Faculty
- Rebecca Reynolds
- Instructor
- Email:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Bio:
Rebecca Reynolds is the author of three books of poetry: Otherly (42 Miles Press, 2025), The Bovine Two-Step (New Issues Press, 2002), and Daughter of the Hangnail (New Issues Press, 1997). Her first collection received the 1998 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and her third collection, Otherly, received the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in several journals, including Boston Review of Books, Web Conjunctions, American Letters and Commentary, The Literary Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and others. She received a Hopwood Award for Poetry from the University of Michigan and a New Jersey State Council on the Arts grant.
- Classes Taught:
Introduction to Creative Writing (211 and 212)
- Daemond Arrindell
- Instructor
- Email:
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- Bio:
Daemond Arrindell is a poet, performer, playwright and teaching artist. He is a faculty member of Freehold Theatre - leading poetry and theater residencies at Monroe Correctional Complex for men for over ten years; Adjunct faculty at Seattle University; and a Senior Writer-In-Residence through Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools Program and Skagit River Poetry Foundation.
His work has appeared in City Arts, Specter, and Crosscut magazines, as well as Poetry NorthWest and Seattle Review of Books. Daemond is a Jack Straw Writer, a VONA/Voices Writer’s Workshop fellow and co-adapted the acclaimed novel “Welcome To Braggsville,” by T. Geronimo Johnson into a stage production for Book-It Repertory Theater. In 2019, he performed his first one-man show, “Frozen Borders,” a performative exploration in imagery, poetry and emotion on the subject of the United States’ southern border.
- Classes Taught:
Introduction to Creative Writing (211 and 212)
Playwriting (308)
- Brendon Votipka
- Associate Teaching Professor
- Email:
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BA, Theatre Directing, Muhlenberg College
MFA, Playwriting, Mason Gross School of the Arts- Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey - Classes Taught:
- 01:351:209 Introduction to Multimedia Composition
Documenting Your World
Curiosity and Expression (Honors)
Writing for Performance (Honors) - 01:351:212 Introduction to Creative Writing (Poetry, Playwriting, Creative Nonfiction)
- 01:351:304 Screenwriting for Television
- 01:355:100 Basic Composition
- 01:355:101 Expository Writing
- 01:355:201 Research in the Disciplines
Broadway and beyond: Contemporary Theatre Analysis
Love and Sex
Queer Drama: LGBTQ Performance on Stage and Screen
Theatre and Performance Studies
"That's So Gay!": Homophobia, Language, and Culture - 01:355:301 College Writing and Research
Cartoon Satire
Heroes and Villains
Psychology of Love - 01:355:395 Writing Theory and Tutoring
- 01:355:396 Advanced Tutoring Strategies
- 01:355:396 Tutoring Multilingual Writers
- Preparation for College Writing (SAS EOF, EOF School of Pharmacy, Rutgers Future Scholars)
- 01:351:209 Introduction to Multimedia Composition
- Publications:
- Common Ground, published by Playscripts, Inc.
Performance rights: Broadway Licensing - Face Forward: Growing Up in Nazi Germany, Published by Playscripts, Inc.
Commissioned by The Institute for Jewish Christian Understanding, Funding by The Charles and Figa Klein Foundation
Performance rights: Broadway Licensing
- Common Ground, published by Playscripts, Inc.
- Baba Badji
- Assistant Professor of French and English
- Email:
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- Office: AB-4180
- Bio:
Education
Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis
M.F.A., Columbia University
B.A, The College of Wooster, Ohio
Translation Studies Certificate
Chancellor’s Fellow and an Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society Fellow
Inaugural Postdoctoral Associate with The Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice (ISGRJ) and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University in New Brunswick (Cohort I-2021-2022)
Inaugural James Baldwin Artist and Scholar in Residence at The University of Virginia, in The Department of French (Cohort I-2022)Fields of Research:
Poetry, Interdisciplinary and Comparative Poetics, Négritude, Studies of Translation, Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Decoloniality, Black France, Literary criticism, Slavery Afterlives, Creative Writing, Translation Within
I am an Assistant Professor of French and Creative Writing at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, where I teach students in both the French and English departments. As a dedicated educator, I strive to inspire a love for literature and foster creativity in my students. In addition to my academic role, I am a proud Senegalese-American poet, translator, and comparatist. I draw from my rich cultural background to explore themes of identity and connection in my work, both critically and creatively. My passion for language and literature informs both my teaching and my writing, allowing me to bridge diverse perspectives and experiences. My multi-dimensional research explores French and Francophone cultures, critical translation studies, poetry and poetics studies, Négritude, and the African diaspora. In my critical and creative scholarship, I explore an interdisciplinary analysis of Négritude that recognizes the differences of people, cultures, and the systems of colonization within Africa and beyond. My first scholarly book in progress, Habits of Négritude: A Black Poetic Imagination in the African Diaspora, reexamines Négritude through interdisciplinary lenses. I conceptualize Négritude as a set of rehearsals, worldbuilding, and translation practices, asserting that these habits can manifest within Négritude’s diverse geographical and genealogical frameworks. A chapter and a Coda from Habits of Négritude will be published soon in peer-reviewed scholarly journals.
My second interdisciplinary and scholarly book project is a close study of Francis Ledwidge and Léopold Sédar Senghor. It illustrates how Ledwidge and Senghor pursued a poetic galaxy in the trenches that became a place of withdrawal. Exilic Trenches: Francis Ledwidge and Léopold Sédar Senghor contend that if Ledwidge, an Irishman, fought for England, and Senghor, a Senegalese, fought for France, their fractured identity, exile, and alienation occurred in the trenches. Senghor and Ledwidge’s war poems are at the forefront of my overall argument in the book to show poetic tactics that illuminate their defiance, their exilic sense, and patriotism in their lived experience of war. I conclude that their poems are nationalistic elegies that operate in a pastoral mood.
A full-length poetry manuscript entitled Ghost of Tirailleurs retraces memories of war and the violence of colonialism through Senegalese soldiers who fought for France during WWI and WWII, is in progress, and poems have been published here https://apela.hypotheses.org/11111
A novel titled Madame Diawara is in progress. Read a chapter of the book here https://www.journaloftheplagueyears.ink/blog/madame-diawara
Building on my previous interdisciplinary research, I integrated my research and creative writing into my third scholarly book, Arrivals to Orality: Landscape, Home & Grief. The book begins with trilingual poems from Ghosts of Tirailleurs, showcasing how poetic forms in English, Wolof, Diola, Manding, and French allow for a fusion of my Senegalese and American backgrounds within Négritude traditions. The first chapter analyzes Ousmane Sembène’s engagement with Négritude in his films “Guélowar”, “Faat Kiné”, and “Camp de Thiaroye”. The second chapter situates the works of Légitime Défense, Tropiques, and Présence Africaine within their historical contexts. The third chapter compares the engagement with Négritude poetics by Édouard Glissant, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite. The fourth chapter examines the vernacular politics of Galandou Diouf, Blaise Diagne, and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Chapter five addresses contemporary debates surrounding Négritude, focusing on Sylvia Wynter’s interrogation of race, culture, and history; Christina Sharpe’s exploration of Black life and history in the present; and Saidiya Hartman’s reflections on Black individuals and the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade. In the epilogue, I include a close reading of excerpts from my novel Madame Diawara, which reflects African and Senegalese rhythms and syntax across multiple languages, embodying a diasporic crossing both bodily and linguistically.
Interdisciplinary Publications and Public Outreach:
Ancient Algorithms, 2025, a collaborative poetry book by Katrine Øgaard Jensen with contributors Sawako Nakayasu, Aditi Machado, CAConrad, Paul Cunningham, and Ursula Andkjær Olsen, Sarabande Books, 2025 https://www.sarabandebooks.org/all-titles/p/ancient-algorithms
Jazz en Waxtaan: Archiving Black Sound and Memory (2025) Medina Marmiyal, Saint Louis, Senegal, https://www.instagram.com/p/DKR8aDuogoZ/
https://www.action-spectacle.com/summer-2024-part-i/badji
National Endowment for the Arts
Literary Arts: FY 2024 Grants Panelist reader (Translation)
https://poetrysociety.org/events/a-tribute-to-richard-howard
https://www.theafricanistpodcast.com/e/decolonizing-the-mind-in-conversation-with-ngugi-wa-thiong-o/
https://pen.org/meet-the-2023-literary-awards-judges/
https://gaecafrica.org/afrik-bu-nuy-xaar/
Scholarly publication: “Jesus Died to Guide the Prophet in the Moon’s Blue Chunk: After Mahershala Ali Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Michigan State University Press, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2022 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/862877 Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Michigan State University Press, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2022 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/862877
Book(s):
https://www.europenowjournal.org/2018/02/28/four-poems-by-leopold-sedar-senghor/
https://www.europenowjournal.org/2018/02/28/five-poems-by-mohammed-kair-eddine/
Teaching Statement:
I strive for teaching excellence, which involves learning from both my students and my colleagues while also developing my interdisciplinary research, writing, and teaching. My teaching and learning goals have evolved significantly due to the influence of my students and colleagues. Drawing on Rutgers University’s commitment to excellence in teaching, innovative research, and mentoring, I place my research, teaching, and learning alongside my students’ intellectual curiosity, believing that these elements are symbiotic and essential for my scholarship both at home and abroad. In my teaching, I employ a methodological approach that utilizes a comparative framework, both in the classroom and beyond. This comparative framework helps me create meaningful relationships with my students, focusing on wisdom, kindness, and the joy of learning. What inspires me in my courses is the comparative approach, which captures my students’ interest and attention. This fosters a learning environment of trust and creates a stimulating, profound learning community. My students are integral to my research and teaching, helping me strive to be a better and more generous scholar. I adopt an instructional attitude that emphasizes group work, encouraging students to engage in dialogue with one another. I view the classroom as a collaborative space and workroom— where students interact intellectually with the material and with each other in various ways—linguistically, thematically, intimately, and physically. On an interpersonal level, I deeply enjoy interacting with my students, driven by their curiosity. I embody the values that are essential for any good relationship: trust, communication, compassion, and care. Over the years, I have found that what motivates me most as a teacher is understanding the relevance of cultures through comparative thinking. Supporting my students’ intellectual curiosity, struggles, and growth has been the most rewarding aspect of my academic journey. I emphasize the importance of humility, determination, tolerance, and a passion for learning—habits that help students become independent—free thinkers. As a writer, translator, and teacher, I believe strongly in nurturing my students’ creative and critical growth. I want them to find meaning and voice in their writing projects, critically and creatively. Voicing one’s meaning is another form of communication that must be emptied of the inner self. The author must give themself away on the otherwise empty page. That voice and meaning eventually emerge with a community in practice and patience.
Student Supervision & Advising:
I welcome the opportunity to provide guidance and support to students whose research interests align with my own. My goal is to ensure that they have the resources and encouragement they need to excel in their studies and achieve their research objectives. I am committed to cultivating an inclusive academic environment that positively and productively supports students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds who may face challenges in their academic journeys. I encourage prospective students to reach out to me with their ideas and aspirations, especially in the following areas: Francophone cultures, comparative literature and poetry, Négritude, French theory, studies of translation, poetics, postcolonial literature and theory, decoloniality, Black France, literary criticism, Africa, and creative writing.
Services, Mentoring, and intellectual projects at Rutgers:
Founder and co-organizer of the Fanon Research Collective https://cca.rutgers.edu/working-groups/working-groups-details/84-working-groups/870-frc
I am the co-founder and Project leader of The Dakar Translation Symposium (DTS) that is a 5-days international, interdisciplinary, multilingual scholarly meeting centered on the African diaspora-(https://globalracialjustice.rutgers.edu/event/dakar-translation-symposium-africa-and-her-diasporas). The second edition of the Dakar Translation Symposium was scheduled on Jun 3-9, 2024, and it was held in Ghana https://globalracialjustice.rutgers.edu/Global_Initiatives.
The third edition of The Dakar Translation Symposium is scheduled to take place in Tanzania, at The University of Dar es Salaam, (15-19, 2026).
I am also the co-founder of the Center for Translation Studies, Literature and Cultures at Assane Seck University in Ziguinchor, Casamance, Senegal https://mail.seneplus.com/education/vers-la-creation-dun-centre-de-traduction-de-litterature-et
Awards and Honors:
Washington University in St. Louis
Translation Studies Certificate
Chancellor’s Fellow and an Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society FellowRutgers University in New Brunswick
Inaugural Postdoctoral Associate with The Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice (ISGRJ) and Comparative Literature (Cohort I)Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of French and the Department of English (Cohort II)
The University of Virginia
Inaugural James Baldwin Artist and Scholar in Residence in The Department of French (Cohort I-2022) - Classes Taught:
Graduate Courses:
Translation as Critique
Undergraduate Courses:
Global Black Poetry
Literature Across Borders
French and Francophone Texts & Images
Forms and Techniques in Poetry
Modern Literature in French Honors
Modern Literature in French
Introduction to Creative Writing
- Jamison Standridge
- Email:
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Jamison Standridge is an educator, writer, translator, and editor. He holds a Ph.D. in Italian Literature, with a focus on gender and postcolonial studies and an emphasis on trauma theory, and has been teaching at Rutgers University since 2011. Originally from Italy, Dr. Standridge has lived and worked on three continents and teaches writing, language, literature, cinema, and culture courses in both English and Italian.
- Classes Taught: Writers House Courses: Introduction to Multimedia Composition (209) and Documentary Filmmaking for Writers (314)
- Joyce Carol Oates
- Instructor
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde (a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize), and the New York Times bestseller The Falls (winner of the 2005 Prix Femina Etranger) The Gravedigger's Daughter, and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. She is the recipient of many distinguished awards including the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award, and The Norman Mailer Prize for Lifetime Achievement. In 2013, she received the Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection for Black Dahlia and White Swan.
- Alfredo Franco
- Instructor
- Email:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - ALFREDO_FRANCO_cv_for_Rutgers_Faculty_Page.pdf
- Bio:
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
- Associate Teaching Professor
- Email:
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- Bio:
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 children and her dog, Luna.
- Evie Shockley
- Director of Creative Writing & Writers House/Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English
- Email:
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- Evie Shockley Current CV File
- Office: Murray Hall | Room 202 | CAC
- Phone: (848) 932-7909
- Bio:
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."
- Amy Lawless
- Instructor
- Email:
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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)
- Paul Bielecki
- Associate Teaching Professor
- Email:
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Professor Bielecki is an Associate 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.
- Jennifer Bryan
- Assistant Teaching Professor
- Email:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - CV_Bryan.pdf
- Bio:
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.Publications:
Short Stories in Anthologies
Short Stories
- Classes Taught:
- Leslieann Hobayan
- Instructor
- Email:
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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
- Instructor
- Email:
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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
- Instructor
- Email:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Office: 36A | Fridays, 12pm-2pm
- Bio:
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.
- Classes Taught: Introduction to Creative Writing, Fiction Writing, Screenwriting for Film, Introduction to Multimedia Composition
- Adam Dalva
- Assistant Teaching Professor
- Email:
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- Bio:
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.
- Alex Dawson
- Assistant Teaching Professor
- Email:
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- Mark Doty
- Email:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Office: Murray Hall | Room 040A
- Phone: (848) 932-7064
- Bio:
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.
- The Friend
- Assistant Teaching Professor
- Email:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Bio:
The Friend is the author of two books of poetry, both published by W. W. Norton’s historic Liveright imprint. Their debut collection, The Late Parade, was published in 2013 and was hailed by The New York Times Sunday Book Review as “a new and welcome sound in the aviary of contemporary poetry.” In 2016, their second book of poems, George Washington, was published and reviewed in The New York Times, Bookforum, Interview Magazine, Boston Review and elsewhere. The Friend is currently at work on a nonfiction manuscript about the origins of white supremacy and its relationship to anti-black violence. The Friend a professor in creative writing at Rutgers University and lives in New York City. Selected publications: "George Washington," BOMB "Our Lady of South Dakota," New Republic "The Lordly Hudson," The New Yorker "Oregon Trail," Hyperallergic "George Washington," Poetry "Poem With Accidental Memory," Poetry "Time After Time," Poetry
- Joanna Fuhrman
- Assistant Teaching Professor
- Email:
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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.
- Classes Taught: Advanced Poetry Writing, Poetry Writing, Introduction to Creative Writing, Introduction to Multimedia (Walking and Mapping), and Introduction to Multimedia: (Make it New: Rewriting and Remixing)
- Emily Wallis Hughes
- Instructor
- Email:
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- April-2026-CV.pdf
- Office: Murray Hall 036C | Tuesday / Thursday, 1:30-3:30
- Emily Wallis Hughes grew up in Agua Caliente, California, a small town in the Sonoma Valley. She is the author of Sugar Factory, published in 2019, and my friend Now, forthcoming in spring 2027 from Spuyten Duyvil. Ilya Kaminsky noted that Sugar Factory was "absolutely gorgeous lyric fire; one of the subtlest expressions of music I have read this year." Spanish translations of her poems have been published in Buenos Aires Poetry and Perfil, a widely circulated newspaper in Argentina. Poems from her second book, my friend Now, have been published in Always Crashing, The American Poetry Review, Conduit, Cordella Magazine, Edible Jersey, Luna Luna Magazine, and Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry. Since 2010, Emily has been in remission from Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy/Complex Regional Pain Syndrome. She is a Lecturer in the undergraduate Creative Writing Program in the English Department at Rutgers–New Brunswick. At Fence Magazine, Inc., Hughes is Editorial Director and Fence Books Editor, collaboratively leading the small noncommercial independent not-for-profit publisher of Fence Books as well as the literary arts magazine, Fence, which was awarded the Whiting Foundation Literary Magazine Prize in 2018. A 2026 New York State Council on the Arts grant recipient, Emily lives in Astoria, Queens, New York City, just a twenty-minute walk from where her mother lived as a child in Jackson Heights.
- John Hulme
- Instructor
- Email:
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- Bio:
John Hulme is a writer/filmmaker from Highland Park, NJ. He co-authored The Seems, a trilogy of fantasy novels from Bloomsbury Children’s Books, as well as the original radio drama, Vanishing Point (NPR, XM Radio). Hulme was also the director of Unknown Soldier: Searching for A Father, a feature-length documentary for HBO, and producer of the Highland Park African-American History Project, an oral history of his hometown’s black community. His first feature length horror screenplay, Bagman (Lionsgate), was released in theaters in 2024, and his true-crime horror podcast, No Man’s Land, is currently available on all platforms. Hulme is currently working on a film about Tryee Wallace, a wrongfully incarcerated man from Philadelphia who was freed from prison after twenty-six years thanks to the efforts of Rutgers student filmmakers.
- Aimee LaBrie
- Instructor
- Email:
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- Bio:
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.
- Susan Miller
- Associate Teaching Professor, Russell Teaching Fellow
- Email:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Bio:
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.
- Richard Murray
- Instructor
- Email:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Office: 035 Murray Hall | 4:50-5:40 p.m.
- Yehoshua November
- Associate Teaching Professor
- Email:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Y._November_CV.pdf
- Bio:
Yehoshua November is an Associate Teaching Professor of Creative Writing and serves as the Director of the Creative Honors Thesis Program at Writers House. He is the author of three poetry collections: God’s Optimism (winner of the MSR Book Award and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), Two Worlds Exist (a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize), and The Concealment of Endless Light (Orison Books, 2024). His work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The Best American Poetry anthology (2025), The Chicago Tribune, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Sun, Tikkun, Virginia Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, and on National Public Radio and Poetry Unbound.
- Evan Rehill
- Instructor
- Email:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Bio:
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
- Jacob Suskewicz
- Instructor
- Email:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Bio:
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
- Classes Taught:
Courses taught (current): 01:351:211/212: Creative Writing 01:351:307: Form & Technique in Fiction Courses taught (past): Undergraduate: 01:355:101: Expository Writing 101 01:355:201: Research in the Disciplines 01:355:301: College Writing & Research Graduate: 19:910:666: Foundation to Advanced Practice 19:910:682: Clinical Practice 19:910:695: Engaged Scholarship
- Caridad Svich
- Instructor
- Email:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Svichlongbio2018updated.pdf
- Bio:
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.