Core Full-Time Faculty
Youmna Chlala
Youmna Chlala is a writer and an artist. She is the author of the poetry collection, The Paper Camera (Litmus Press) and recipient of an O. Henry Award and a Joseph Henry Jackson Award. Her writing is published in magazines and anthologies including BOMB, Academy of American Poets, Prairie Schooner and the Black Warrior Review. Her artwork is exhibited internationally at museums and galleries including the Hayward Gallery, The Drawing Center, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter and the Concrete Gallery. She participated in the Croatian Pavilion of the 60th Venice Biennale, 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, 2017 LIAF Biennial in Norway, and 11th Performa Biennial. Chlala is the co-editor of the Spatial Species series at Coffee House Press and co-founder of the Mutating Cities Institute.
Laura Elrick
Laura Elrick is the author of several books of poetry, including What This Breathing (The Elephants 2020), Propagation (Kenning Editions 2012), Fantasies in Permeable Structures (Factory School 2005), and Skincerity (Krupskaya 2003). Their transmedia performances Stalk and Blocks Away explore the psychogeographical terrain of post-9/11 New York and have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver, the Judith E. Wilson Center in Cambridge, the Folkebiblioteket series in Oslo, Exit Art in New York, and the Spaces Gallery in Cincinnati. Essays, criticism, poems and stories have appeared in Bomb, Mandorla, The Brooklyn Rail, XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics, LINE, Interim, and Aufgabe, among other magazines, and are featured in the collections Viz. Interarts: Interventions, and The Eco Language Reader.
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.
Christian Hawkey
Christian Hawkey has written two full-length poetry collections (The Book of Funnels, Wave Books, 2005 and Citizen Of, Wave, 2007), four chapbooks, and the cross-genre book Ventrakl (2010, Ugly Duckling Presse). A new book, Sonne from Ort, a collaborative bi-lingual erasure made with the German poet Uljana Wolf, appeared in 2013 (kookbooks verlag, Berlin). In 2006 he received a Creative Capital Innovative Literature Award. In 2008 he was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellow. He translates contemporary German poetry, as well as the late short prose of the Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger, and his own work has been translated into over a dozen languages. He is an officer of the Office of Recuperative Strategies and a member of the WeTransist collective.
Samantha Hunt
Samantha Hunt is the author of five books and various screenplays. The Unwritten Book: An Investigation is a work of non-fiction that explores our relationships with the dead. The Dark Dark is a collection of stories including “The Yellow” which Hunt adapted into a short film that became an official selection at TIFF. Hunt’s three novels, Mr. Splitfoot, a ghost story; The Invention of Everything Else about Nikola Tesla, and The Seas have been recognized with a number of awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the St. Francis College Literary Prize, the Bard Fiction Prize, the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Prize, the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner.
Shayla Lawz
Shayla Lawz is a writer and interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of text, sound, and performance. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Jack Jones Literary Arts, The Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden, and The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) where she was the 2024 Dream Space Resident. She has served as the inaugural writer-in- residence at The Hurston/Wright Foundation and has been a visiting writer at The University of Arizona Poetry Center, Rutgers University, and Brown University where she received her MFA in fiction. Her writing and digital/sound work appear in McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Poetry Foundation, Catapult, and Obsidian, among other publications. Her debut poetry collection “speculation, n.” (2021) was chosen by Ilya Kaminsky for the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize and has been featured in Poets & Writers, The Slowdown, and NPR’s On The Record. She lives in Brooklyn where she is an Assistant Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute.
Rachel Levitsky
Rachel Levitsky has published three poetry volumes, Under the Sun (Futurepoem), NEIGHBOR (Ugly Duckling), the novel The Story of My Accident Is Ours (Futurepoem), as well as over fifteen chapbooks, most recently the bi-lingual English/French Against Travel: Anti Voyage, out from Pamenar Press, a publisher that operates transnationally from London, Toronto and Tehran. Pamenar will publish Against, a full length volume, in 2026. Levitsky has written and produced several poetry plays, including Perfect California performed at the Ontological Hysteric Theater in 2006 and Under Water performed for 24 Hour Plays in 2002, both in New York City. Reduced Tuesday, a play she wrote with Camille Roy, was produced at the Poets Theater Jubilee in San Francisco in 2002. She has also appeared as characters such as Andy Warhol, Emma Goldman and Pseudo Voice in plays by Maxe Crandal, Bernadette Mayer and Carla Harryman. Levitsky has a long history of social practice, embodied in their robust work editing and promoting radical voices and convening collective engagement. During the early months of the Covid-19 quarantine, these manifested as the Simultaneous Collective Variously Ambulatory walks. An essay on these walks was published online at The Hopkins Review, 2023, part of a special walks folio edited by Anna Maria Hong and Christine Hume. In 2022, she offered a MFA Writing elective course titled Help! that looked toward disability and activist art collectives and collaborations as models for learning to create practices for the specific bodies that collect in a room. Nowadays, Levitsky is writing a long poem essay called Fascism Is In The Family and writing a film script with Nathalie Rozanes about the contemporary recuperation of heteronormativity by feminists on television, called The Persistence of the Straight Woman. Levitsky has held residencies at MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Villa Montalvo, LMCC and the T.S. Elliot House. Levitsky is an active, founding member of Belladonna* Collaborative, is person to a small dog, and hosts free meditation sessions online with poets, activists and friends.
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, an IBWA Prize for short fiction, and the Baldwin-Emerson Oral Storytelling Fellowship 2022/2023. Selected publications include: The New York Times, Ploughshares, Open City, Nouvelles Frontières, The International Review, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Berkeley Fiction Review, and State by State—a Panoramic Portrait of America; notable feature film script consulting projects: From Paris with Love, Brotherhood of the Wolves, The Italian Job, Grillé, From Hell, Arthur and the Invisibles (animation), Sophie and the Dream Bandits (animation), and The Myth of Darkness.
Part-Time Faculty
Mirene Arsanios
Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection, The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, 2015). She has contributed essays and short stories to The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Animated Reader, and The Outpost, among others. Her writing was featured collaboratively at the Sharjah Biennial (2017) and Venice Biennial (2017), as well as in various artist books and projects. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. She has previously taught art history and literature at the American University of Beirut. She holds an MA in Art Theory from Goldsmiths College and an MFA in Writing from Bard College. Arsanios currently lives in New York where she was a 2016 LMCC Workspace resident.
Laura Henriksen
Laura Henriksen is the author of Duvall, Shelley (Newest York, 2025) and Laura’s Desires (Nightboat, 2024), as well as numerous chapbooks. Before coming to Pratt, she worked at the Poetry Project as the Program Director, where she hosted hundreds of readings, lectures, and workshops.
Claire Donato
Claire Donato is the author of three full-length books: Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts (Archway Editions), a collection of short stories; Burial (Tarpaulin Sky Press), a fiction novella; and The Second Body (Poor Claudia), a poetry collection. Her most recent chapbook is Woebegone and Other Poems (Theaphora Editions), for which she co-wrote an accompanying video game. Recent writing has appeared in Parapraxis, The Cleveland Review of Books, The Chicago Review, Forever, and BOMB, and she is currently writing a novel. In addition to her teaching and administrative work, Claire is an LP candidate in psychoanalysis at the Psychoanalytic Training Institute of the Contemporary Freudian Society.
Hannah Assadi
Hannah Lillith Assadi is the author of Sonora (Soho 2017), which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her second novel The Stars Are Not Yet Bells (Riverhead 2022) was named a New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022. Her third novel Paradiso 17, inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father, will be published by Knopf in March 2026. She teaches fiction at the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute. In 2018, she was named a ‘5 under 35’ honoree by the National Book Foundation.
Benjamin Krusling
Benjamin Krusling works in writing, sound and moving image. He is the author of two poetry collections—Glaring (Wendy’s Subway, 2020) and Fear of God Essentials (forthcoming 2027, Nightboat)—some chapbooks, and various multimedia assemblages, most recently ski mask over my skull (Triple Canopy, 2024), which explores the affective economy of balaclavas. Recent sound and video work has appeared at Storefront Gallery for Art and Architecture, Giorno Poetry Systems, and Sculpture Center; recent poetry and criticism have appeared in The Paris Review, The Journal of Palestine Studies, poets.org, and The Drift.
Silvina López Medin
Silvina López Medin was born in Buenos Aires and lives in New York. She has published five books of poetry including La noche de los bueyes (Loewe Foundation International Young Poetry Prize), 62 brazadas (City of Buenos Aires Poetry Prize), That Salt on the Tongue to Say Mangrove (tr. Jasmine V. Bailey, Carnegie Mellon University Press), and the chapbook Excursion (selected by Mary Jo Bang as the winner of the Oversound Prize). Her hybrid poetry book Poem That Never Ends was awarded the Essay Press-University of Washington Bothell Book Contest. Her play Exactamente bajo el sol (staged at Teatro del Pueblo in Buenos Aires) was granted the Argentine Institute of Theater National Playwriting Third Prize. She co-translated Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet and Robert Hass’s Home Movies into Spanish, and Sergio Chejfec’s The Month of the Flies into English. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Hyperallergic, Poetry Foundation, The Georgia Review, Brooklyn Rail, and MoMA/post, among others. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University, NYU, and Pratt Institute. She is an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse.
Anna Moschovakis
anna moschovakis works with poetry and prose as a writer, editor, translator, publisher, teacher, and designer. Her most recent book is An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, a novel (Soft Skull, 2024). Other books include Participation (2022), Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love (2018), They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This (2016), and You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake (2011), which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She is the translator of David Diop’s novel At Night All Blood Is Black (Frère d’âme), for which she and Diop received the International Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book award; other translations include Albert Cossery’s The Jokers, Annie Ernaux’s The Possession, Bresson on Bresson, and (with Christine Schwartz-Hartley) Marcelle Sauvageot’s Commentary. She is a longtime member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse and a co-founder of Bushel Collective, an experimental mixed-use storefront space in Delhi, NY. Recently, she launched Dirt Editions, an informally distributed pamphlet press. Her collaborative translation of Mihret Kebede’s #evolutionarypoems was published in November 2025 by Circumference Books. She has been teaching in Pratt’s BFA since 2007 and in the MFA since its inception.
Christopher Rey Pérez
Christopher Rey Pérez is a poet from the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. His first book, gauguin’s notebook, received the 2015 Madeleine P. Plonsker Prize from Lake Forest College. He is also the author of Fayuca, a book on markets and movement, with diSONARE Editorial in Mexico City, and the upcoming Authenticity Drill (Futurepoem, ’27). He edited Aliens Beyond Paradise/Alienígenas más allá del paraíso (Wendy’s Subway, ‘19) and has published several chapbooks, pamphlets, and artist books in Mexico, Brazil, Cyprus, Lebanon, Canada, and other places. Christopher 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. With Gabriel Finotti, he publishes the multilingual and nomadic bookwork, Dolce Stil Criollo. He also forms part of Post-Novis, an alternative project of architectural education and practice.