Creative Writing Faculty

Creative Writing Faculty

Lee Clay Johnson is the director of the Brooklyn Writers Foundry Low-Residency MFA at St. Joseph's University, New York. Originally from Middle Tennessee, Johnson holds a BA from Bennington College and an MFA from the University of Virginia. He is the award-winning author of the novels Nitro Mountain (Knopf), which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and Bloodline (Panamerica, '26). His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Metropolitan Review, County Highway, The Southampton Review, Ploughshares, Lit Hub, Oxford American, The Common, Appalachian Heritage, Salamander, Mississippi Review, and more. He is currently at work on a memoir titled Long Journey Home, about growing up in a family of bluegrass musicians, the death of his twin brother and his personal path toward faith. 

Amy Hempel is a recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the United States Artists Foundation, and the Academy of Arts and Letters. She is the author of Sing to It, Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home, and The Dog of the Marriage. Her stories have appeared in Harper’s, GQ, Vanity Fair, and many other publications, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Her Collected Stories was named by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of 2007. 

Nathan McClain is a poet, editor, and educator living in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017) and Previously Owned (Four Way Books, 2022), and his poems and prose have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in Poetry Northwest, Green Mountains Review, Poem-a-Day, The Common, The Critical Flame, and upstreet, among others. He is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and African American Literary Arts at Hampshire College, and serves as Poetry Editor of The Massachusetts Review.

Alicia Mountain is the author of High Ground Coward (Iowa, 2018), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her chapbook Thin Fire was published by BOAAT Press. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Guernica, Pleiades, and The Georgia Review. She holds a MFA from the University of Montana and a PhD from the University of Denver. She was the 2020-2021 Artist in Residence at the University of Central Oklahoma. Dr. Mountain's second collection, Four in Hand, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in early 2023. She is a lesbian poet and writer based in New York City.

Andrew Martin is the author of the novel Early Work, a New York Times Notable Book of 2018 and a finalist for the Cabell First Novelist Award, and the story collection Cool For America. His stories have been published in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and The Yale Review, and his essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The New York Times Book Review, and VICE. A recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and the UCross Foundation, he has taught writing classes at Tufts University, Boston College, Catapult, and elsewhere. 

Erinrose Mager's work appears in Wigleaf, Prelude, wildness, DIAGRAM, jubilat, Fence, The Adroit Journal, BOMB, New South, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and her PhD in Literary Arts from the University of Denver. A finalist for the 2020 Wendy’s Subway Carolyn Bush Award, Erinrose's debut collection Hot Fruit is forthcoming from Fonograf Editions in 2026. 

Elisa Gabbert is the author of seven collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently Any Person Is the Only Self (FSG, 2024), which was a finalist for the PEN/Diamondstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and one of the Washington Post’s 50 notable works of nonfiction for 2024. Her other books include The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays, Normal Distance, The Word Pretty, and The Self Unstable. She writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared widely in publications including Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Believer, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. 

Alex Sujong Laughlin is a writer and producer based in Lancaster, PA. She is a co-owner at Defector Media, where she writes about media, culture, and politics, and where she also produces and hosts podcasts like Normal Gossip, Try Hard, and the forthcoming Only If You Get Caught. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Catapult, and more. She has created podcasts for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Defector Media, BuzzFeed, NBC, and Spotify, and she has taught journalism at New York University and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. She is currently working on her first nonfiction book for One World, which will be out in 2027. You can find her on Instagram @alexlaughs. 

John Cotter is the author of Losing Music: A Memoir of Art, Pain, and Transformation (Milkweed, 2023), winner of the Colorado Book Award. His essays have appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Guernica, Epoch, Georgia Review, and elsewhere. His fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, New England Review, and Joyland; his book-length fiction Under the Small Lights is available from Miami University Press, as winner of their 2010 novella competition. He's been a resident artist at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut, and SPACE gallery in Portland, Maine. He lives in New England. 

Jill McCorkle is the author of New York Times bestseller Life After Life, in addition to nine other novels and short story collections. Five of her books have been named New York Times notable books, and several of her stories and essays have appeared in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. McCorkle has received the New England Booksellers Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and the Thomas Wolfe Prize. She was recently inducted into the NC Literary Hall of Fame.

 

Laura Kolbe practices medicine and medical ethics at New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center and Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. She studied English at Harvard and the University of Cambridge before studying medicine at the University of Virginia, where she was an Edward W. Hook Scholar in Humanities and Ethics. Little Pharma (2021), her debut poetry collection, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh. Her poems and prose have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, n+1, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by a Calderwood Fellowship for Journalism and by fellowships at MacDowell and the James Merrill House.

Haleh Liza Gafori is a translator, poet, performance artist, vocalist, and educator living in Brooklyn NY. Her books of translations of poems, by the 13th century mystic and sage Rumi, Gold (2022) and Water (2025), were published by New York Review Books/NYRB Classics. A recipient of a 2023 NYSCA grant and a 2024 MacDowell fellowship for her multi-media performance piece, Gafori has performed and lectured at venues such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Lincoln Center, Stanford University, and Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has been published by Columbia U Press, Harvard Review, Paris Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Lit Hub and others. 

David Gates is the author of the novels Jernigan and Preston Falls, and two story collections, The Wonders of the Invisible World and A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me. His stories have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, the Paris Review, Granta, Esquire, Tin House and GQ, and The Best American Short Stories. He’s published nonfiction in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times magazine, Esquire, GQ, Bookforum, Rolling Stone, Tin House, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Oxford American and The Journal of Country Music, as well as Newsweek, where he was a Senior Writer. 

Adrienne Raphel is the author of Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them (Penguin Press), a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, as well as the poetry collections Our Dark Academia (Rescue Press) and What Was It For (Rescue Press), winner of the Black Box Poetry Prize. Her essays, poetry, and crossword puzzles appear widely, including in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Poetry, and many other publications. Raphel is the recipient of the Visiting Fellowship at the American Library in Paris and a Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at the James Merrill House.

Peter Trachtenberg is the author of The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists in New York (Black Sparrow, 2025) hailed by Francine Prose as “a page-turner: The force and beauty and clarity of Peter Trachtenberg’s writing make [it] impossible to put down.” His other books are 7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh, The Book of Calamities, and Another Insane Devotion, which was a 2012 New York Times Editors’ Choice. His honors include Whiting and Guggenheim Fellowships and a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award. He's a professor emeritus in the Writing Program of the University of Pittsburgh and former faculty at the Bennington Writing Seminars.