Full-Time Faculty
Aracelis Girmay
Aracelis Girmay is the author of three books of poems: the black maria (BOA, 2016); Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007), winner of a GLCA New Writers Award; and Kingdom Animalia (BOA, 2011), the winner of the Isabella Gardner Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She is also the author/illustrator of the collage-based picture book changing, changing. For her work, Girmay was nominated for a Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2018. For the last several years, Girmay was on the faculty of Hampshire College’s School for Interdisciplinary Arts and before that taught community writing workshops with young people in New York and California. She has received grants, training, and fellowships in support of her work from the NEA, the Whiting Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the Community~Word Project, among other programs. She is the editor of How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton and is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund.
Laura Elrick
Laura Elrick is the author of What This Breathing (The Elephants 2020). Previous books include Propagation (Kenning Editions 2012), Fantasies in Permeable Structures (Factory School 2005), and Skincerity (Krupskaya 2003). Her transmedia performances Stalk (2008) and Blocks Away (2010) explore the psychogeographical terrain of post-9/11 New York and have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work has appeared in Bomb, Mandorla, The Brooklyn Rail, XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics, LINE, and Aufgabe, among other journals, and in the anthologies Viz. Interarts: Interventions, and The Eco Language Reader. She lives in Brooklyn..
James Hannaham
James Hannaham is a writer and visual artist. His novel Delicious Foods (Little, Brown 2015) won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book of 2015. His criticism, essays, and profiles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Spin, Out, Buzzfeed, 4Columns, and Travel+Leisure. He received a 2015 Pushcart Prize for a piece that appeared in Gigantic. He co-founded the performance group Elevator Repair Service and worked with them from 1992–2002. He has exhibited text-based visual art at Open Source Gallery, 490 Atlantic, Kimberley-Klark, and The Center for Emerging Visual Artists, and won Best in Show at Main Street Arts’ Biblio Spectaculum. Pilot Impostor, a multigenre book inspired by the work of Fernando Pessoa, will be released in 2021, followed by Re-Entry, or What Happened to Carlotta, a novel, in 2022. Still curious?
Christian Hawkey
Christian Hawkey has written two full-length poetry collections: The Book of Funnels, which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Citizen Of, both from Wave Books. He’s published several chapbooks, as well as the widely reviewed cross-genre book Ventrakl (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). A collaborative bi-lingual erasure made with the German poet Uljana Wolf, Sonne from Ort, appeared in 2013 (kookbooks verlag, Berlin). A selection of Ilse Aichinger’s short prose, Bad Words, also translated with Uljana Wolf, appeared in 2019 (Seagull Books). He’s received the Creative Capital Innovative Literature Award, a NEA grant, and a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellowship, and his own work has been translated into over a dozen languages. A member of the WeTransist translation collective (www.wetransist.org), he is currently co-translating a selection of essays by the Moroccan philosopher Abdessalam Benabdelali, and his newest book of poems is forthcoming from Action Books in 2021. More info here.
Samantha Hunt
Samantha Hunt is the author of The Dark Dark: Stories, and three novels. Mr. Splitfoot is a ghost story. The Invention of Everything Else is about the life of inventor Nikola Tesla. The Seas, Hunt’s first novel, was republished by Tin House Books in 2018. Hunt is the recipient of a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Prize, the St. Francis College Literary Prize and she was a finalist for the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner. Hunt writes for the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, the Guardian and a number of other fine publications. A book of Hunt’s non-fiction will be published in January 2022.
Rachel Levitsky
Rachel Levitsky is the author of the book length serial poems Under the Sun (Futurepoem 2003) and NEIGHBOR (UDP 2009), as well as five poetry chapbooks. Her prose publications include Renoemos (Delete Press 2010), and a novel, The Story of My Accident is Ours (Futurepoem 2011); she is co-curator of Belladonna Series. Four mini-essays on The Poetics of Confinement can be found online at the Poetry Project Blog.
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is the author of Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America. The first volume of a planned trilogy on African-Americans and utopia (Harlem, Haiti, and the Black Belt of the American south), it was a New York Times Notable Book of 2011, a National Book Critics Circle Finalist, and cited by BOOKFORUM as the “Best New York Book” written in the twenty years since the magazine’s founding. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Chimurenga, Bidoun, A Public Space, Creative Time Reports, Harper’s, Essence, and Vogue, among many others. She has received grants and awards from Creative Capital, the Whiting Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. Her 2015 book for young readers Jake Makes a World: Jacob Lawrence a Young Artist in Harlem (commissioned by MoMA and illustrated by Christopher Myers) was named by Booklist among the year’s top books about art for children. Rhodes-Pitts organizes projects through The Freedwomen’s Bureau, gathering collaborators across the fields of visual art, music, theater, film, and education to produce events at venues like Harlem Stage, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The New Museum, PS 1 / MoMA, and public spaces in Harlem. Photograph by Marcus Werner.
Ellery Washington
Ellery Washington holds a DEA in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne University, in Paris, France. He is the author of Buffalo, a novel forthcoming with Creston Books, a recipient of a PEN Center West Rosenthal Award, and Fellowship and an IBWA Prize for short fiction.
Part-Time Faculty
Laura Henriksen
Laura Henriksen’s first book, Laura’s Desires, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books, and an excerpt is available now as a chaplet from Belladonna*. Her writing can be found in LitHub, The Brooklyn Rail, Newest York, and other places. Along with teaching at Pratt, she also works as the Program Director at The Poetry Project.
Christopher Rey Pérez
Christopher Rey Pérez is a poet from the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. His book, gauguin’s notebook, received the 2015 Madeleine P. Plonsker Prize from Lake Forest College. His most recent publications include Compendio palestino-puertorriqueño en proceso, while in residence as a 2017-18 La Práctica fellow with Beta-Local; Aliens Beyond Paradise/ Alienígenas más allá del paraíso, a book on the alien as foreigner and extraterrestrial that was jointly published by Wendy’s Subway & Queens Museum; and Todo el amor del mundo con todas sus sangres y todos sus virus, an online essay in response to the coronavirus pandemic. His writings have appeared in Mexico, Brazil, Cyprus, Lebanon, Canada, the U.S., and China, and he has led poetry workshops with Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program, The Garden Library for Refugees & Migrant Workers in South Tel Aviv, Beta-Local’s La Iván Illich, Queens Museum, Wendy’s Subway, & Loudreaders Trade School. Since 2012, he has edited a nomadic publication in, of, and around Latin America, called Dolce Stil Criollo.
Macgregor Card
MacGregor Card is a poet, translator and bibliographer living in Jackson Heights, NYC. His first collection, Duties of an English Foreign Secretary, is just out from Fence (December 2009). A new chapbook, The Archers, is forthcoming from Song Cave. With Andrew Maxwell he was co-editor of The Germ: A Journal of Poetic Research, from 1997-2005. He is an associate editor of the MLA International Bibliography.
Peter Catalanotto
Peter Catalanotto has published forty-nine books for children, eighteen of which he has written, including Ivan the Terrier, Matthew A.B.C., Question Boy Meets Little Miss Know-it-All, Monkey & Robot, and Emily’s Art. His book, The Painter, was featured on PBS’s Storytime. In 2008, First Lady Laura Bush commissioned him to illustrate the White House holiday brochure. Peter was recognized by Drexel University for his outstanding contribution to children’s literature and he currently teaches Columbia University’s first children’s book writing course. Peter is currently working on the fourth book in his Monkey & Robot series.
Gabriel Cohen
Gabriel Cohen’s debut novel Red Hook was nominated for the Edgar award for Best First Novel, and he is also the author of the novels The Ninth Step, The Graving Dock, Boombox, and Neptune Avenue, and the nonfiction book Storms Can’t Hurt the Sky. He has written journalism and essays for The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Time Out New York, Gourmet.com, Shambhala Sun, and other publications.
Claire Donato
Claire Donato is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of two books: Burial (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2013), a novella, and The Second Body (Poor Claudia, 2016), a collection of poems. She also wrote the introduction to The One on Earth: Selected Works of Mark Baumer (Fence Books, 2021). Recent writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Chicago Review, Forever, GoldFlakePaint, The Brooklyn Rail, DIAGRAM, The Believer, BOMB, and Harp & Altar. Beyond the page, her art practice includes illustration, 35mm photography, and songwriting. She teaches psychoanalytically-inflected courses and advises theses in the MFA/BFA Writing Program at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she received the 2020 Distinguished Teacher Award.
David Gordon
David Gordon was born in New York City. He attended Sarah Lawrence College, holds an MA in English and Comparative Literature and an MFA in Writing, both from Columbia University, and has worked in film, fashion, and publishing. His first novel, The Serialist, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2010 and was named a finalist for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.
Max Ludington
Max Ludington’s novel Tiger in a Trance was a New York Times Notable Book, and his fiction has appeared in Tin House, Meridian, HOW Journal, Nerve, and others. He received an MFA from Columbia University.
Poupeh Missaghi
Poupeh Missaghi is a writer, a translator both into and out of Persian, an editor, and an educator. She holds a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Denver, an MA in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University, and an MA in translation studies. Her debut novel trans(re)lating house one was published by Coffee House Press in February 2020. Her nonfiction, fiction, and translations have appeared in numerous journals, and she has several books of translation published in Iran. I’ll Be Strong for You, her translation of Iranian author Nasim Marashi’s novel is forthcoming in spring 2021. As an editor, she worked for many years with Asymptote and is co-editor of Matters of Feminist Practice from Belladonna* Collaborative. She is currently a visiting assistant professor at the Department of Writing at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, at the BFA and MFA levels, as well as a writing consultant at Baruch College, CUNY, NY.
Eric Rosenblum
Eric Rosenblum’s fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Guernica Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Reader, Playboy.com, and Dossier Journal. Eric holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Syracuse University and a BA in English from Ohio University.
Adrian Shirk
Adrian Shirk is the author of And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy (Counterpoint) a hybrid-memoir exploring the lives of American women prophets and mystics, as well as the forthcoming Heaven is a Place on Earth (Counterpoint, 2021). She works in a wide variety of creative nonfiction forms. Her essays appear frequently in Catapult, and have otherwise been published in The Atlantic, among others. She splits her time between the Catskills and an adjunct flophouse in Brooklyn.
Sofi Thanhauser
Sofi Thanhauser is the author of Threads: A People’s History of Clothing (Pantheon: January 2022). She has received fellowships and residencies at MacDowell, Ucross Foundation, and the Millay Colony for the Arts, and has contributed writing to The Establishment, Essay Daily, Wag’s Revue, The Spectator, whitehot magazine of contemporary art, The Conversant, Entropy, Dilettante Army, and Edible Vineyard, among other publications. She received her MFA in Nonfiction Writing and Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming, and her B.A. in American History from Columbia University.
Gina Zucker
Gina Zucker grew up in Vermont, went to college in St. Louis, and has her MFA from The New School. Her fiction, journalism and essays have appeared in anthologies, journals and magazines such as Fantastic Women, Tin House, Tin House Online, Salt Hill, Elle, Self, and many other publications. She loves working with students, collaborating on cross-disciplinary projects, and is writing a novel.
Fulla Abdul-Jabbar
Fulla Abdul-Jabbar is a writer, artist, and editor. She is Managing Editor at The Green Lantern Press, a nonprofit publisher specializing in art and poetry to produce exhibitions and experimental publications. Her work has been supported by the Vermont Studio Center and Zaratan Arte Contemporânea. She has performed or exhibited at SPACES, Defibrillator, Woman Made Gallery, ACRE, BBQLA, St. John University in York, the University of East London, the Electronic Literature Organization, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Bad at Sports, DIAGRAM, Emergency Index, Bombay Gin, and Prairie Schooner. She received her B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Michigan and M.A. in Visual & Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.