Faculty

After earning a BA in German literature and an MA in art history from Johns Hopkins University, I received an MFA in creative writing from New York University, where I studied with Marie Ponsot, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Mark Doty, Galway Kinnell, and Donald Hall. I have also studied fiction with Jacob Appel and Katherine Mosby. I have been guest editor for several issues of Chiricú Journal (Indiana University Press). My fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Euphony Journal, Failbetter, The MacGuffin, Pembroke Magazine, and several others. I have taught at Writers House since 2006.

Alison Powell is a poet, lyric essayist, and scholar, and is Associate Teaching Professor of Creative Writing at Rutgers University. Her work has been featured on PBS NewsHour, Environmental Health News, and www.poets.org, and supported by institutions including the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), Fine Arts Work Center of Provincetown, Rockvale Writer’s Colony, Crosshatch Center for Arts and Ecology, and more. She is the author of two collections of poetry: On the Desire to Levitate (Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, Ohio University Press 2014) and Boats in the Attic, (Editor’s Prize, Poets Out Loud / Poetic Justice Institute contest, Fordham University Press 2022). A chapbook of lyric essays titled The Art of Perpetuation was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2020. Her poems and lyric essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in A Public Space, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Powell received her PhD in English Literature from the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, and her scholarship focuses on the relationship between play, morality, and aesthetics in the Romantic poets. She lives in New Jersey with her husband, son, daughter, dog, and two elusive cats.

Amy Lawless is the author of the poetry collections My Dead and Broadax, both from Octopus Books. And a chapbook A Women Alone (Sixth Finch). She is also coauthor of the poem/essay hybrid text I Cry: The Desire to Be Rejected from Pioneer Works Press. Her work has been anthologized in the Brooklyn Poets anthology, Best American Poetry, and Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Every Occasion from the Academy of American Poets (Abrams Image).  She was the recipient of a NYFA poetry fellowship. Poems have appeared widely both in print and online, most recently in The Recluse, The Poetry Project's annual literary magazine, Poetry Northwest, and VIDA Review. (Photo credit: Theo Cote)

Professor Bielecki is an Assistant Director in the Creative Writing Program, where he coordinates Digital Composition course (209, 303, 304, 309, 314) offered through Writers House. Professor Bielecki is also the Associate Director of the Plangere Culture Lab, a space that provides technical and pedagogical support for English department students, staff and faculty who are interested in pursuing coursework and research projects that are anchored in the interdisciplinary work of the digital humanities.
Professor Bielecki's research interests are composition studies, social media, digital production, graphic composition, autobiographical writing, film theory and criticism, and media theory.

Paul Blaney has been teaching at Writers House for a dozen years. Along with numerous short stories, he's published novellas and a 2015 novel, Mister Spoonface. He aims to teach classes that are serious fun.

Jennifer Bryan has an MFA in Fiction from Bowling Green State University and a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  She was the 2011 Kimmel Foundation Award writing recipient, and her fiction has appeared in a number of literary journals including The Missouri Review, LIT, and the New Ohio Review. She lives with her husband the artist, Arjan Zazueta and her daughter, Sadie in Brooklyn, NY.
Jennifer has taught Introduction to Multimedia Composition, Digital Storytelling and Fiction Writing.

Leslieann Hobayan is a poet, essayist, healer, transformational coach, and host of the podcast, Vinyasa In Verse. As an American-born daughter of immigrants, identity has always been at the forefront of her work. As a result, her work’s focus has been on documenting these lived experiences while helping others facilitate their own healing in order to uncover and express their truest identities, their most authentic selves. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a 2018 Best of the Net, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Aster(ix) Journal, The Grief Diaries, The Lantern Review, The Mom Egg Review, The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit, and elsewhere. She also teaches yoga and meditation, including trauma-informed yoga, at local studios and with private clients where she guides them through sessions that strive to connect mind, body, and spirit. With an open heart, kind words, and a little silliness, she works to create safe spaces that nurture and heal. She believes in magic –that it exists in all of us—and uses it in everything she does.  Classes taught: Introduction to Creative Writing , Introduction to Multimedia Composition, Performance Poetry, Advanced Poetry Workshop

Ashley Chambers is a writer, multimedia artist, theologian, and educator.. She holds a Master of Sacred Theology and a Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University, as well as an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. Her first book of poetry, The Exquisite Buoyancies, was published in 2021 by New Michigan Press at the University of Arizona. She is currently finishing her second book and her first full-length film. You can also find her work in publications such as The Believer Magazine, Prelude, Salt Hill Journal, and The Seattle Review.

Thomas Cotsonas is the author of Nominal Cases, his first book of fiction and winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press.  His fiction has also appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including Conjunctions, Puerto del Sol, and Western Humanities Review.  He lives with his wife in New York City.

Adam Dalva’s writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Tin House, and The Guardian. He teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and is a book critic for Guernica Magazine. Adam has received fellowships from the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. He is a graduate of NYU's MFA Program, where he was a Veterans Writing Workshop Fellow. Adam's best-selling comic book, Olivia Twist, was published by Dark Horse in 2019. You can find his work at adamdalva.com.

Mark Doty is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and prose, including Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, winner of the 2008 National Book Award for Poetry.

JOANNA FUHRMAN  is the author of six books of poetry, most recently  To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press 2021), The Year of Yellow Butterflies (Hanging Loose Press 2015), and Pageant (Alice James Books 2009). Her seventh book Data Mind, a collection of darkly comic, surreal prose poems about the internet, is forthcoming from Curbstone/Northwestern University Press in 2024.  She is a former poetry editor of Ping Pong and Boog City and served as the Monday night coordinator for the poetry readings at the Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s Church from 2001-2003 and the Wednesday night coordinator from 2010-2011. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including The Baffler, The Believer,  Conduit, and Denver Quarterly, as well as on the Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets (poem-a-day) websites, and in anthologies published by Soft Skull Press, HarperCollins, New York University, and Carnegie Mellon University. Her poem “Stagflation” won a 2011 Pushcart Prize,  her poem “Lavender” was featured on The Slowdown podcast, and in 2023, a poem will appear in The Best American Poetry anthology.  She also creates poetry videos that are on her own Vimeo site and in literary journals. After publishing with them since she was a teenager, she became a co-editor of Hanging Loose Press in 2022.

John Hulme is an award-winning writer/filmmaker from Highland Park, NJ. He co-authored The Seems, a trilogy of fantasy novels from Bloomsbury Children’s Books. He previously created the original radio drama, Vanishing Point (NPR, XM), which he expanded into an online role playing game for Microsoft. Hulme was also the director of Unknown Soldier: Searching For A Father, a feature-length documentary for HBO’s America Undercover. He is currently producing the Highland Park African-American History Project, a digital archive capturing the oral history of his hometown’s black community. His first feature length horror screenplay, Bagman, is being produced for Paramount Pictures, to be directed by Colm McCarthy of Peaky Blinders and The Girl With All The Gifts.

Aimee LaBrie’s short story collection, Wonderful Girl, was chosen as the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction and published by the University of North Texas Press. Her stories have appeared in Pleiades, Beloit Fiction Journal, Cleaver Magazine, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Minnesota Review, Permafrost, and other literary journals. In 2012, she won first place in Zoetrope’s All-Story Fiction contest. Aimee lives in Princeton, NJ and works as a lecturer and senior program administrator for creative writing at Rutgers University.

Miller is a Russell Teaching Fellow and she has been teaching at Rutgers since 2005. She has been writing since she was very young,  and studied with Marie Ponsot for 11 years after completing graduate school. In her words, Ponsot "taught me by the observation method and that's also the way I teach--by observing technique, content, and style rather than critiquing them." Her book, Communion of Saints was published in 2017, and her poetry has been included in the anthologies Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion, and Spirituality and St. Peter's B-List: Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints. She won two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg awards for poetry and her work has been presented on BBC4 Radio.

Yehoshua November is an Assistant Teaching Professor at the Rutgers Writing Program and Writers House.  He is the author of two books of poetry, God's Optimism, winner of the MSR Book Award and a finalist for the L.A.Times Book Prize, and Two Worlds Exist, a finalist for National Jewish Book Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize. His writing has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, VQR, The Sun, and on National Public Radio.  “[November] allows a radiant spiritual light to shine through deeply human fissures.”   –The Chicago Tribune.

Evan Rehill’s work has been published or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, No Tokens, Open City, Little Star, The Literary Review, Lumina, Fourteen Hills, Big Bell, Instant City, and Watchword Press. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. The Way We’re Used To, a collection of shorter stories, was published by Push Press in limited edition with cover art by Ryan Coffey. A new novel, The Sequels, is forthcoming in 2019. Rehill has received the Miriam Ylvisaker Award for Fiction and a Browning Society Award for Dramatic Monologue. Rehill is a founding curator of the Picasso Machinery performance series happening underground in Brooklyn. He lives in New York City. Selected publications: The Spade Night Comes Later The Letter Landon Sheinblatt

Professor Evie Shockley is the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (U Iowa P, 2011) and six collections of poetry, most recently suddenly we (Wesleyan UP, 2023). Among her earlier books, the new black (Wesleyan UP, 2011) received the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; semiautomatic (Wesleyan UP, 2017) received the same award in 2018, and was also a finalist that year for the LA Times Book Review Prize and the Pulitzer Prize.

Shockley's intellectual and creative work takes a variety of forms. Her current research on "Black Graphics" concerns the strategies Black poets and other artists (literary and visual) have employed during the recent period characterized by the dominance of "colorblindness" ideology. Articles related to this project have appeared in New Literary History, The Black Scholar, and Contemporary Literature. Other scholarly and teaching interests include 20th and 21st century African American and African Diaspora literatures, Black feminist thought, and contemporary poetry and poetics in the US and beyond. She has placed numerous essays on these subjects in academic journals, edited volumes, and broader audience publications, such as How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill; Furious Flower: Seeding the Future; The New Emily Dickinson Studies; Harriet; The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time; LARB; Literary Hub; The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry; Jacket2; and Boston Review, among others. Since 2021, she has served as Editor for Poetry (scholarship) at Contemporary Literature. Her poetry has appeared nationally -- in publications like Kenyon Review, Obsidian, Poem-a-Day, The 1619 Project, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Adi, Lana Turner, Ploughshares, The Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, Torch Literary Arts, and Poetry Daily -- and internationally, with pieces translated into French, Spanish, Polish, and Slovenian. Honors for the body of her poetry include the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Stephen Henderson Award, and the Holmes National Poetry Prize.       From her teaching philosophy: "In my classroom, I make every effort to show students clearly how passionate I am about the texts and ideas I'm teaching—how much a poem, a novel, or a literary movement can mean to me and many others.  They appreciate this, I think, in part because it gives them permission to feel passionate about their own relationships to texts, in turn.  When that sense of the power of literature is circulating in the room, it makes it much easier for me to make palpable for them the historical and cultural significance of the works, on one hand, or to convince them of the importance of a line break or an element of plot, on the other.  What I appreciate most is that this becomes a feedback loop, wherein my own experience of texts that have become too familiar from frequent teaching is reenergized by the enthusiasms (or engaged resistance) my students express."

EducationMFA, Creative Writing (Fiction), The New School, 2009 BA, Political Science & English, Rutgers University, 2004 Jacob Suskewicz received his MFA (fiction) from The New School, and teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and literature at Montclair State University. He is the author of the chapbook, Set a Fire Burning, and the forthcoming novel of the same name. His areas of practice include: creative writing, literature (contemporary world literature), narrative theory and design, and composition, with a focus on developing pedagogy using a traditional writing workshop approach, in combination with digital literacy and multimedia composition, to be able to reach all levels of writers where they are at. Selected Recent Publications Set A Fire Burning, Published by the New School Chapbook Series Winner of the New School Graduate Writing Program Chapbook Contest, selected by Benjamin Percy Guest Editor, Qualitative Social Work: Research and Practice Special Issue: "Ethnography--Practice and Theory in Social Work" The New Humanities Reader, "Teaching the New Humanities Reader", 4th Edition. *Course & Assignment Sequence Forthcoming Publications Set A Fire Burning: A Novel

Caridad Svich received a 2012 OBIE for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre and a 2018 Ellen Stewart Award for Career Achievement in Professional Theatre from ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education), and the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for The House of the Spirits, based on Isabel Allende's novel. She has written over 100 plays and translations, and her work has been staged across the US and abroad. She sustains parallel career as theatrical translator, where is she is known chiefly for her translations of the plays of Federico Garcia Lorca. She has also edited several books on theatre and performance published by Bloomsbury Drama, Theatre Communications Group, Intellect Books UK, Seagull Books UK, Manchester University Press, Smith & Kraus and more. She has taught Introduction to Creative Writing and Playwriting at Rutgers for nine years. She is currently at work on a seven-play cycle entitled American Psalm, a music-dance-theatre piece entitled Mi Cuba, a modern translation of Shakespeare's King Henry VIII, and her first film, Fugitive Dreams.  She is associate editor of Contemporary Theatre Review for Routledge UK, and contributing editor of TheatreForum, and drama editor of Asymptote literary translation journal.

Carolyn Williams specializes in Victorian literature and culture. She has recently published a study of the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, entitled Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody (Columbia University Press, 2011). The author of Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Cornell, 1989), she has also co-edited Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire (with Laurel Brake and Lesley Higgins, ELT Press 2002). She edited a special issue of VLC on Victorian Studies and Cultural Studies (1999) and an issue of the Pater Newsletter on Queer Pater Studies (2007). Her current research is on Victorian stage melodrama, conducted under the working title, “The Aesthetics of Melodramatic Form.” She is also currently editing The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama (forthcoming). Some recent publications include: “Stupidity and Stupefaction: Barnaby Rudge and the Mute Figure of Melodrama” in Dickens Studies Annual (2015), “Melodrama,” for the New Cambridge History of English Literature (Victorian volume), ed. Kate Flint (2012); Jane Eyre 2011 (on the film) in VLC (2012); “The Gutter Effect in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love,” in Graphic Subjects, ed. Michael Chaney (2011); “Eve Sedgwick, the Boston Years: Her Humor and Her Anger,” in Criticism (2010); “Walter Pater, Film Theorist,” in Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Pater Across the Arts, ed. Elicia Clements and Lesley Higgins (2010); “Parody and Poetic Tradition: Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience,” in Victorian Poetry (2008); “Moving Pictures: George Eliot and Melodrama,” in Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, ed. Lauren Berlant (2004); “Pater’s Impressionism and the Form of Historical Revival,” in Knowing the Past: Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Suzy Anger (2001); “Intimacy and Theatricality: Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy,” in VLC (2000); and “Parody, Pastiche and the Play of Genres,” in The Victorian Comic Spirit: New Perspectives, ed. Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor (2000). Until 2010, she was Director of Undergraduate Studies and Director of the Writers at Rutgers and the Writers from Rutgers reading series. She was the founding Director of Writers House since 2008 directed by Mark Doty. She has served as Chair of the Department since 2010. Outside of Rutgers, she has served on the Supervisory Board of The English Institute, the Executive Board of The Dickens Project, the Advisory Board of NAVSA (North American Victorian Studies Association) and the PMLA Advisory Committee as well as the editorial boards of Victorian Literature and Culture, English Literature in Transition, and Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film. She was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004-5, the Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1999, and the Scholar-Teacher Award in 2010.