Faculty

Laura Cronk is the author of a book of poems, Having Been an Accomplice, which won the 2011 Lexi Rudnitsky prize from Persea Books. Her work has appeared in journals and websites such as Barrow Street, Conduit, Ecotone, RealPoetik, and WSQ and in the anthologies The Best American Poetry (2006, 2008), Best American Erotic Poems, and The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel. She is an associate director of the Writing Program at The New School, where she coordinates the Riggio Honors Program: Writing and Democracy. For many years, she curated the Monday Night Poetry Series at KGB Bar in Manhattan.

Mira Jacob is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing, which was shortlisted for India's Tata First Literature Award, honored by the APALA, and named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle, and The Millions. She is the co-founder of the much-loved Pete's Reading Series in Brooklyn, where she spent 13 years bringing literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to the city's sweetest stage. Her recent writing and short stories have appeared in Guernica, Vogue, the Telegraph, and Bookanista, and earlier work has appeared in various magazines (RED, Redbook, i-D, Metropolis, STEP), books (Footnotes with Kenneth Cole, Simon & Schuster; Adios Barbie, Seal Press), on television (VH-1′s Pop-Up Video), and across the Web. She has appeared on national and local television and radio and has taught writing to students of all ages in New York, New Mexico, and Barcelona. She currently teaches fiction at NYU.

Madge McKeithen has an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and is the author of Blue Peninsula: Essential Words for a Life of Loss and Change. Her writing has been published in TriQuarterly, Utne Reader, Lost and Found: Stories from New York, The New York Times Book Review, and Best American Essays 2011. She currently teaches nonfiction online at the New School and all genres in person at St. Andrews University in North Carolina.

Sharon Mesmer, MFA, Brooklyn College, is a Fulbright Specialist. She is the recipient of two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships and a MacArthur Scholarship (through Brooklyn College) and a co-recipient of a Jerome Foundation/SASE grant. Publications include Greetings from My Girlie Leisure Place, Annoying Diabetic Bitch, The Virgin Formica, Ma Vie a Yonago, In Ordinary Time, and The Empty Quarter; poems in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry; prose in I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women; and essays and articles in the Paris Review, the Brooklyn Rail, and American Poetry Review. A novel, The Starry Dynamos, is forthcoming.

John Reed is the author of the novels A Still Small Voice (Delacorte Press/Delta), The Whole (Simon & Schuster/Pocket/MTV Books), the SPD bestseller Snowball's Chance (Roof Books/Melville House), All The World's A Grave: A New Play By William Shakespeare (Penguin Books/Plume), and Tales of Woe (MTV Press), as well as Free Boat: Collected Lies and Love Poems (C&R Press). He has received fellowships from Columbia University, where he received his MFA in Creative Writing. His work has been published in (selected) Artnet, the Brooklyn Rail, Tin House, Paper Magazine, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Bomb magazine, Art in America, the PEN Poetry Series, the Los Angeles Times, The Believer, the Rumpus, the Daily Beast, Gawker, Slate, the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the Wall Street Journal, Electric Literature, Vice, the New York Times, and Harper's and anthologized in Best American Essays (Houghton Mifflin), Devouring the Green (Jaded Ibis), StoryScape Anthology V2, American Wasteland (CLMP), The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology (Hanging Loose), Vitamin PH (Phaidon), and 100 Greatest Albums (VH1). Other accolades include Vice magazine's "Employee of the Month" and Longform's #1 Most Entertaining Essay. His works have been translated into German, French, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Latvian, and other languages. Performances, workshops, and readings of his plays have been staged in New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, and Texas in venues including the Public Theater in NYC and the Brooklyn Book Festival. He is a two-term member of the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle.

Andrew Zornoza has a BA from Princeton University. He is the author of the novel Where I Stay. His short fiction and essays have appeared in BOMB, the Poetry Foundation, Gastronomica, Sleepingfish, CapGun, and many other outlets. He has taught at Gotham Writers' Workshop and in Parsons' Design and Technology MFA program. Born in Houston, Texas, he currently works out of New York City.