Our Faculty
Ammiel Alcalay
Poet, novelist, translator, essayist, critic, and scholar Ammiel Alcalay’s over 20 books include After Jews and Arabs, Memories of Our Future, Keys to the Garden, from the warring factions, a little history, and the forthcoming Follow the Person: Archival Encounters. He also co-edited Dove in Flight by Syrian poet and former political prisoner Faraj Bayrakdar. Alcalay is the founder and general editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, for which he was recognized in 2017 with a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award.
Nicole Cooley
Nicole Cooley is the author of six books of poems, most recently Girl After Girl After Girl (Louisiana State University Press 2017; winner of the Devil’s Kitchen award from Southern Illinois University) and Of Marriage (Alice James Books 2018), as well as three chapbooks and a novel. Her poems have appeared most recently in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review and other magazines.
Kimiko Hahn
Kimiko Hahn, author of ten collections, casts a wide net for subject matter in Foreign Bodies (W. W. Norton), revisiting the personal as political while exploring the immigrant body and hoarded objects. Advocate for chapbooks, her latest is Brood (Sarabande). Honors include NEA awards, Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize.
Briallen Hopper
Briallen Hopper is the author of Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions (Bloomsbury, 2019), a Kirkus Best Memoir of the Year, and Gilead Reread (forthcoming from Columbia University Press). She is a co-editor-in-chief of the literary magazine KtB and a contributing editor at the independent press And Other Stories.
Roger Sedarat
Roger Sedarat’s most recent poetry collection, Haji as Puppet: An Orientalist Burlesque, won the Word Work’s Tenth Gate Prize for a Mid-Career Poet and was adapted for stage. A recipient of the Willis Barnstone Prize for Translation, his renderings of classical and contemporary Persian have appeared in such journals as Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Brooklyn Rail. He is the author of Emerson in Iran: The American Appropriation of Persian Poetry (SUNY Press).
Jason Tougaw
Jason Tougaw’s memoir, The One You Get: Portrait of a Family Organism, is the winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize. He writes a regular column for Psychology Today. His essays appear in OUT magazine, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and Largehearted Boy. His book The Elusive Brain was published by Yale University Press.
In addition to your MFA courses, you’ll have the opportunity to learn under world-class scholars. Take a look at faculty teaching literature electives for the academic year 2023-24:
John Weir
John Weir, winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction for Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me, is the author of two novels, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, winner of the 1989 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men’s Debut Fiction, and What I Did Wrong.
Alaya Dawn Johnson
Alaya Dawn Johnson is a Nebula award-winning short story writer and the author of eight novels for adults and young adults. Her novel Trouble the Saints won the 2021 World Fantasy Award for best novel. Her debut short story collection, Reconstruction, was an Ignyte Award and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist. Her debut YA novel The Summer Prince was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Her short stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, most notably the title story in The Memory Librarian, in collaboration with Janelle Monáe.
Annmarie Drury
Annmarie Drury is the translator of Stray Truths: Selected Poems of Euphrase Kezilahabi and the editor of The Imaginative Vision of Abdilatif Abdalla’s Voice of Agony, which is forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press. With an international collective, she translates Swahili poetry from 19th-century Lamu. She writes on decolonial aesthetics and on translation history (as in her first book, Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry) and is working on a book about listening in 19th-century poetry. Her translating has been supported by PEN, and many of her own poems have appeared in The Paris Review and Raritan.
