Faculty

Madge McKeithen began teaching nonfiction writing at The New School in 2006, shortly after completing her MFA in the low-residency program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, and publishing her first book, Blue Peninsula (FSG, 2006). She has taught courses on the poetic and comic in essays and on memoir, as well as a broader range of nonfiction forms and techniques in workshop during the Summer Writers Colony. As an undergraduate, she studied international politics at William and Mary, and as a grad student, she attended Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. McKeithen worked in government, international, and educational institutions before coming to The New School. In her writing courses, she connects subjects of broad human concern with content personally important to the writers in the workshop and works in a variety of styles available to nonfiction writers. Currently she is teaching Intersectionality in Nonfiction: Writing Real People, the Summer Writers Colony Nonfiction Workshop; a new course, Reading and Writing the Physical World: Science, Nature, and the Human Body; and a two-Saturday intensive seminar, The Micro Essay. McKeithen’s writing has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Utne Reader, TriQuarterly, Lost and Found: Stories from New York, and Best American Essays 2011 and in other journals, newspapers, and anthologies.

Madge McKeithen will also be the Literary Salon faculty for Edwidge Danticat's Everything Inside: Stories.

Sharon Mesmer’s fiction collections are Ma Vie à Yonago (Hachette Littératures, Paris, in French translation, 2005), In Ordinary Time (Hanging Loose Press, 2005) and The Empty Quarter (Hanging Loose Press, 2000). An excerpt of her story “Revenge” appears in the anthology I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women (Les Figues, 2012). Her recent poetry collection, Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place (Bloof Books), was voted Best of 2015 by Entropy. Four of her poems appear in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (second edition, 2013). Previous collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2008), The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose Press, 2008), Vertigo Seeks Affinities (chapbook) (Belladonna Books, 2007), Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press, 1998), and Crossing Second Avenue (chapbook) (ABJ Press, Tokyo, 1997). Other anthologies in which her work has appeared are Brooklyn Poets Anthology (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2017), Poems for the Nation: Edited by Allen Ginsberg (Seven Stories Press, 2000) and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999). Mesmer is co-editor of Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf (Edge Books, 2017). Her awards include a Fulbright Specialist grant (2011), a Jerome Foundation/SASE award (as mentor to poet Elisabeth Workman, 2009) and two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships (2007 and 1999). Her essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in publications including the New York Times, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and the Brooklyn Rail.

Sharon Mesmer will also be the Literary Salon faculty for R. Eric Thomas' Here for It.

Kathleen Ossip is the author of The Do-Over, a New York Times Editors' Choice; The Cold War, one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2011; and the Search Engine, chosen by Derek Walcott for the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Best American Magazine Writing, the Washington Post, Poetry, Paris Review, The Believer, The Nation, the New Republic, and the New York Review of Books. Ossip has also been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. 

Kathleen Ossip will also be the Literary Salon faculty for Aaron Smith's The Book of Daniel.