Michelle Valladares, Program Director
is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing, through which she launched the Archives as Muse: A Harlem Storytelling Project, is the author of Nortada, the North Wind (Global City Press) and several chapbooks. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, anthologized in Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond (Norton), and translated into Spanish for the III Feria Virtual del Libro de Cajamarca. She was awarded “The Poet of the Year” by the Americas Poetry Festival of NY. Recent publications: Women’s Studies Quarterly and Feminists Reclaim Mentorship. She has produced three independent award-winning films.
Salar Abdoh
Abdoh’s forthcoming novel is A Nearby Country Called Love (Viking Penguin, Fall 2023). His last book, Out of Mesopotamia(Akashic, 2020), has been hailed as “One of a handful of great modern war novels,” and was a NYTimes Editors’ Choice, and also selected as a Best Book of the year across several platforms, including Publishers Weekly. He is also the author of Tehran At Twilight, Opium, and The Poet Game, and editor and translator of the celebrated crime collection, Tehran Noir.
Mostly dividing his time between New York City and Tehran, Iran, Salar regularly publishes personal essays and short stories, plus numerous translations of other authors that appear in journals across the world.
A professor at the City University of New York’s CITY COLLEGE campus in Harlem, he teaches workshops in the English Department’s MFA program and also serves as Director of Undergraduate Creative Writing. Website: salarabdoh.com
Mikhal Dekel
is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the City College and the CUNY Graduate Center and Director of the Rifkind Center for Humanities and the Arts. She is the recipient of many awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation and the Lady Davis Foundation. She is the author of Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey (W. W. Norton 2019), Oedipus in Kishinev (Bialik Institute, 2014), and The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity and the Zionist Moment (Northwestern University Press, 2011). Her articles, translations and blogs have appeared in The Journal of Comparative Literature, English Literary History, Jewish Social Studies, Callaloo, Shofar, Guernica, and Cambridge Literary Review, among many others.
Keith Gandal
is Professor of English at the City College of New York, with a joint appointment in American Literature and Creative Writing. He received his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of five books: four scholarly monographs and a novel. His research has focused on two areas of American studies: literature and poverty, and literature and war. His scholarly books are The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of the Slum (Oxford University Press, 1997), Class Representation in Modern Fiction and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization (Oxford, 2008), and War Isn’t the Only Hell: A New Reading of World War I American Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). The novel, Cleveland Anonymous (North Atlantic Books, 2002), combines a variety of genres, including comedy and mystery. At City College, he has served as MFA director, MA director, deputy chairperson, and chair.
Mostly dividing his time between New York City and Tehran, Iran, Salar regularly publishes personal essays and short stories, plus numerous translations of other authors that appear in journals across the world.
A professor at the City University of New York’s CITY COLLEGE campus in Harlem, he teaches workshops in the English Department’s MFA program and also serves as Director of Undergraduate Creative Writing. Website: salarabdoh.com
Lyn Di Iorio
is working on a suspense novel, The Sound of Falling Darkness, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Faulkner-Wisdom Novel-in-Progress award. Her short novel Outside the Bones (Arte Público Press) won the 2011 Foreword Review Indie Book of the Year Silver Award, was best debut novel on the Latinidad list, a top-five finalist for the 2012 John Gardner Fiction Award, a finalist for the International Latino Book Award, and on Book Riot’s 2016 list of the top 100 works of noir. Her recent short stories have appeared in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas and New Guard. She has won residencies and fellowships from The Millay Colony for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Vermont Studio Center and Ucross, and was a Patricia Harris Fellow at Stanford University’s Creative Writing Program.
William Gibbons
is an Associate Professor at The City College of New York and an award-winning librarian and archivist. He teaches on subjects such as gentrification, Harlem, and archiving the African American experience. His published works cover a range of subjects including basketball, libraries, archives, and music.
Mark Jay Mirsky
is the author of thirteen books, among them five novels and a book of stories and novellas, Thou Worm Jacob, Proceedings of the Rabble, Blue Hill Avenue, The Secret Table, The Red Adam, and Puddingstone. He has also published three critical studies, The Absent Shakespeare, Dante, Eros and Kabbalah. Blue Hill Avenue was listed by the Boston Globe in 2009 as “One of the Essential Books of New England.” His last book A Mother’s Steps is a search for his mother in dreams and photographic albums. The editor of the Diaries in English translation of Robert Musil (Basic Books) and co-editor of Rabbinic Fantasies (Yale University Press) and Volume 1 and 2 of The Jews of Pinsk, 1506-1941 (Stanford University Press) he has been the editor of Fiction since its founding in 1972. Professor Mirsky has taught at Stanford University and Bar Ilan as well as serving first as director of the City College M.A., and then as chairperson of its English Department. He has published in numerous periodicals, the New York Times Sunday Book Review, the Washington Post, Partisan Review, and received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and a New York Foundation for the Arts Award.
Janée Moses
Assistant Professor of English, specializes in African American Literature, 20th-century black expressive cultures, and oral history theory and methodology. Her current book project is an intertextual study of black women’s life writing and performances that combines extraordinary pursuits and ordinary experiences to highlight the fullness of their lives. Her writing appears in publications including Rejoinder and BOMB Magazine. An established oral historian, Moses serves as the Director of BOMB Magazine’s Oral History Project, preserving the narratives of black visual artists in America.
Emily Raboteau
is the author of a novel, The Professor’s Daughter (Henry Holt) and a work of creative nonfiction, Searching for Zion (Grove/Atlantic), named a best book of 2013 by The Huffington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle, a finalist for the Hurston Wright Legacy Award, grand prize winner of the New York Book Festival, and winner of a 2014 American Book Award. Her fiction and essays have been widely published and anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, Buzzfeed, Literary Hub, The Guardian, Guernica, VQR, The Believer, Salon, Orion and elsewhere. Honors include a Pushcart Prize, The Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony.
Dalia Sofer
is the author of the novels Man of My Time (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)—a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Notable Book of 2020, and The Septembers of Shiraz (Ecco Press, 2007)—also selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her novels have been translated and published in 16 countries. A recipient of a Whiting Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Sami Rohr Choice Award, the Sirenland Fellowship, the Santa Maddalena Foundation Fellowship, and multiple residencies at Yaddo, Sofer has contributed essays and reviews to various publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The LA Review of Books, and The Believer.
Guest Faculty
David Groff
received his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. He also has an MA in English and Expository Writing from the University of Iowa. His two books are poetry are Clay (Trio House Press, 2013) and Theory of Devolution (University of Illinois Press, 2002). He has co-edited the anthologies Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013) and Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (Alyson, 2010).
He has taught poetry and nonfiction workshops. An independent book editor with an interest in the ways writers engage with the culture, he has also led MFA courses in publishing and authorship.
Mayra Cuevas
is a CNN award-winning journalist and the author of the young adult novels Does My Body Offend You?a Target YA Book Club selection co-written with Marie Marquardt,and Salty, Bitter, Sweet. Her short story Resilientwas published as part of the anthology Foreshadow: Stories to Celebrate the Magic of Reading and Writing YA. Her new young adult novel and debut picture book are scheduled for publication in 2024 and 2025 respectively with Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House. She is currently developing her debut adult title in collaboration with Alloy Entertainment. She is the co-founder of the Latinx KidLit Book Festival and member of Las Musas Books authors collective. She has been a guest speaker at the LA Festival of Books, YALLWest, Decatur Book Festival and the Six Bridges Book Festival, among others. She loves connecting with readers and is passionate about inspiring new writers to create their best work, especially creators from historically marginalized spaces. She has served as faculty and presenter at The Highlights Foundation, The Author’s Guild, the Romance Writers of America national conference, Las Musas Books and various high school and college classrooms across the country.
Yahdon Israel
is a writer, college professor and creator of Literaryswag, a cultural movement that intersects literature and fashion to make books cool. He has written for Avidly, The New Inquiry, Brooklyn Magazine, LitHub, and Poets and Writers. He teaches at The New School and City College. He hosts the Literaryswag Book Club, a monthly book club that’s free and open to public and the host of LIT, a weekly web series about books and culture.
Kima Jones
is a poet and the founder of Jack Jones Literary Arts, a Los Angeles-based book publicity agency for black and brown writers where she worked as lead strategist on all publicity campaigns. In 2017, Kima founded the Jack Jones Literary Arts retreat—a two-week respite and book incubator for black and brown nonbinary and women writers. The Los Angeles Times called Kima “2018’s literary breakthrough” and “an important new voice on the national stage.” In 2019, she founded Culture, Too—a mentorship conference for black and brown cultural critics.
In the spring of 2021, Kima joined Triangle House Literary as an agent. Her clients include David Haynes and Rochelle Spencer. She is interested in representing literary fiction, essay collections, memoir, hybrid texts, commercial fiction, poetry, speculative fiction, science fiction, and horror. She’s a developmental editor who brings more than a decade of marketing and publicity experience into her agenting negotiations. Kima is at work on her first book, Butch, a memoir, forthcoming from Knopf.
Rosanna Young Oh
is the author of The Corrected Version (Diode Editions, 2023), which won the Diode Editions Book Prize and the North American Poetry Book Award judged by Lisa Russ Spaar. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review of Books, Beloit Poetry Journal, Graywolf Lab, RHINO Poetry, Literary Hub, Best New Poets, and Rain Taxi Review of Books, among other publications. She has received support and residencies from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, the Hudson Valley Writing Center, the Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the New York State Writers Institute. Her poetry was also the subject of a solo exhibition at the Queens Historical Society, where she was an artist-in-residence. A graduate of Yale (B.A.), the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins (M.F.A.), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (M.A.), Rosanna lives on Long Island. She is currently The Bill & Doris Lippman Visiting Poet at the City College of New York, CUNY.
Soraya Palmer
is the author of The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts, which has been named a best or most anticipated novel by Today, Elle, Ms. Magazine, and Goodreads, among others. The novel is currently a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for debut fiction. She has been awarded grants, residences, and fellowships for her writing from the Café Royal Cultural Foundation, the New York Foundation of the Arts, Blue Mountain Residency, and the Nawat Fes Residency in Fes, Morocco. She was born and raised in Flatbush and is a licensed clinical social worker who has organized and advocated for criminalized survivors of gender-based violence, tenants facing eviction, and victims of police brutality. She teaches Graduate Fiction at CUNY City College and Writing Magical Realism for the Center for Fiction. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat, Nicholas.
Marc Palmieri
has taught dramatic writing in the MFA program at CCNY since 2010, and Modern and Postmodern Drama, Shakespeare, Dramatic Writing for the stage, TV and Film, Fiction and other courses for the Undergraduate English Department since 2006. He is a full-time core faculty member in the School of Liberal Arts at Mercy College. Credits include: Miramax Films’ Telling You (screenplay), stage plays include Levittown (NY Times Critic’s Pick), The Groundling, Carl The Second and Poor Fellas (all published by Dramatists Play Service). He has published twice in Fiction, and in numerous anthologies for Applause/Limelight Books and Smith & Kraus Inc. His collection of plays for middle schoolers, S(cool) Days, will be published by Brooklyn Publishers in 2020. Marc is a fully vested member of SAG-AFTRA and Actors Equity. He received his B.A. from Wake Forest University and MA/MFA from the City College of New York.
Reiko Rahna Rizzuto
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. She is also a recipient of the U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. She was Associate Editor of The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings About New York City. She has been interviewed widely on motherhood including on The Today Show, 20/20, and The View. Reiko’s articles on motherhood, Hiroshima, the Japanese incarceration camps and radiation poisoning have been published globally, including in the L.A. Times, Guardian UK, CNN Opinion, and Salon, and through the Progressive Media Project and The Huffington Post, and have been anthologized in Mothers Who Think, Because I Said So, Nonwhite and Woman, and Topography of War, among others. She was a judge for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction in 2015. She was a professor in the Masters of Creative Writing program at Goddard College for 17 years, and has led numerous writing retreats, including for the Two Trees Writers Collaborative. Reiko is a Hedgebrook alumna, and has taught master classes and at Vortext for Hedgebrook. She is “hapa” (mixed Japanese/Caucasian) and was raised in Hawaii.
Her website is www.rahnareikorizzuto.com.
Irvin Weathersby, Jr.
is the author of In Open Contempt (Viking), a forthcoming memoir-in-essays that mediates on expressions of racism in art, museums, and public spaces in New Orleans and throughout the world. He has written for Guernica, Esquire, The Atlantic, EBONY, and other outlets. His work has received funding and support from the Voices of our Nation Arts Foundation, the Professional Staff Congress-City University of New York Research Award, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference where he was named the 2019 Bernard O’Keefe Scholar in Nonfiction. He has earned an MFA in creative writing from The New School, and a master’s in education from Morgan State University. He teaches composition and creative writing at Queensborough Community College.
Past Guest Faculty
Amir Arian Ahmadi
started his writing career in 2000 as a journalist in Iran. In Farsi, he has published two novels Cogwheels and Disappearance of Daniel, a collection of stories (Fragments of a Crime), and a book of nonfiction on the state of Iranian literature in the new millennium Graffiti on the Paper Wall. He also translated from English to Farsi novels by E.L Doctorow, Paul Auster, P.D. James, and Cormac McCarthy. He switched to writing in English in 2012, and has published short stories and essays in The New York Times, The Guardian, London Review of Books, Massachusetts Review, Asymptote, openDemocracy. He earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Queensland in Australia, and an MFA in creative writing from NYU.
Justine Calma
is a journalist reporting on science and the environment for Vox Media’s The Verge. She previously covered environmental justice and health for Grist.org. Since the adoption of the Paris climate accord in 2015, Justine has covered the effects of climate change across four continents. Her work can be found on NBC News, PBS, PRI’s The World, WNYC, FiveThirtyEight, Quartz, Wired, HuffPost, Mother Jones, Business Insider, and The GroundTruth Project, among others. She is an alumna of Columbia Journalism School’s Toni Stabile investigative program and the Ida B. Wells fellowship at The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund. Justine was born in the Philippines, immigrated to Los Angeles as a child, and is now based in New York City.
Mostly dividing his time between New York City and Tehran, Iran, Salar regularly publishes personal essays and short stories, plus numerous translations of other authors that appear in journals across the world.
A professor at the City University of New York’s CITY COLLEGE campus in Harlem, he teaches workshops in the English Department’s MFA program and also serves as Director of Undergraduate Creative Writing. Website: salarabdoh.com
Naima Coster
is the author of Halsey Street, a novel of family, loss, and renewal, set in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn. Halsey Street has been recommended as a must-read by People, Essence, BitchMedia, The Root, Well-Read Black Girl and The Skimm, among others. It was a Finalist for the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction.
Naima’s second novel, Didn’t Never Know, is the story of the integration of a public high school in a small Southern town, which sets off a chain of events that bonds two families together in unexpected and complicated ways over the course of their lives. It is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing.
Naima’s stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Rumpus, Aster(ix), Kweli, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She has taught writing to students in jail, youth programs, and universities. Naima is currently visiting faculty at the MFA program at City College in Harlem and Antioch University in L.A.
Cynthia Cruz
is the author of five collections of poems: How the End Begins, Wunderkammer, The Glimmering Room, and Ruin. Her fifth collection of poems, Dregs, was published in September of 2018. The editor of an anthology of contemporary Latina poetry, Other Musics: New Latina Poetry (2019), Disquieting: Essays on Silence is her first collection of essays. Cruz is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and a Hodder fellowship from Princeton University. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University.
Nicole Dennis-Benn
is the author of the novel, Here comes the sun. Dennis-Benn is a Lambda Literary Award winner, named by Time Out Magazine as an immigrant making a stamp on New York City. Her debut novel has received much acclaim including: a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a NPR Best Books of 2016, an Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Entertainment Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2016, a BuzzFeed Best Literary Debuts of 2016, among others. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, ELLE Magazine, Electric Literature, Lenny Letter, Catapult, Red Rock Review, Kweli Literary Journal, Mosaic, Ebony, and the Feminist Wire. Her writing has been awarded a Richard and Julie Logsdon Fiction Prize; and two of her stories have been nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize in Fiction. Vice listed Dennis-Benn among immigrant authors “who are making American Literature great again.” She was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, and now lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York.
Andrew Martin
is the author of the novel Early Work, a New York Times Notable Book of 2018 and finalist for the Cabell First Novelist Prize, and the story collection Cool for America, longlisted for the 2020 Story Prize. His stories and essays have been published frequently in The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books, and he has also contributed stories and essays to Harper’s, The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, The Yale Review, The New York Times Book Review and many other publications. The recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and UCross, he has taught fiction writing and criticism at Tufts University, Boston College, The Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s University, The Mountainview MFA at Southern New Hampshire University, and elsewhere.
Nelly A. Rosario
is a Dominican-American author and creative writing instructor of Song of the Water Saints, winner of a PEN/Open Book Award. Her fiction and non-fiction works appear in various anthologies and journals. Rosario holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she has taught. She was formerly on faculty at Texas State University and a Visiting Scholar in the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing Program. Currently, Rosario is the 2017-18 Schumann Visiting Professor in Democratic Studies in the Latina/o Studies Program at Williams College and also serves as Assistant Director of Writing for the MIT Black History Project.
Nicole Sealey
is an award-winning Poet and Director of Cave Canem. Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole is the author of Ordinary Beast and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her other honors include an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award and the Poetry International Prize. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming to Best American Poetry 2018, The New Yorker, The New York Times and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the executive director at Cave Canem Foundation, Inc.
David Unger
is a writer and translator, he received Guatemala’s 2014 Miguel Angel Asturias National Literature Prize for lifetime achievement though he writes exclusively in English. His latest novel, The Mastermind, is appearing in seven languages including Spanish, Arabic, Turkish and Italian. Other published novels include The Price of Escape; Para Mi, Eres Divina; Ni chicha, ni limonada; and Life in the Damn Tropics. His short stories and essays have appeared in Guernica Magazine, Review and Playboy Mexico. As translator, he has published 14 titles including The Popol Vuh, Guatemala’s pre-Columbian creation myth and the work of Rigoberta Menchú (Guatemala), Silvia Molina (Mexico), Nicanor Parra (Chile), Teresa Cárdenas (Cuba), Mario Benedetti (Uruguay), among others. He just received a NYSCA grant to retranslate Nobelist Miguel Angel Asturias’s first novel El Señor Presidente and teaches Translation in the MFA Program.
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