Faculty

Core Faculty

Lauren Grodstein is the author of The New York Times-bestselling A Friend of the Family, The Washington Post Book of the Year The Explanation for Everything, Our Short History, and most recently the Read with Jenna Today Show pick We Must Not Think of Ourselves, among other works. Her articles, essays, and reviews have been included in Post Road, The New York Times, Columbia, and other publications, and her work has been widely anthologized. She directs the MFA Program at Rutgers-Camden.

Paul Lisicky is the author of seven books including Later: My Life at the Edge of the World (Graywolf, 2020), The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship (Graywolf, 2016), Unbuilt Projects (Four Way, 2012), The Burning House (Etruscan Press, 2011), Lawnboy (Graywolf, 2006) and Famous Builder (Graywolf, 2002). Later was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2020 and The Narrow Door was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the Randy Shilts Award. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Conjunctions, The Cut, Fence, The New York Times Book Review, Ploughshares, Tin House, and other magazines and anthologies. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment from the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Rose Dorothea Award from the Provincetown Library, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He has been the editor of StoryQuarterly since 2012. His next book, Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell, is forthcoming from HarperOne in 2024.

Tom McAllister is the author of the novels How to Be Safe and The Young Widower’s Handbook, as well as the memoir Bury Me in My Jersey. How to Be Safe received starred reviews in Library Journal, Kirkus, and Booklist. His short fiction and essays have been published widely, and have most recently appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Sun, Hobart, The Rumpus, Buzzfeed, The Millions, The Collagist, The Washington Post, and Bridge Eight. He is co-host of the weekly podcast Book Fight!, and nonfiction editor at the literary magazine and small press Barrelhouse. His book of essays, It All Felt Impossible, is forthcoming from Rose Metal Press this year. He lives in New Jersey. 

Patrick Rosal is the author of five full-length poetry collections including The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems, which was listed among the best books of 2021 by The Boston Globe, in addition to winning the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Book Award. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Research Scholar program, as well as residencies from Civitella Ranieri and Lannan. His writing and visual work has been published in The New York Times, The Nation, e-flux, Best American Poetry and many other journals and magazines. He has taught at Bloomfield College, the University of Texas at Austin, Princeton University, as well as in many community workshops around the country through Poets House, Kundiman, the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project, and elsewhere. A winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, he has performed as poet and musician in Europe, Africa, Asia, and throughout the Americas at venues that include Lincoln Center, NJPAC, the Cabrillo housing projects for agricultural workers, and Filipino Community Hall in Delano— comprising a writing and performance career spanning more than twenty years and reaching a myriad of audiences around the world.  

Lisa Zeidner is the author of five novels: Customs, Alexandra Freed, Limited Partnerships, Layover, and her most recently published novel, Love Bomb (Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar Straus and Giroux). She has also published two books of poetry, Talking Cure and Pocket Sundial, which won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. Layover is in production as a film; she has written screenplays for Universal Studios and Focus Features. Her craft book is Who Says: Mastering Point of View in Fiction (Norton).  Her fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in GQ, Mademoiselle, The New York Times, Boulevard, Poetry, The Washington Post and other publications. Her creative nonfiction has been anthologized in Salon.com’s Life As We Know It and Tin House’s Cooking and Stealing. Zeidner is the recipient of the 1993 Warren I. Sussman Award for Excellence in Teaching, The Provost’s Teaching Award, and the Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Faculty in Residence

Aaron Hamburger is the author of the story collection The View from Stalin’s Head, which was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and nominated for a Violet Quill Award. He has also written three novels: Faith for Beginners, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, Nirvana Is Here, winner of a Bronze Medal from the 2019 Foreword Reviews Indies Book Awards, and Hotel Cuba, featured by NPR and named a Best Book of 2023 by Hadassah Magazine. In 2023, he was awarded by Lambda Literary with the Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Village Voice, Tin House, Michigan Quarterly Review, Subtropics, Crazyhorse, Boulevard, and elsewhere. He has also won fellowships from Yaddo, Djerassi, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation as well as first prize in the Dornstein Contest for Young Jewish Writers, and his short fiction and creative non-fiction have received special mentions in the Pushcart Prizes.

Recent Visiting Professors

Stephanie Cawley is the author of My Heart But Not My Heart, chosen by Solmaz Sharif as winner of the Slope Book Prize. Stephanie’s poems and hybrid writing have been featured in Poetry Daily, the PEN Poetry Series, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and have been published in journals including Protean, TYPO, and West Branch. They live in Philadelphia and are a 2023 NEA Creative Writing Fellow.

Airea D. Matthews’ first collection of poems, Simulacra, received the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award (Yale University Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in Best American Poets 2015, American Poets, The Rumpus, Cordite Review (Australia), Four Way Review, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She received the 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and was awarded the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the 2016 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Matthews’s newest work, Bread and Circus (2023), concerns class and poverty.