The writers who teach in the Goddard MFA in Creative Writing Program have been published and produced internationally, and are recognized in their fields. They are active writers. Collectively, current and recent faculty members have published more than 150 books, had plays produced around the world, and won most of the major U.S. literary awards, a short list of which includes: the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Fulbright Scholarship, the Creative Capital Grant for Innovative Literature, the U.S. Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, the Lambda Literary Award, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Shubert Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the World Fantasy Award, the New Dramatists’ Joe Callaway Award and Whitfield Cook Award, the Kennedy Center’s Fund for New American Plays’ Roger Stevens Award, the Drama-Logue Award, and the Greenwall Foundation’s Oscar Ruebhausen Commission, the Revson Fellow for the Future of New York City at Columbia University, Stonewall Award for Improving the Lives of Lesbians and Gays in the United States, American Library Association Book Award, and the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction, among many others.
Danita Berg
Biography Danita Berg is the co-author and co-editor of Creative Composition: Inspiration and Techniques for Writing Instruction. Her essays and short stories have appeared in anthologies and literary magazines including Shifts: An Anthology of Women's Growth Through Change; Other Orlandos: An Anthology; Press Pause Moments: Essays About Life Transitions by Women Writers; Redivider; Southern Women's Review, and others. From 2012-2020, she was the founder and non-fiction editor of Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine, which drew 5,000 subscribers. She…
Meng Jin
Biography Meng Jin is a fiction writer and the author of the novel, Little Gods (Custom House/HarperCollins 2020), which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. Her next book, Self Portrait with Ghost is a short fiction collection, forthcoming by Custom House in 2022. Her novel in progress Mothers and Girls: A Fake Memoir (also forthcoming from Custom House) received a 2021 Creative Capital Award. Meng’s short fiction and nonfiction has been…
Darrah Cloud
Darrah Cloud’s first play, The House Across the Street, was produced by Ensemble Studio Theatre. Since then, productions include The Stick Wife, Our Suburb, The Mud Angel, Dream House, Braille Garden, The Sirens, Heartland, The Boxcar Children, Honor Song for Crazy Horse, Understudy Jesus, and the stage adaptation of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, filmed by American Playhouse. Cincinnati Playhouse toured Joan the Girl of Arc, and What's Bugging Greg? Two new plays, Turning and Sabrina, will premiere in 2021 and…
Sherri L. Smith
Sherri L. Smith is the author of nine award-winning books for young people, including the 2009 California Book Awards Gold Medalist, Flygirl,—a World War II adventure the Washington Post named a best book of the year. Her middle grade historical fantasy The Toymaker’s Apprentice, and her contemporary YA noir mystery, Pasadena, are both winners of the Southern California Independent Booksellers Award. Her nonfiction book Who Were the Tuskegee Airmen? is part of the NY Times bestselling Who Was? series. Her…
Victoria Nelson
Victoria Nelson is a writer of fiction, criticism, and memoir. Her books include the award-winning Gothicka and The Secret Life of Puppets, both published by Harvard University Press; two collections of stories, Wild California and A Bestiary of My Heart, a memoir, My Time in Hawaii; and On Writer’s Block. She was a Guggenheim Fellow for the 2016-17 academic year and edited and wrote the introduction to the New York Review Books edition of Robert Aickman's story collection Compulsory Games, published in 2018. Website: www.victorianelson.net *Photo Credit: Sylvia…
Susan Kim
Susan Kim writes for television, theater, fiction, nonfiction, film, and graphic novel. She has been the story editor/head writer on dozens of animated TV series. With husband Laurence Klavan, she wrote the young adult fiction trilogy, Wasteland. With Klavan, she also wrote two graphic novels: City of Spies (artwork by Pascal Dizin) and Brain Camp (artwork by Faith Erin Hicks). As a playwright, Kim wrote the stage adaptation of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, as well as The Arrangement, Where It Came From, Open Spaces,…
Rogelio Martinez
Rogelio Martinez is an award-winning playwright whose plays have been workshopped and produced in theaters across the country and abroad. His newest play, Blind Date, was produced this season at the Goodman Theater under the direction of Robert Falls. The play starred Tony Award winning actress Deanna Dunagan as Nancy Reagan. Blind Date was awarded an Egerton Award. This is the second time his work has received such an award. Blind Date was also awarded a Citation of Excellence by…
Richard Panek
Richard Panek is most recently the author of The Trouble with Gravity: Solving the Mystery Beneath Our Feet, published in July 2019 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. His previous book, The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, received the Science Communication Award from the American Institute of Physics. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Antarctic Artists & Writers grant from the National Science Foundation, and a Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature from the…
Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
Rahna Reiko Rizzuto’s three books include Shadow Child, a mystery/family/saga/historical novel set in Hawaii, New York and Japan; her memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning, which moves from the original “Ground Zero” to its echo, the 9/11 terrorist attacks; and her first novel, Why She Left Us, about the Japanese American incarceration camps. Awards and recognitions include an American Book Award, Grub Street National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Finalist, Asian American Literary Award Finalist, Dayton Literary Peace Prize Nominee, among others.…
Kenny Fries
Faculty member Kenny Fries is the author of In the Province of the Gods, which received the Creative Capital literature grant; The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory, recipient of the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights and Bigotry; and Body, Remember: A Memoir; as well as editor of Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out. He was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera to write the libretto for The Memory Stone,…
John McManus
John McManus is the author of three short story collections—Fox Tooth Heart, Born on a Train, and Stop Breakin Down—and the novel Bitter Milk. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Tin House, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, Oxford American, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, a Fulbright Scholar grant, the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award, and a Creative Capital Literature grant. Education MFA in Creative Writing, Michener Center for Writers, University of Texas at Austin MA in English and Creative Writing, Hollins University BA in…
Jan Clausen
Jan Clausen is the author of a dozen books in a range of genres, including the hybrid text Veiled Spill: A Sequence (GenPop). Seven Stories Press recently reissued her 1999 Memoir Apples and Oranges: My Journey through Sexual Identity. Other titles include If You Like Difficulty and Duration (poetry); Sinking, Stealing and The Prosperine Papers (novels); and Mother, Sister, Daughter, Lover (stories). Clausen’s poetry and creative prose are widely published in journals and anthologies; her book reviews and literary journalism…
Douglas A. Martin
Martin is the author of three novels, a collection of novellas, a collection of short stories and four collections of poetry. His 2017 title, Acker is a book-length study of his hero and iconic writer. His work is widely anthologized and reviewed, and he has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Lambda Literary Award, among other honors. Education PhD in English, CUNY Graduate Center MFA in Writing, The New School BA in English, University of Georgia Areas of Expertise…
Deborah Brevoort
Deborah Brevoort writes plays, musicals and operas. She is best known for The Women of Lockerbie, which won the Onassis international playwriting competition and the Kennedy Center Fund for New American plays award. Translated into nine languages, the play is regularly performed around the world. Her other plays, which have been produced in regional theatres in the US and internationally, include Blue Moon Over Memphis (a Noh Drama about Elvis Presley), The Poetry of Pizza, The Blue-Sky Boys, The Comfort Team, The Velvet Weapon and My Lord What Night. She is…
Aimee Liu
Aimee Liu is the author of the novels Glorious Boy, Flash House, Cloud Mountain, and Face. Her nonfiction includes Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders, and a memoir, Solitaire. She is editor of Restoring Our Bodies, Reclaiming Our Lives, co-editor of Alchemy of the Word: Writers Talk About Writing, and a contributor to more than half a dozen recent anthologies. She also has co-authored or ghost written more than a dozen nonfiction books and written numerous articles on medical, psychological, literary, and…
Beatrix Gates
Beatrix Gates has published five poetry collections, including Dos; In the Open, a Lambda poetry finalist; and Ten Minutes. In 2019, Gates’ chapbook, Desire lines, will be published by Artifact Press, with graphics by award-winning poet/book artist Heidi Reiszies, (https://www.artifactpress.com), and upcoming in Bateau, Gates’ poems and more translations of Spanish poet Jesús Aguado (w Electa Arenal). Recently awarded an Alan Jutzi Non-traditional Scholar fellowship at the Huntington Library for research on astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt for “Good Seeing: Poem…
Bhanu Kapil
Bhanu Kapil is the author of six full-length collections of poetry and experimental prose. Currently, she lives in Cambridge, England, where she is an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College. In 2020, she won a Windham-Campbell Award for Poetry from Yale University and a Cholmondeley Award (also for poetry) from the Society of Authors (UK). Her newest book, How To Wash A Heart, was a Poetry Book Society Choice in 2020 and won the TS Eliot Prize. Education MA in English…