Our Faculty
Ammiel Alcalay
Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, novelist, translator, critic, scholar, political commentator, and author of some thirty books. Controlled Demolition: a work in four books; Follow the Person: Archival Encounters, and Nasser Rabah’s Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece (co-translated with Khaled al-Hilli and Emna Zghal), have all come out in 2025, with Imperial Abhorrences / For Palestine, a collaboration with the Palestinian artist Kholoud Hammad due out before the end of the year. He regularly writes on politics, most recently for Middle East Eye. During the genocide in Bosnia, he was one of the only translators bringing Bosnian journalists, writers, and witnesses into English. Alcalay is Distinguished Professor at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, and his work on Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, founded by him in 2009, was recognized with a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award.
Nicole Cooley
Nicole Cooley is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Mother Water Ash (Louisiana State University Press 2024) as well as 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), several other collections, three chapbooks and a novel. Her newest book Trash will be published by Alice James Books in 2027. Her poems have appeared most recently in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review and other magazines, and her essays have been published in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, and The Paris Review Daily.
Kimiko Hahn
Kimiko Hahn, author of eleven collections, casts a wide net for subject matter. In The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton), she offers a contemplative and haunting narrative of her artistic journey through craft and form while illuminating personal themes influenced by her Japanese American heritage. An advocate for chapbooks, her latest is Brood (Sarabande). Honors include Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achiement Award. She is the current poet laureate of N.Y. State.
Briallen Hopper
Briallen Hopper is the author of Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions, a Kirkus Best Memoir of the Year, and Gilead Reread (forthcoming from Columbia University Press). Her essays have appeared in The New Republic, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She is an editor of the literary magazine Killing the Buddha, a contributing editor at the independent press And Other Stories, and also teaches in the Yale Prison Education Initiative.
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 Salon, Inkwell, Queerty, OUT magazine, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and Largehearted Boy. His book The Elusive Brainwas published by Yale University Press. He is currently director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation. He also teaches in the Biography and Memoir program at the CUNY Graduate Center.
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.
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 2025-26:
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).
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 received the 2025 Paul Hair Prize from the African Studies Association. With an international collective, she translates Swahili poetry from 19th-century Lamu, and she is part of an Oxford University-based working group on AI, Decoloniality, and Creative Poetry Translation. She writes on decolonial aesthetics and on translation history (as in her first book, Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry) and is now 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. Forthcoming work includes an essay on “Voice” for a volume on “Translationality” edited by Matthew Reynolds.
Vanessa Pérez-Rosario
Vanessa Pérez-Rosario is the author of Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon (University of Illinois Press), available in English and Spanish, which was the Silver Award Winner for Best Latina Themed Book and an Honorable Mention for the Dolores Huerta Best Cultural and Community Themed Book at the 2023 International Latino Book Awards. She is editor of the bilingual critical edition I Am My Own Path: Selected Writings of Julia de Burgos (University of Texas Press), Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement (Palgrave), and Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.
She is currently working on a new book project tentatively titled “Las Girlfriends: A Cultural History of Latina Feminisms, 1980-1990,” for which she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship.
Veronica Schanoes
Veronica Schanoes is an American author of fantasy stories and an associate professor in the department of English at Queens College, CUNY. Her novella Burning Girls was nominated for the Nebula Award and the World Fantasy Award and won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella in 2013. She lives in New York City. Burning Girls and Other Stories, her debut collection, appeared from Tordotcom in 2021.
