co-recipient of the 2009 Jerome Foundation/SASE grant, and a 2008 Fulbright Senior Specialist candidate. Two poetry collections, The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose) and Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books), were published in 2008. Other poetry collections include Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press, 1998) and the chapbooks Vertigo Seeks Affinities (Belladonna Books, 2006) and Crossing Second Avenue (ABJ Books, Tokyo, 1997). Fiction collections are Ma Vie à Yonago (Hachette Littératures, 2005), and In Ordinary Time and The Empty Quarter (Hanging Loose 2005, 2000). Lonely Tylenol, an art book collaboration with painter David Humphrey, was published in 2003 by Flying Horse Editions/University of Central Florida, and is currently in the permanent collections of the New York Public Library, the Bienecke Library/Yale University, and Brown University. In 1998, “Virgo Mater Creatrix,” her libretto in Latin composed for Prix de Rome-winning composer Barbara Kolb, premiered at the International Festival of Women Composers at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Mesmer has taught at the New School for fourteen years. She received her MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College in 1990.

Ernesto Mestre is the author of two novels, The Lazarus Rhumba and The Second Death of Unica Aveyano. His fiction has been collected in various anthologies, including Best American Gay Fiction 1996, A Whistler in the Nightworld: Short Fiction from the Latin Americas, and Cubanisimo!: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature.

Meera Nair's debut collection, Video, received the Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction in 2003. She has published fiction in The Threepenny Review and Calyx, and in the anthology Charlie Chan is Dead. She is at work on her first novel, which will be published by Pantheon.

Jenny Offill's first novel, Last Things, was published in 1999. She is the editor of the anthology The Friend Who Got Away, forthcoming from Doubleday. Her fiction has appeared in Story, Boulevard, The Gettysburg Review, and other publications. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 1991 to 1993.

Richard Pearse, professor; PhD., Columbia. Pearse's poems and stories have been published in The Paris Review, New York Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Fiction, and almost fifty other journals. A collection of his poetry, Come Back Vanishing, was published by Linear Art Books in fall 1998. His book, Private Drives: Selected Poems 1969-2001, appeared in October 2001. In 1996 he won the Chester H. Jones Award for poetry.

Catherine Texier is the author of four novels, Chloé l'Atlantique, Panic Blood, Love Me Tender, and Victorine, and a memoir, Breakup. She was coeditor of the groundbreaking literary magazine Between C and D and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Award and two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships. Her latest novel Victorine won ELLE Magazine's 2004 Readers' Prize for Fiction. Her short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in such places as The New York Times, Newsday, ELLE, Harper's Bazaar, Marie-Claire, More, Cosmopolitan, Bookforum, and nerve.com. She has recently completed her fifth novel, Russian Lessons, excerpts from which are included in the anthology Mr. Wrong (Ballantine, 2007) and on nerve.com. And she is at work on a new memoir. Her work has been translated into ten languages. She lives in New York City.

Ellen Tremper, professor and chair of the English Department; Ph.D., Harvard. Specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British poetry and fiction, she has published many articles on Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and children's literature and is the author of "Who Lived at Alfoxton?": Virginia Woolf and English Romanticism (Bucknell University Press) and I'm No Angel: The Blonde in Film and Fiction, which was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2006.

Mac Wellman, professor and coordinator of the Playwriting Program; MA, University of Wisconsin. His recent work includes The Difficulty of Crossing a Field (Montclair, 2006) and 1965 UU (Chocolate Factory, 2008). His most recent collection of plays is The Difficulty of Crossing a Field (University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Four other collections of his plays have been published: The Bad Infinity and Cellophane (PAJ/Johns Hopkins University Press),and Two Plays and The Land Beyond the Forest (Sun & Moon). He has written a volume of stories, A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds (Trip Street Press, 2008), as well as three novels: Q’s Q (Green Integer, 2006), Annie Salem (Sun & Moon 1996), and The Fortuneteller (Sun & Moon, 1991). His recent books of poetry are Miniature (Roof Books, 2002), Strange Elegies (Roof Books, 2006), and A Shelf in Woop's Clothing (Sun & Moon, 1990). In 1997 he received the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. In 2003 he received his third Obie, for lifetime Achievement (Antigone, Jennie Richee and Bitter Bierce all cited). In 1990 he received an Obie (Best New American Play) for Bad Penny, Terminal Hip and Crowbar. In 1991 he received another Obie for Sincerity Forever. He has received numerous honors, including both NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships. In 2004 he received an award from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. He is the Donald I. Fine Professor of Playwriting at Brooklyn College. Currently, he is working on two plays for chorus: The Invention of Tragedy (Classic Stage Company) and Nine Days Falling (Stuck Pigs Company, Melbourne, Australia).

Marjorie Welish is the author of several books of poetry, including The Windows Flew Open (Burning Deck, 1991), Casting Sequences (University of Georgia, 1993), The Annotated "Here" and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2000), Word Group (Coffee House Press, 2004), and Isle of the Signatories (Coffee House Press, 2008). Annotated "Here" was an Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize finalist and a Village Voice Best Book of the year. A noted art critic, she is also the author of Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960 (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Ms. Welish has received the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Fellowship (Brown University), the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Poetry Fellowship (Cambridge University), and two fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts. A conference on her writing and art, produced at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, resulted in the 300-page book, Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish (Slought Books, 2003).In 2009, Granary Books published Oaths? Questions?, a collaborative artists' book by Marjorie Welish and James Siena.