Fiction

Fiction Faculty

René Steinke

Rebecca Chace

Rebecca Chace is the award-winning author of four books, Leaving Rock Harbor; Capture the Flag; Chautauqua Summer; June Sparrow and The Million Dollar Penny. She has written for the New York Times, the Huffington Post, The LA Review of Books, Guernica, Lit Hub, and other publications. Plays: Colette; The Awakening (adaptation of the novel by Kate Chopin). She adapted her novel, Capture the Flag, for screen and television with director Lisanne Skyler (Best Screenplay Short Film, 2010 Nantucket Film Festival). She has been awarded numerous artist residencies and fellowships including Civitella Ranieri, MacDowell, Yaddo, Dora Maar House, and others. She is an associate professor in Creative Writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Rebecca teaches Creative Nonfiction and Fiction in the MFA program.

David Grand

David Grand’s first novel, Louse (1998), was selected as a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles TimescBest Book of the Year. His second novel, The Disappearing Body (2002), is described by Salon.com as “A nifty update on the classic noir [which] plumbs an urban underworld of dames, dope rings, double-crossing heavies and poor saps set up to take a fall.” His third novel, Mount Terminus, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the winter of 2014. Grand’s writing has appeared in anthologies as well as The New York Times Magazine, Travel and Leisure, BlackBook, and elsewhere.

Idra Novey

Idra Novey is the author of the novel Those Who Knew, a finalist for the 2019 Clark Fiction Prize and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her first novel Ways to Disappear received the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize, the 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Prize, and was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her poetry collections include Exit, Civilian, selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series, The Next Coun­try, a final­ist for the 2008 Fore­word Book of the Year Award, and Clarice: The Visitor, a collaboration with the artist Erica Baum. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into ten languages and she’s written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, NPR’s All Things Con­sid­ered, New York Magazine, and The Paris Review. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writ­ers Mag­a­zine, the PEN Trans­la­tion Fund, and the Poetry Foundation. She has also translated the work of several prominent Brazilian writers, most recently Clarice Lispector’s novel The Pas­sion Accord­ing to G.H. A collection of her co-translations with Ahmad Nadalizadeh of Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian was published with Penguin Press in 2020. She currently teaches fiction at Princeton University. Idra teaches Poetry, Fiction, and Literary Translation in the MFA program. 

Minna Proctor

Minna Proctor is the Editor of The Literary Review and a translator and essayist. She has been working in publishing since 1995 and was the editor of Colors and the managing editor of Bomb. Her most recent book, Landslide, a collection of personal essays, is forthcoming on Catapult Press. Her book on the idea of religious calling in America, Do You Hear What I Hear?: Religious Calling, the Priesthood, and My Father was published in 2004. Her essays and reviews have appeared in such publications as Aperture, Bookforum, The LA Times Book Review, Guilt and Pleasure, The Nation, American Scholar, and The New York Times Book Review. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire and Bogliasco in Italy. Proctor’s translation of Love in Vain, Selected Stories of Federigo Tozzi won the PEN Poggioli Prize in 1998. Her other translations include Bruno Arpaia’s novel, The Angel of History. Minna Proctor teaches Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, and Literary Translation in the MFA program.

PADMA VISWANATHAN

Padma Viswanathan is a Canadian-American novelist, published in eight countries and shortlisted for the PEN USA Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her short fiction, essays and short translations have been published in Granta, The Boston Review, BRICK, and elsewhere. Her translation of the novel São Bernardo, by the Brazilian novelist Graciliano Ramos, was published in 2020 by the New York Review Books on their classics series. It was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize and runner-up for the Society of Authors TA First Translation Award. Her nonfiction book, Like Every Form of Love, is forthcoming from Random House Canada in 2023.  

Our faculty brings diverse styles of writing together through workshops and lectures, and students are exposed to many different voices. Students may choose their mentors, and the program focuses on an individualized curriculum and instruction. To help our students with the publishing process, we invite editors, literary agents, and other publishing professionals to the residencies. Most of our students publish in literary magazines while still enrolled in the program, and many of our alumni have published books.

Our faculty are not only award-winning, acclaimed authors, but also skilled and devoted teachers.