小福利导航

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 2025 readings will be free and open to the public and a schedule will be available here in the spring. Click here for a PRINT version of the 2024 schedule.  

2025 Writers-in-Residence:

HannahLillith Assadi, a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, is the author of Sonora, which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and The Stars Are Not Yet Bells, a New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022. Called a writer who is 鈥渨ise and poetic鈥� by Publishers Weekly, Assadi鈥檚 third novel, Paradiso 17, inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2026.  She teaches at the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute. 

 

April Bernard's sixth book of poems, The World Behind the World, has just been published by W.W. Norton; previous collections are Brawl & Jag, Romanticism, Swan 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 小福利导航 College as well as a faculty member of the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars.

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鈥檛 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鈥橢rasmo wrote of her in The NY Times Book Review that 鈥淎mbiguity鈥攖he inseparability of light and darkness, love and pain, nurture and destruction, progress and regress鈥攊s her m茅tier. The question she seems to ask again and again, and with astonishing force鈥�is how to feel, how we do feel.鈥� She has taught at the summer writers institute for seventeen years.

 

is 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 Root, The New York Daily News, The 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 Language, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, Doing 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.

is Professor of Politics and Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research in New York City. His latest book is The Passion of Pedro Almod贸var (2024). Other books include Can Democracy Work? From Ancient Athens to Our World (2018); Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche (2011); Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock鈥檔鈥橰oll (1999); The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993); and 鈥淒emocracy is in the Streets鈥� (1987).  The former executive editor of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, he was also for ten years a general editor at Newsweek magazine, where he covered books and music.     

 's newest book, Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury, was published on by W.W. Norton on March 10. Moore鈥檚 previous memoir, The Bishop鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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.

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鈥檚 Daughter. The Falls won the 2005 Prix Femina as the best novel in France. John Updike wrote of her in The New Yorker: 鈥淚f the phrase 鈥榳oman of letters鈥� existed, Joyce Carol Oates would be, foremost in this country, entitled to it.鈥� 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鈥檚 Tale.

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鈥檚 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.

 

 

 

 

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 鈥渁 peerlessly accomplished performance鈥�timelessly funny,鈥� and in Mademoiselle as a 鈥渇unny yet devastating novel that will rock literary and academic worlds alike.鈥� Prose is a contributing editor of Harper鈥檚 and writes for The New Yorker, Gentleman鈥檚 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 Shepard has written eight novels, and six story collections. Of his most recent novel, Phase Six, The New York Times Book Review writes that 鈥淪hepard has managed to make art out of our crisis with a thought-provoking work of fiction that sustains our emotions.鈥� As 鈥渙ne of this country鈥檚 greatest fiction writers鈥� (NPR), Shepard鈥檚 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鈥檇 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 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. 鈥淎n ebullient maestro of words and mayhem, wonder and conscience鈥� (Booklist), he has won two Pushcart Prizes, an O鈥橦enry Award, a Pushcart Writers' Choice Award and a National Jewish Book Award. For thirty years, Stern taught at 小福利导航 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鈥檚 Kabbalah (2025). Photo by Sabrina Jones.

 

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鈥檚 writing often reflects her spiritual practice. 鈥淶en,鈥� she says, 鈥渋s said to be a 鈥榤ind-to-mind transmission.鈥� The best poems are exactly that: they leap from one mind to another without stopping to explain exactly how they did it.鈥�

 

 

'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.鈥� Also the winner of the 2020 Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction, Walker is the author of two previous books of nonfiction. 

 

More Writers-in-Residence to be announced soon!

Faculty bios can be found here: