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.

Anselm Berrigan's books include Free Cell (City Lights, 2009), Some Notes on My Programming (Edge, 2006), and Zero Star Hotel (Edge, 2002). A new longer poem, Notes From Irrelevance, will be published by Wave Books in 2011. He is the current poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail (brooklynrail.org), and with his mother Alice Notley and brother Edmund Berrigan co-edited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U.Cal, 2005) and The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U.Cal, 2011). A member of the subpress publishing collective, he has published Hoa Nguyen's book of poems Your Ancient See-Through (2002), and Selected Poems of Steve Carey (2009). He was the Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church from 2003-2007, and is co-chair of Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts. MFA, Brooklyn College, 1998.

Rebecca Chace is the author of Leaving Rock Harbor (Scribner); an “Editor’s Choice” New York Times Book Review, also a June Notable Book/Indie Pick by the ABA (American Booksellers Association) and a finalist for the 2010 New England Book Award.  Her first book, a memoir, Chautauqua Summer, was a New York Times Book Review “Notable Book”, as well as “Editor's Choice" and "Picks for Summer"; Rebecca is also the author of the novel, Capture the Flag, and her essay, “Looking for Robinson Crusoe” (Fiction Magazine) was nominated for a Pushcart prize and a Distinguished Story in Best American Short Stories, 2010.  Capture the Flag wasadapted for the screen by Ms. Chace and director, Lisanne Skyler, and received the Showtime Tony Cox Screenwriting Award at the 2010 Nantucket Film Festival. The film is currently screening at national and international film festivals. Also a playwright, her plays include: Colette (Theatre for the New City), an adaptation of Kate Chopin's novel, The Awakening, produced by Book-It Repertory Theatre at the Seattle Repertory Theatre; with a second production at Seattle Rep. in June, 2005. Ms. Chace received a grant from A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle and A.S.K. Theatre Projects in Los Angeles as part of the FringeACT festival for her play Vershinin’s Wife. She has received fellowships and/or been a guest artist with New York Theatre Workshop, the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo.

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 is 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.

Rebecca Curtis is the author of Twenty Grand and Other Tales of Love & Money (HarperCollins 2007) which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2007, a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book of 2007, and an L.A. Times Best Book of 2007.  It was a finalist for the Pen-Hemingway Award and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for Best First Fiction, and it won the New Hampshire Literary Award for Outstanding Work of Fiction 2006 - 2007.  Curtis’ fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, Jane, Harper’s Bazaar, The Huffington Post, McSweeney’s, N+1, and elsewhere. Her stories have been performed by New York’s Symphony Space and Chicago’s Stories on Stage, and have been anthologized in The O’Henry Prize Stories 2007.  She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation award and a Saltonstall Grant.  She received a Masters of English from New York University and a Master of Fine Arts from Syracuse University.  She lives in Brooklyn.

Wendy Fairey is the author of One of the Family (Norton 1992), a family memoir, and Full House (Southern Methodist University Press), a collection of linked stories that centers on a women's poker game.  At Brooklyn College since 1985, she teaches a range of courses on nineteenth-to twenty-first century English and Anglophone literature, especially ficiton and also the writing of creative nonfiction.  She is interested in women's studies and also the genres of biography, memoir and autobiography.  Her current work-in-progress is a memoir of personal reading.

Rebecca Godfrey is the author of the novel The Torn Skirt (HarperCollins), a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Under the Bridge (Simon & Schuster), a work of literary reportage about the murder of a 14-year-old girl, was featured in GQ and Rolling Stone, and is being adapted for feature film. She is the recipient of The James Silberman and Selma Shapiro Fellowship from Yaddo and two grants from the Canada Council. She holds an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia University. 

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 Harper's. Her book reviews have appeared in the New York Times and Bookforum. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband Jason Little and their daughters.

David Grubbs, associate professor in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, has released eleven solo albums and appeared on more than 150 commercially-released recordings.  He is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with writers such as Susan Howe and Rick Moody, and with visual artists such as Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, Cosima von Bonin, and Stephen Prina.  His work has been presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou.  Grubbs was a founding member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and directs the Blue Chopsticks record label.  He is currently completing the book Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, The Sixties, and Sound Recording for Duke University Press. Grubbs was a 2005-6 grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and has been called one of two “Best Teachers for an Indie-Rocker to Admire” in the Village Voice and “le plus Français des Américains” in Libération.  He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago.

Aaron Hamburger was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his short story collection The View from Stalin’s Head (Random House, 2004), also nominated for a Violet Quill Award. His next book, a novel titled Faith for Beginners (Random House, 2005), was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award.  His writing has appeared in Poets and Writers, Tin House, Details, The Village Voice, The Forward, and Out.  He has received fellowships from the Edward F. Albee Foundation and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy, as well as residencies from Yaddo and Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Currently he teaches writing at Columbia University, NYU, and the Stonecoast MFA Program.

Colin Harrison is the author of seven novels, the newest of which, Risk, was published in Fall 2009. His books have appeared in about a dozen languages and a number of them have been selected as Notable Books by the New York Times Book Review. He was an editor at Harper’s for twelve years, the last six of them as deputy editor. Since 2001 he has been a vice president and senior editor at Scribner, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, where he edits both fiction and non-fiction.

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, professor and coordinator of the Fiction Program, is the author of the novels Matrimony, which was named a New York Times Notable Book, and Swimming Across the Hudson, which was named a Los Angeles Times Notable Book.  His short stories have been published in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, Triquarterly, DoubleTake, Glimmer Train, The North American Review, The New England Review, Boulevard, and elsewhere.  His fiction has been performed at Symphony Space, broadcast on NPR's "Selected Shorts," and cited for distinction in Best American Short Stories. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.    

Heidi Julavits is the author of three novels, most recently The Uses of Enchantment, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2006. Her fiction has appeared in Harper's, Esquire, Zoetrope, McSweeney's, The Best American Short Stories, among other places. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a founding editor of The Believer magazine. 

Anne Landsman is the author of the novels The Rowing Lesson and The Devil’s Chimney. The Rowing Lesson was awarded South Africa’s two top literary awards--the 2009 Sunday Times Fiction Prize and South Africa’s 2009 M-Net Literary Award for English fiction--and was shortlisted for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize. Award nominations for The Devil’s Chimney include the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. She has contributed essays to the anthologies Touch, An Uncertain Inheritance and The Honeymoon’s Over, and has written for numerous publications including The Washington Post, The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Guardian and The Telegraph. Born in South Africa, she lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

Ben Lerner is originally from Topeka, Kansas. He holds a BA in political science and an MFA in creative writing from Brown University. He was a 2003-2004 Fulbright Scholar in Spain. His first book, The Lichtenberg Figures, won the Hayden Carruth Award from Copper Canyon Press, was a Lannan Literary Selection, and was named one of 2004’s best books of poetry by Library Journal. It appeared in German translation from Luxbooks in the late spring of 2010. His second book, Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon, 2006), was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, among other honors. Copper Canyon published his third book, Mean Free Path, in early 2010. His poems and criticism can be found in a variety of national and international magazines, as well as in the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2007 (Scribners), The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative Poetry (Green Integer), New Voices (Northern Ireland, Irish Pages), and 12x12: Conversations in Poetry and Poetics (University of Iowa). He edits poetry for Critical Quarterly.

Fiona Maazel is the author of a novel, Last Last Chance. She is a 2008 National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree and winner of the Bard Prize for fiction in 2009.   

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.

Ann Napolitano is the author of the novels A Good Hard Look and Within Arm’s Reach.  A Good Hard Look was published in July 2011, and was an Indie Next Pick, an Okra Pick and spent several weeks on the Southern independent bestseller list. Her nonfiction has been published in Poets & Writers and The Millions. She received her MFA from New York University, and lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.

Jenny Offill's novel, Last Things, was chosen as a notable or best book of the year by the New York Times, the Village Voice and the Guardian (U.K) and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Book Award. She is also the editor, along with Elissa Schappell, of two anthologies, The Friend Who Got Away and Money Changes Everything. She has written one children's book, 17 Things I'm Not Allowed to Do Anymore, and has two more forthcoming from Random House. She received a NYFA fellowship in fiction in 2008 and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 1991 to 1993. Her flash fiction is featured in the new anthology, Long Story Short (UNC-Press, 2009).

Julie Orringer is the author of a novel, The Invisible Bridge, and an award-winning story collection, How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times notable book and was named Book of the Year by the LA Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and The Washington Post, and have been widely anthologized; she has received fellowships from the New York Public Library, Stanford University, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the National Endowment for the Arts.  She lives in Brooklyn, where she is working on a new novel.

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.

Nathaniel Rich is the author of The Mayor’s Tongue, a novel. He lives in Brooklyn and is the fiction editor of The Paris Review. On the web he can be reached at www.nathanielrich.com.

Christine Schutt is the author of two short story collections, Nightwork and A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer.  Her first novel, Florida, was a National Book Award finalist; her second novel, All Souls, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize.  She has published fiction in such magazines as Harper’s, The Kenyon Review, NOON, and Post Road.   Among other honors, Schutt has twice won the O.Henry Short Story Prize, as well as a Pushcart Prize, a New York Foundation of the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships.  Schutt has been a writer-in-residence at the University of California-Irvine, Hollins, Syracuse, and Washington University.  She has also taught in writing programs at Columbia, Sarah Lawrence, Bennington, and Barnard.   She lives in New York.

Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of the memoirs Devotion and Slow Motion, and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Ploughshares, n+1, One Story, Elle, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, and has been widely anthologized. She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, The New School and Wesleyan University, and she is co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. She is a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. Her new book, Still Writing: the Pleasures and Perils of the Creative Process will be out in 2013.

Rob Spillman is editor and co-founder of Tin House, an eleven-year-old bi-coastal (Brooklyn, New York and Portland, Oregon) literary magazine. Tin House has been honored in Best American Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, O’Henry Prize Stories, the Pushcart Prize Anthology and numerous other anthologies, and was nominated for the 2010 Utne Magazine Independent Press Award for Best Writing. He is also the Executive Editor of Tin House Books and co-founder of the Tin House Literary Festival, now in its seventh year. His writing has appeared in BookForum, Boston Review, Connoisseur, Details, GQ, Nerve, the New York Times Book Review, Real Simple, Rolling Stone, Salon, Spin, Sports Illustrated, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Worth, among other magazines, newspapers, and essay collections. He is also the editor of Gods and Soldiers: the Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing, which was published in 2009.

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 of which are included in the anthology Mr. Wrong (Ballantine, 2007) and on nerve.com. She is at work on a new memoir. Her work has been translated into ten languages. She lives in New York City.

Hannah Tinti is co-founder and editor-in-chief of One Story magazine, 
for which she won the 2009 PEN/Nora Magid award for excellence in editing. Her story collection, Animal Crackers, has sold in sixteen countries and was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway award. Her best-selling novel, The Good Thief, is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, recipient of the American Library Association's Alex Award, winner of the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, and winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award. Recently, she joined the award-winning public radio program, Selected Shorts, as their Literary Commentator.

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.

Josh Weil is the author of the novella collection The New Valley (Grove, 2009), a New York Times Editors Choice and winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters; the New Writers Award in Fiction from the Great Lakes Colleges Associaton; and a “5 Under 35” Award from the National Book Foundation.  Weil’s fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Granta, American Short Fiction, Narrative, and Glimmer Train, among others; he has written non-fiction for The New York Times, Granta Online, and Poets & Writers.  Since earning his MFA from Columbia University, he has received a Fulbright grant, a Writer’s Center Emerging Writer Fellowship, the Dana Award in Portfolio, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences.  As the 2009 Tickner Fellow, he is the writer-in-residence at Gilman School in Baltimore, where he is at work on a novel.

Marjorie Welish, Distinguished Lecturer, is the author of several books of poetry, the most recent of which is In the Futurity Lounge / Asylum for Indeterminacy (Coffee House Press, 2012). Others include: 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). Other publications include “The Art of Being Sparse Porous, Scattered,” in Writing the Image after Roland Barthes (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).  Among her literary and artistic honors, Ms. Welish has received Fulbright Senior Specialist Fellowships for stays at the Goethe University and at Edinburgh College of Art, the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Fellowship at Brown University, the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Poetry Fellowship at Cambridge University, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, a grant from the Trust for Mutual Understanding, 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.

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).