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New York State Summer Writers Institute

Writers-in-Residence and Public Readings 

The New York State Summer Writers Institute will offer evening readings by an extraordinary line-up of distinguished writers this June and July. The 2026 readings will be free and open to the public, and the schedule will be available here in the spring. Click here for a PRINT version of the 2025 schedule.  

Writers-in-Residence:

April BernardApril Bernard's sixth book of poems, The World Behind the World, has just been published by W.W. Norton; previous collections are Brawl & Jag, RomanticismSwan Electric, Psalms, and Blackbird Bye Bye, which won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her novels are Pirate Jenny and Miss Fuller; she has also published short fiction in Little Star, Electric Literature, and The Southampton Review.  A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and other journals, she is Professor of English and Creative Writing at 鶹ƽ College as well as a faculty member of the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars.

Henri Cole is the author of seven books of poems, including The Look of Things, The Marble Queen, The Visible Man and Middle Earth. (“HenriCole has become a master poet, with few peers,” writes Harold Bloom.“
Middle Earth is [his] epiphany, his Whitmanesque sunrise… [These] are the poems of our climate.”) Of his earlier books, Wayne Koestenbaum wrote in The New Yorker: “a poet not content to remain in the realm ofthe merely lapidary, the self-consciously coloratura…he produces lines of natural and nonchalant brio…in stanzas as shapely as topiary…; he can write about the soul stumbling against quotidian impediments…[approaching] a variety of subjects, from first love… to family history.” Cole has taught at the Summer Writers Institute since 2004. His most recent books are The Other Love, Gravityand Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022, and Blizzard. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College.

 

mary gaitskill Mary Gaitskill is the author of three novels (The Mare, Veronica and Two Girls, Fat and Thin) and three collections of short stories (Bad Behavior, Don’t Cry and Because They Wanted To), Mary Gaitskill is one of the most celebrated writers in the country. Her most recent books include a collection of essays (Somebody With A Little Hammer) and a controversial novella called This Is Pleasure which appeared in a summer 2019 issue of The New Yorker Magazine. Stacey D’Erasmo wrote of her in The NY Times Book Review that “Ambiguity—the inseparability of light and darkness, love and pain, nurture and destruction, progress and regress—is her métier. The question she seems to ask again and again, and with astonishing force…is how to feel, how we do feel.” She has taught at the summer writers institute for seventeen years.

 

Paul Harding is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Tinkers, and Enon. His third novel, This Other Eden was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize and the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction. He is director of the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook University.

 

 

 

 

 
Tom Healyis the author of three books of poetry, Velvet, Animal Spirits and What the Right Hand Knows, which was a finalist for the 2009 L.A. Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award. He has taught on the faculties of NYU, The Pratt Institute and The New School. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Carlie Hoffman is the author of three poetry collections: One More World Like This World, When There Was Light (winner of the National Jewish Book Award), and This Alaska (winner of the Northern California Gold Award as well as a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award), all from Four Way Books. She contributed translations of surrealist artist Anneliese Hager’s poetry to the monograph, White Shadows: Anneliese Hager and the Camera-less Photograph (Atelier Éditions, 2025) and is the translator of Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger’s Song of the Yellow Asters (World Poetry Books, 2026). Her translations of Rose Ausländer’s essential poems are forthcoming. Her honors include a 92NY “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize and a Poets & Writers Amy Award. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal
 
Binnie Kirshenbaum is the author of seven novels and one short story collection. Her books have been selected as Favorite Books of the Year by, The New York Times, Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The SanFrancisco Chronicle, Newsweek Magazine, Vogue and National Public Radio. Her novel Hester Among the Ruins, the story of the adulterous relationship between a Jewish-American biographer and a dashing German intellectual whose mother once had Nazi sympathies. Publisher's Weekly called the novel, "complete and convincing." Kirshenbaum's works include the novels Counting Backwards, Rabbits For Food, Pure Poetry, A Disturbance in One Place, and On Mermaid Avenue. She is a professor of Fiction in the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University. Her 2019 novel Rabbits For Food was an NPR ‘Favorite Book of the Year” and was described in The Boston Globe as a work of “absolute genius.” 
 
Megha Majumdar is the author of the novel A Guardian and a Thief, which the New York Times Book Review  described as "A true literary achievement  . . . . Majumdar creates a tense and deeply compassionate portrait of desperation, fear and the combined selflessness and selfishness of parenthood." Her first book, ABurning, was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, Vogue, and TIME Magazine. Writing of it in the New Yorker,  James Wood called A Burning,  "Masterly. . . . the elements of a thriller are transmuted into prismatic portraiture. . . . Her spare plot moves with arrowlike determination.” Born and raised in Kolkata, India, Megha now lives in New York. 
 

John McWhorteris a regular columnist for The New York Times whose most recent book is WOKE RACISM: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. He has taught linguistics, American Studies, and classes in the Core Curriculum program at Columbia University, since 2008 where he is currently an Associate Professor in the English and Comparative Literature department. He was Contributing Editor at The New Republic from 2001 to 2014. From 2006 to 2008 he was a columnist for the New York Sun and he has written columns regularly for The RootThe New York Daily NewsThe Daily Beast, CNN and Time Ideas. He has published a number of books on linguistics and on race relations, of which the better known are Power of Babel: A Natural History of LanguageOur Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of EnglishDoing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why You Should, Like, Care, and Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. He makes regular public radio and television appearances on related subjects.   

 's newest book, Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury, was published on by W.W. Norton on March 10. Moore’s previous memoir, The Bishop’s Daughter, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, and many other journals and anthologies. For the Library of America, she edited Amy Lowell: Selected Poems and Poems from the Women’s Movement, an Oprah Summer Reading List pick. She has been poet-in-residence at Wesleyan University and the University of Richmond, visiting professor at the Columbia School of the Arts, and three times the Visiting Distinguished Writer in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. When still in her twenties, Mourning Pictures, her play in verse about her mother’s death, was produced on Broadway. The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter, published in 1996 and recently reissued, was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives and writes in New York, where she is on the graduate writing faculty of The New School.

Joyce Carol Oates 2023 won the National Book Award for her novel them and has since written dozens of novels and short story collections that have made her one of the most celebrated writers of her generation. Among her best known works are Blonde, We Were The Mulvaneys, Zombie and The Gravedigger’s Daughter. The Falls won the 2005 Prix Femina as the best novel in France. John Updike wrote of her in The New Yorker: “If the phrase ‘woman of letters’ existed, Joyce Carol Oates would be, foremost in this country, entitled to it.” Apart from her many works of fiction, Oates has also written acclaimed books of poetry and a number of books of non-fiction and memoir, the best known of which are On Boxing and A Widow’s Tale.

Tracy O'Neill is the author of the memoir Woman of Interest, which was selected for Electric Literature's Best Nonfiction of 2024, Crime Read's Best True Crime Memoirs of 2024, and Esquire's Best Memoirs of 2024. She has published two previous novels, The Hopeful and Quotients. In 2015, she was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her writing has appeared in magazines and journals such as Granta, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Guernica, Bookforum, and The Guardian. She holds an MFA from the City College of New York; and an MA, an MPhil, and a PhD from Columbia University. She teaches at Vassar College. 

 

Caryl Phillips began writing for the theatre and his plays include Strange Fruit, Where There is Darkness, The Shelter, and The Wasted Years. He has written many dramas and documentaries for radio and television, including the three-hour film of his own novel The Final Passage. His other novels include A State of Independence, Higher Ground, Cambridge, Crossing the River, The Nature of Blood, A Distant Shore, Dancing in the Dark, Foreigners, In the Falling Snow, The Lost Child, and A View of the Empire at Sunset. His non-fiction: The European Tribe, The Atlantic Sound, A New World Order, and Colour Me English. He is the editor of two anthologies: Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging and The Right Set: An Anthology of Writing on Tennis. His literary awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and Britain's oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for Crossing the River which was also shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. A Distant Shore was longlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize, and won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize; Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN/Open Book Award. He is presently Professor of English at Yale University. 

Robert Pinsky was the Poet-Laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2002, and is the author of many books of poetry and prose. His books of poetry include The Figured Wheel, Jersey Rain, The Want Bone, Gulf Music and others. His translation of Dante’s Inferno was a national best-seller, and his latest book, a memoir, is called Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet. He teaches at Boston University.

 

 

 

 

Francine Prose is the author of many acclaimed works of fiction, including Guided Tours of Hell, Primitive People, and Bigfoot Dreams. Her novel, Blue Angel, was hailed in Publishers Weekly as “a peerlessly accomplished performance…timelessly funny,” and in Mademoiselle as a “funny yet devastating novel that will rock literary and academic worlds alike.” Prose is a contributing editor of Harper’s and writes for The New Yorker, Gentleman’s Quarterly, and Atlantic Monthly. Recent books include The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & The Artists They Inspired, Caravaggio, and A Changed Man. Other recent titles include the novels Goldengrove and Lovers at the Chameleon Club. Her recent non-fiction books include Reading Like A Writer, and Anne Frank. (Photo by Frances F. Denny.)

 

Jim ShepardJim Shepard has written eight novels, and six story collections. Of his most recent novel, Phase Six, The New York Times Book Review writes that “Shepard has managed to make art out of our crisis with a thought-provoking work of fiction that sustains our emotions.” As “one of this country’s greatest fiction writers” (NPR), Shepard’s short stories have been chosen for Best American Short Stories, the PEN/O, Henry Prize Stories, and for The Pushcart Prize, and his collection Like You’d Understand, Anyway was a finalist for the National Book Award and Story Prize winner.  He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles.

 

 

Steve SternSteve Stern's fiction, with its deep grounding in Yiddish folklore, has prompted critics such as Cynthia Ozick to hail him as the successor to Isaac Bashevis Singer. “An ebullient maestro of words and mayhem, wonder and conscience” (Booklist), he has won two Pushcart Prizes, an O’Henry Award, a Pushcart Writers' Choice Award and a National Jewish Book Award. For thirty years, Stern taught at 鶹ƽ College. He has also been a Fulbright lecturer at Bar Elan University in Tel Aviv, the Moss Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Memphis, and Lecturer in Jewish Studies for the Prague Summer Seminars. Stern splits his time between Brooklyn and Ballston Spa, New York. His most recent novel is A Fool’s Kabbalah (2025). Photo by Sabrina Jones.

 

Chase Twichell has published eight books of poetry, most recently Things As It Is and Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New and Selected Poems, which won both the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University and the Balcones Poetry Prize from Austin Community College. After teaching for many years, she left academia to start Ausable Press, an important publisher of contemporary poetry that was absorbed by Copper Canyon in 2009. A student in the Mountains and Rivers Order at Zen Mountain Monastery, Twichell’s writing often reflects her spiritual practice. “Zen,” she says, “is said to be a ‘mind-to-mind transmission.’ The best poems are exactly that: they leap from one mind to another without stopping to explain exactly how they did it.”

 

 

Jerald Walker's collection How to Make a Slave and Other Essays was a Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in Nonfiction, in which the judges noted how it "shows us something knotty, fraught, and unforgettable, not just about race and the commonplace, 'living while black,' but about living while human. Walker is furious and funny. He is talking to himself about his life and allows us to listen in.” Also the winner of the 2020 Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction, Walker is the author of two previous books of nonfiction. 

 

 

Faculty bios can be found here: