2025 Faculty 

Elizabeth Benedict  is the author of Almost, a novel described by Edmund White as “a fast-paced, funny, and splendidly intelligent drama [with] a varied, unforgettable cast of characters.” Her earlier books include Slow Dancing (a finalist for the National Book Award), The Beginner’s Book of Dreams, Safe Conduct, The Practice of Deceit and The Joy of Writing Sex (“Read it because it will teach you everything you need to know about writing good fiction,’’ suggests Peter Carey). Benedict has taught at Princeton University, Swarthmore College, and the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her latest book (2023) is Rewriting Illness.

Adam Braver is author of several historical novels including Divine Sarah, Mr. Lincoln’s Wars and Crows Over The Wheatfield. (“Brilliant and inventive work,” wrote a reviewer for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. “A novelist whose works are richly imagined,” says the Washington Post.) Braver’s most recent novels are NOV 22, 1963, which revolves around the assassination of John F. Kennedy; Misfit (“Amazing...a book about identity, privacy and intimacy that both exposes and conceals its subject – Marilyn Monroe,” writes Ann Beattie), and Rejoice The Head Of Paul McCartney, which "brilliantly captures the fragmented intensity of late '60s California — and the US — in its idealism, exhilaration, violence and despair," says Claire Messud.

                                                                                     

Amy Hempel is the author of five collections of stories, most recently Sing To It. Her Collected Stories won The Ambassador Award for Best Fiction of the Year in 2006, and was one of the top five books of fiction in the NYTBR that year. Her stories have appeared in Harper's, Vanity Fair, the Harvard Review, The Yale Review, and many other publications, and have been included in the Best American Short Stories and other prize anthologies. She is a memberof The American Academy of Arts & Letters, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and United States Artists Foundation, and was awarded the REA Award and the PEN/Malamud Award. 

Binnie Kirshenbaum is the author of seven novels and one short story collection. Her books have been selected as Favorite Books of the Year by The New York Times, Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsweek Magazine, Vogue and National Public Radio. Her novel Hester Among the Ruins, the story of the adulterous relationship between a Jewish-American biographer and a dashing German intellectual whose mother once had Nazisympathies. Publisher's Weekly called the novel, "complete and convincing." Kirshenbaum's works include the novels Counting Backwards, Rabbits For Food, Pure Poetry, A Disturbance in One Place, and On Mermaid Avenue.  She is a professor of Fiction in the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University. Her 2019 novel Rabbits For Food was an NPR ‘Favorite Book of the Year” and was described in The Boston Globe as a work of “absolute genius.”

Claire Messud teaches at Harvard and has been on the Summer Writers Institute faculty for almost twenty years. She is the recipient of several major awards, and is the author of seven novels, including The Emperor's Children (a 2006 New York Times best-seller: “masterful, penetrating, splendid,” wrote Meghan O’Rourke in The New York Times Book Review, The Burning Girl (an LA Times Best Book of the Year), The Woman Upstairs (“The first truly feminist (in the best, least didactic sense) novel I have read in years…[the book] Virginia Woolf hoped someone would write,” said Daphne Merkin in Book Forum), and This Strange Eventful History (2024).

Susan Minot is the author of nine books—novels, short stories and poetry, as well as screenplays (“Stealing Beauty”) and plays (“On Island”). Her most recent novel is Don’t Be A Stranger (2024). Her first novel Monkeys won the Prix Femina Étranger in France in 1987 and was published in a dozen countries. Evening, adapted to a film of the same name, was a finalist for the LA Book Award.  Her stories have appeared in numerous publications, among them TheNew Yorker, The ParisReview, The Atlantic, Esquire, Grand Street, The Kenyan Review. Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, HG, Harper’s, McSweeney’s. She teaches in the graduate writing program at Stony Brook University. 

Rick Moody is author of several novels including The Ice Storm, Purple America, and Garden State. He has also written two acclaimed volumes of short fiction, Demonology and The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven. Newsday describes him as “our anthropologist of desolate landscapes,” John Hawkes as “a writer of meticulous originality.” He received the Academy of Arts and Letters Addison Metcalf Award. His memoir is The Black Veil (“Moody’s writing rants and raves and roars,” writes a reviewer for The New York Times. “He is an unrepressed quester after meaning,” writes Robert Boyers). Moody’s latest novels are The Diviners (2005) and The Four Fingers of Death (2010), and his latest collection of short fiction is Right Livelihoods (2007). “One of our best writers,” said a reviewer for the Washington Post. Moody’s acclaimed recent novel is Hotels Of North America (2016).

Phillip Lopate is a central figure in the revival of memoir writing and what has come to be called “the personal essay.” Lopate’s books include Portrait of My Body, Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan, Getting Personal: Selected Writings, and Notes On Sontag. Most recently he has published A Year and a Day: An Experiment in Essays, and My Affairwith Art House Cinema: Essays and Reviews. He edited the seminal anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, as well as the subsequent volumes The Golden Age of the American Essay, and The Contemporary American Essay. Lopate’s work has been included in many publications, such as The Best American Essays, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Paris Review. In recognition of his significant contribution to American literature, Lopate received the 2022 Christopher Lightfoot Walker Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. “He is our Montaigne,” writes Robert Boyers.

Thomas Chatterton Williams is one of the leading memoirists and cultural critics in the country, the author of Self-Portrait in Black & White (Norton, 2019) and Losing My Cool (Penguin-Random House, 2010). A contributing writer at The New York Times, where several of his feature articles have been published in the Sunday Times. He writes often for The Atlantic, Harper's and other magazines. In The New York Times Book Review Andrew Solomon writes of him: “Williams writes beautifully…honest and fresh in his observations, so skillful at blending his own story with larger principles.” In January of 2021 he delivered the Annual Martin Luther King Address, and in 2019 he won the Berlin Prize. Though he lives with his family in France, he is a non-resident Fellow at The American Enterprise Institute and has taught as a visiting professor at Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center.

Peg Boyers is the author of three volumes of poems, all published by the University of Chicago Press. The first, Hard Bread (2002), was described by Richard Howard as “the most original debut in my experience of contemporary American poetry.” With poems spoken in the invented voice of the late Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, the book, says Robert Pinsky, “not only surpasses the notion of a merely good first book” but “soars beyond the conventional expectations of ‘persona’ and dramatic monologue.” “The creation of the voice in this book,” wrote Frank Bidart, “stoic, passionate, resigned, insistent on truth—is a brilliant achievement.” Boyers’ second book, Honey With Tobacco (2007), “has a rare power,” wrote George Steiner; “a beautiful book,” wrote Henri Cole. Peg Boyers is executive editor of the quarterly Salmagundi and teaches creative writing at Skidmore College. Her third book, entitled To Forget Venice, came out in October of 2014 and was hailed for its “disarming flights of imagination” and “inspired ventriloquism.” Her most recent book, The Album, was published by Dos Madres Press in the fall of 2021.

Henri Cole is the author of seven books of poems, including The Look of Things, The Marble Queen, The Visible Man and Middle Earth. (“Henri Cole has become a master poet, with few peers,” writes Harold Bloom. “Middle Earth is [his] epiphany, his Whitmanesque sunrise… [These] are the poems of our climate.”) Of his earlier books, Wayne Koestenbaum wrote in the New Yorker: “a poet not content to remain in the realm of the merely lapidary, the self-consciously coloratura…he produces lines of natural and nonchalant brio…in stanzas as shapely as topiary…; he can write about the soul stumbling against quotidian impediments… [approaching] a variety of subjects, from first love… to family history.” Cole has taught at the Summer Writers Institute since 2004. His most recent books are The Other Love, Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022, and Blizzard. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College.

Megan Fernandes is a writer living in New York City. Fernandes has published in The New Yorker, POETRY, The Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, among others. Her third book of poetry, I Do Everything I’m Told, published by Tin House, received a starred review in Publisher's Weekly and was named a Best or Most-Anticipated Book of 2023 by The New Yorker, Time Magazine, The Boston Globe, Vogue, Electric Lit, The Rumpus, Vulture, Autostraddle, LitHub, among others. Fernandes is an Associate Professor of English and the Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College where she teaches courses on poetry, environmental writing, and critical theory. She has received scholarships and fellowships from the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, the Yaddo Foundation, the Hawthornden Foundation, etc. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, and an MFA in poetry from Boston University.

Sandra Lim is the author of three poetry collections, most recently The Curious Thing. Her writing has appeared in a range of literary journals, including The New York Review of Books, Poetry, The New Republic, and The New York Times Magazine. "In her hands," writes Ocean Vuong, "precision and audacity meld into a performance of quiet, implacable force." Sandra Lim is Distinguished Visiting Professor at University of Massachusetts.

Campbell McGrath teaches creative writing at Florida International University and has taught at the Summer Writers Institute since 2007. The winner of a MacArthur “Genius” Award, he is the author of many books of poetry, including American Noise, Pax Atomica, Spring Comes To Chicago, Seven Notebooks, Florida Poems and Capitalism. “A poet of formal eloquence and rhetorical power,” writes the reviewer for Publishers Weekly, “of vision and engagement….he descends into the maelstrom of American culture and emerges singing.” “He is our Whitman,” writes the reviewer for American Review. McGrath’s latest book XX: Poems For The 20^th Century has been celebrated as a “tour de force” and “an improbable feat of the imagination.”

Rosanna Warren has won the Lamont Poetry Prize, and has been honored with the Award of Merit in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is the author of six books of poems, most recently, So Forth (Norton, 2020), as well as the biography, Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters. (Norton, 2020). Harold Bloom writes: “Warren is an important poet, beyond the achievement of all but a handful of living American poets.” And Charles Simic writes in The NY Review of Books: “Her work has become stronger and stronger …. masterful and ambitious.”  Rosanna Warren is Emeritus Professor at University of Chicago.

Edward J. Delaney (Non-Fiction) is an award-winning author, journalist, filmmaker, and educator.  He was a 2008 National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellow, winner of the 2005 PEN/Winship Award for Fiction, a National Magazine Award finalist, and a past recipient of an O. Henry Prize for short story writing. In addition to having published seven books—most recently The Acrobat, his work has appeared regularly in The Atlantic and other magazines and journals, and has appeared in Best American Short Stories. Of Delaney’s book Follow the Sun, Phillip Lopate writes, “His control of the material is masterful.”

Mamta Chaudhry (Fiction) is the author of the novel Haunting Paris, described as “elegantly wrought” by The New York Times Book Review and “a heart-wrenching love letter to Paris" by Publishers Weekly. Russell Banks called Haunting Paris “audaciously, imaginatively constructed, with a heartbreaking, profoundly adult love story at its center." She has a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Miami, where she has also taught literature and creative writing.

Elisa Gonzalez  (Poetry), a recipient of a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, has had work appear in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Paris Review and elsewhere.  Of Gonzalez’s 2023 debut poetry collection, Grand Tour, Louise Glück described poems that “make me feel as if poems have never before been written.” 

Robert Boyers, Director is editor of the influential quarterly magazine Salmagundi, professor of English at Skidmore College, and director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute. He is the author of eleven books, including a volume of short stories called Excitable Women, Damaged Men. He writes often for such magazines as Harper’s, The New Republic, The Nation, Yale Review, and Granta. His latest book is Maestros & Monsters.