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Director
Patsy Sims
Patsy Sims is the author of The Klan, Cleveland Benjamin's Dead, and Can Somebody Shout Amen!, which was named a Noteworthy Book by The New York Times Book Review. She also co-authored the narration for the award-winning documentary "The Klan: A Legacy of Hate." Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Magazine, Texas Observer, and most major American newspapers. Her most recent book is the anthology Literary Nonfiction: Learning by Example. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and is associate editor of River Teeth, a journal of narrative nonfiction.
Core faculty for the MFA program includes the following writers:
Thomas French
Thomas French is the author of Unanswered Cries, the chronicle of a murder case, and South of Heaven, which details a year in the life of a Florida high school. He is a former staff writer for the St. Petersburg Times, where he specialized in book-length narrative series. He won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing and a Sigma Delta Chi award for Angels & Demons, a seven-part series about the murders of a mother and her two daughters. His work has been excerpted in America's Best Newspaper Writing. He is a writing fellow at the Poynter Institute and teaches reporting and writing there and at newsrooms around the world. He is writing a book tentatively titled Zoo Story and has just joined the faculty at the Indiana University School of Journalism.
Diana Hume George
Diana Hume George is the author of The Lonely Other: A Woman Watching America and co-editor of The Family Track, an anthology of essays. An essayist, poet and critic, her other books include A Genesis, Koyaanisqatsi, Resurrection of the Body, and Blake and Freud. Her work has appeared in such publications as Best American Essays, River Teeth, Creative Nonfiction and MS. She is the former director of the creative writing program at Penn State at Erie. A recent visiting writer at Davidson College, Antioch/LA, and Ohio University, she is a co-director of the Chautauqua Writers' Festival and contributing editor of Chautauqua Journal.
Suzannah Lessard
Suzannah Lessard was a staff writer for The New Yorker for 20 years and, before that, an editor of Washington Monthly. She is the author of the memoir The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Whiting Award, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington fellowship at George Washington University, and the Anthony Lukas Award for Works-in-Progress. She has taught creative nonfiction at several universities, including George Mason University, Wesleyan University, and the Columbia School of the Arts. Her current project is a book tentatively titled Mapping the New World: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Place in the Twenty-First Century.
Jacob Levenson
Jacob Levenson is the author of The Secret Epidemic: The Story of AIDS in Black America, a narrative nonfiction book that weaves together the public health, political, Southern, and urban history of how AIDS became a black epidemic in the United States. His writing has appeared in such publications as Mother Jones, Vibe, The Utne Reader, and the Columbia Journalism Review, as well as being anthologized in academic journals and books. Levenson has also worked in radio and documentary film and has been a fellow at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard and the Open Society Institute. He is currently working on a memoir about the death of his father and birth of his son. He teaches narrative nonfiction at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
Leslie Rubinkowski
Leslie Rubinkowski is the author of Impersonating Elvis. A journalist, feature writer and entertainment critic, she teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared in Harper's,Creative Nonfiction, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She was director of the news-editorial department at West Virginia University's School of Journalism and has lectured at the Poynter Institute and the Chautauqua Institution, among other places. Her essay "In the Woods" was named a Notable Essay in Best American Essays, 2001.
Richard Todd
Richard Todd has worked as a magazine and book editor for more than 30 years. He was executive editor of the Atlantic Monthly and published books under his own imprint at Houghton Mifflin, where his authors included Tracy Kidder, Ward Just, and Ann Patchett. He has taught literature and writing at Amherst and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts. His essays and cultural reportage have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Times, Worth, and numerous other magazines. He is the author of The Thing Itself, recently published by Penguin USA.
Laura Wexler
Laura Wexler is the author of the nonfiction book Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America, a narrative account of a 1946 quadruple lynching in Walton County, Georgia. Wexler's work has been published in The Washington Post, Utne Reader, DoubleTake, the Oxford American, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships and fellowships to the Breadloaf Writers' Conference, the MacDowell Colony, Blue Mountain Arts Center, and the Harry S. Truman Library. She has taught creative writing at the University of Georgia, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is senior editor of Style Magazine in Baltimore, and curator of The Stoop Storytelling Series.
Webster Younce
Webster Younce is a senior editor for English language and international literature at Suhrkamp Verlag in Germany. He has edited history, journalism, travel, politics, and fiction at a number of American publishing houses, including Henry Holt, Houghton Mifflin and Random House. His authors have included Paul Theroux, Diane McWhorter, Joseph Epstein, Jonathan Chait, James Kynge, Ward Just, and Jonathan Miles. He is a graduate of the University of Mississippi and the University of Oxford, and his journalism and criticism have appeared in Harper's, Time Out New York, on Beliefnet.com, and in the anthology A Galaxy Not So Far Away.
Visiting Faculty
James Conaway is the author of 10 books, including the memoir Memphis Afternoons and the best-selling Napa: The Story of an American Eden and its sequel,The Far Side of Eden. He has written numerous articles and essays that have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, Outside, National Geographic Traveler, and other publications. A former Stegner fellow at Stanford University and a former Alicia Patterson fellow, he has worked as a feature writer for The Washington Post and as Harper's Washington editor. He is a former editor of Preservation magazine. His collection of essays titled Vanishing America: In Pursuit of Our Elusive Landscapes was published by Shoemaker & Hoard.
Pete Earley is the author of nine nonfiction books, including three New York Times bestsellers. His first book, Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring, was made into a five-hour mini-series for CBS television. His book CRAZY: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. His most recent book is Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia's Master Spy in American After the End of the Cold War, an account of a former KGB officer who spied for Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin before defecting.
Philip Gerard is the author of three novels and the nonfiction books Secret Soldiers: The Story of World War II's Heroic Army of Deception; Brilliant Passage; Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life; and Writing a Book That Makes a Difference. His essays have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies and on NPR's "All Things Considered." He is chair of the Creative Writing Department at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He was a faculty mentor in the Goucher MFA in Creative Nonfiction program from 1998-2007.
Wil Haygood, an author and journalist, is author of five books, among them three biographies: King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.; In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr.; and Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson. Haygood is a staff writer for the Style section of The Washington Post. Among his journalism honors are the National Headliners Award, the Sunday Magazine Editors Award, the Missouri Journalism Award, and the National Association of Black Journalists Award for both feature writing and foreign reporting. In 1991 Haygood was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Kevin Kerrane is the author of Dollar Sign on the Muscle: The World of Baseball Scouting, which was named one of the best 100 sports books of all time by Sports Illustrated. He has co-edited six books, including The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism. He has lectured at the Poynter Institute and is a professor of English at the University of Delaware. His work has appeared in such publications as Sports Illustrated and Salon, the online magazine. He is a former member of the MFA faculty.
Lisa Knopp is the author of four collections of essays: Field of Vision and Flight Dreams: A Life in the Midwestern Landscape, both from the University of Iowa Press, The Nature of Home and Interior Places, both from the University of Nebraska Press. Knopp is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, where she teaches courses in creative nonfiction. She is a former member of the MFA faculty. Three Rivers, her current writing project, is a collection of essays about the Mississippi, Platte, and Missouri rivers. Essays from this collection have been published or are forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, North Dakota Review, and Organization and Environment.
MFA Advisory Committee
Madison Smartt Bell is the author of the novels The Washington Square Ensemble; Waiting for the End of the World; Straight Cut; The Year of Silence; Ten Indians; Save Me, Joe Louis; and Soldier's Joy, which received the Lillian Smith Award in 1989. He received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Mildred and Harold Strauss Livings Award in 2008 and is currently on leave from his position as director of the Kratz Center of Creative Writing at Goucher College.
Madeleine Blais is the author of The Heart Is an Instrument: Portraits in Journalism; In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle; and Uphill Walkers: Memoir of a Family. She is professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.
Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters and director of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. His books include The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture, which won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
Gareth Esersky is a literary agent with the Carol Mann Agency. She has held editorial positions at five publishing houses and the Book-of-the Month Club, and has co-authored three nonfiction books. She is a Goucher alumna.
Lee Gutkind is the founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction. His books include the award-winning Many Sleepless Nights: The World of Organ Transplantation; Fat Forever: Essays by the Godfather; and The Art of Creative Nonfiction. He is editor of The Creative Nonfiction Reader anthology series and Duquesne University Press' Emerging Writers in Creative Nonfiction book series. A longtime professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, he is now a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Consortium for Science, Policy, & Outcomes and a professor at the Hugh Downs School for Human Communication at Arizona State University. His most recent book is Almost Human: Making Robots Think.
Walt Harrington was a staff writer for nearly 15 years at The Washington Post and is now head of the Department of Journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His books include the memoir The Everlasting Stream: A True Story of Rabbits, Guns, Friendship, and Family; and Crossings: A White Man's Journey into Black America. He also edited the anthologies Intimate Journalism and The Beholder's Eye: A Collection of America's Finest Personal Journalism.
Tracy Kidder won the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction and the National Book Award for The Soul of the New Machine, and National Book Critics' Circle nominations for House and Among Schoolchildren. He is also the author of Old Friends, Home Town and Mountains Beyond Mountains. His most recent book is Strength in What Remains.
Jane Kramer is the European correspondent for The New Yorker and writes the "Letters from Europe" for that magazine. She is author of nine books, including The Politics of Memory, Europeans, Unsettling Europe, The Last Cowboy, and Lone Patriot. She is the first American to win the Prix European de l'Essai, Europe's most prestigious award for nonfiction.
Andrew Miller is a senior editor at Alfred A. Knopf, where he edits books in history, journalism, and general nonfiction. He previously worked at Vintage/Anchor, Grove/Atlantic and St. Martin's Press and is a member of the American Association of Publishers' International Freedom to Publish Committee.
Hilda Raz's recent books include Trans and Divine Honors (poetry), Living on the Margins, and the anthologies Best of Prairie Schooner:Essays and Best of Prairie Schooner: Fiction and Poetry. What Becomes You, a collection of essays written with Aaron Raz Link, was published by the University of Nebraska Press and by Bison Paperback. It was a finalist for the Lambda Book Award. Two books of poems, All Off and Splendid and What Happens, were published in the fall of 2008. In addition to being the Luschei editor-in-chief of Prairie Schooner and professor of English and women's and gender studies at the University of Nebraska, she directs the Prarie Schooner Book Prizes in Short Fiction and Poetry, published through the University of Nebraska Press.
Norman Sims is a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he administers an online certificate program and teaches the history of literary journalism, freedom of the press, and writing. Northwestern University Press published his history, True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism, in 2008 and republished the classic work of scholarship, Literary Journalism in the 20th Century, which he edited, in 2008. He is the editor of The Literary Journalists and of Literary Journalism (with Mark Kramer).
Gay Talese is credited by Tom Wolfe with creating "The New Journalism." His nonfiction books include Unto the Sons, The Kingdom and the Power, Honor Thy Father, The Bridge, New York: A Serendipiter's Journey, and Fame and Obscurity, an anthology of his articles from Esquire magazine. His most recent book is A Writer's Life.
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