The Writer At Large (previously called the BFA Writer-in-Residence) is a distinguished writer who visits classes, meets with students, and participates in the life of the department each year. Past distinguished guests have included Renee Gladman, TC Tolbert, Michelle Tea, Layli Long Soldier, Kurt Anderson, Jenny Offil, Hilton Als, Francine Prose, Mary Gaitskill, Simone White, and Jen Hofer.
Writer at Large (2026-2027): Lynne Tillman
Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. Her novels are Weird Fucks; Haunted Houses; Motion Sickness; Cast in Doubt; No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction; American Genius, A Comedy, and Men and Apparitions, nominated for a Republic of Consciousness Prize (UK, 2021). Her nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965-67, photographs by Stephen Shore; What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism; The Broad Picture, and Mothercare, an autobiographical book-length essay on caregiving. Her essays and stories are published in Frieze, Bomb, Bookforum, Aperture, Artforum, N+1; Worms; Tank; in artist’s monographs such as those of Dana Schutz, Steve Locke, Stanley Whitney, Amy Sillman, and Raymond Pettibon, and in museum catalogues such as those from The Whitney Museum of American Art; The ICP Boston, The New Museum, Hammer Museum, and MOCA. Tillman’s most recent books are Thrilled to Death, selected stories; The Mystery of Perception, a book-length conversation with Taylor Lewandowski, and Paying Attention, collected art and culture essays.
Tillman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Contributions to Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a Professor in the English Department at The University at Albany. She lives in New York with bass player David Hofstra.
Writer at Large (2025-2026): Ross Gay
Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition to his poetry, Ross has released three collections of essays—The Book of Delights was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller; Inciting Joy was released in 2022, and his newest collection, The Book of (More) Delights was released in September of 2023.
Writer at Large (2024-2025): Eugene Lim
Eugene Lim is the author of the novels Fog & Car, The Strangers, Dear Cyborgs, and Search History. His writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The Believer, The Baffler, Granta, Dazed, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. He is the librarian at Hunter College High School, runs Ellipsis Press, and lives in Queens, NY, with Joanna and Felix.
Writer at Large (2023-2024): Jonas Hassen Khemiri
Jonas Hassen Khemiri is the author of five novels, seven plays, and a collection of his plays, essays and short stories. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages and his plays have been performed by more than a hundred international companies. He received the Village Voice Obie Award for his first play “Invasion!” and in 2015 he was awarded the August Prize, Sweden’s highest literary honor for the novel Everything I Don’t Remember. In 2017 he became the first Swedish writer to have a short story published in The New Yorker and in 2020 his latest novel The Family Clause (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) was a finalist for the National Book Award in the United States and won the Prix Médicis Étranger, France’s highest honor for translated books. Khemiri was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and moved to New York for a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. He is currently teaching in the creative writing program at NYU.