Current Faculty

Rachel Aydt

Rachel Aydt is a writer and part-time Assistant Professor at the New School University in New York City. She spent many years working as an editor and research director in national consumer magazines, including American Heritage Magazine, YM, Cosmopolitan, and CosmoGirl. She’s written personal essays that have appeared in publications that include the Huffington Post, the New York Times’ Motherlode blog, The New York Observer, Parents, Redbook, The New York Post, New York Metro Parents, New Mexico magazine, and CosmoGirl. Her literary essays and fiction have appeared online in The White Review, Broad Street Journal, and the University of Dublin’s HCE Review, Breadcrumbs, and is forthcoming in Post Road. She’s written culture pieces for Time Magazine, Photo District News, Inked, Publishing Perspectives, and Reader’s Digest. She received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College where she was a Graduate Fellow. While there, she served as Nonfiction Editor of their literary journal, Lumina. She developed and taught a class for the Barnard Pre-college Program called “In Their Footsteps” about finding creative inspiration in an urban landscape, which she’s adapted for an ongoing Freshman seminar at The New School University. She’s the recipient of a grant for creative work from the New School University, and of a fellowship to attend Colgate Writer’s Conference and Kettle Pond Conference. She tweets at @Rachelrooo.

Nkosi Ife Bandele

Nkosi Ife Bandele tells stories. He writes for periodicals, stage, TV, and film. His novels The Ape is Dead! (2016), The Beast (2017), and Scott Free (2019) are published by Crimson Cloak Publishing. His most recent short fiction appears in Akashic Books’ Terrible Twosdays series. He is a longtime teacher in the first-year writing program, offering the wildly popular classes Too Cool for School and What’s Love Got to do with It?. A detailed description of his teaching can be found on his Lang Faculty Page and more information about his writing is available on his Facebook fan page.

 

Brie Bouslaugh

Brie Bouslaugh obtained her BFA in Writing, Literature and Publishing from Emerson College and went on to receive her Master’s degree from Columbia’s School of the Arts Creative Writing Program. After graduating she was awarded a teaching fellowship with Columbia’s first-year writing program and has spent the past seven years working at colleges around New York (including The Fashion Institute of Technology, Medgar Evers College, and the past four years at The New School). Having spent many years working in first-year writing programs, she believes that beginning one’s college career with a strong foundation in communication, both written and spoken, and some rigorous practice in critical thinking is essential no matter the path a student takes. In her courses she is interested in the discourse around contemporary culture, how we use language, and sometimes sports. She lives in Brooklyn with her three dogs.

 

Olga Breydo

Olga Breydo received her M.Arch from The Bartlett School of Architecture in London and an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. Her fiction and nonfiction appear in Slice Magazine, Joyland Magazine, The Cossack Review, Bodega Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, and Cagibi Literary Journal. Her short story “Not a Star” was a finalist in the 2018 Missouri Review Editors’ Prize and her short story “Cherry Preserves” was a finalist in the 2018 New Letters Prize for Fiction. Her critical essay “Nabokov’s Space-time” was longlisted for the 2015 Notting Hill Editions Prize, and her short stories “Torre Flavia” and “Prelude” were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her writing and photography can be found at olgabreydo.com.

 

Christen Clifford

Christen Clifford is a writer, performer and part time lecturer at The New School, where she teaches Contemporary Feminisms, What is Rape Culture? and The Body in Performance Art.

 

Bret Gladstone

Bret Gladstone is the editorial director of Graver Goods Press and the founder of its Impracticum—an independent creative writing program grounded in community service. He received his MFA from Columbia University, where he has also taught undergraduate workshops. His music journalism has been published by Rolling StonePitchforkThe Village VoiceSpin, and The Associated Press, and his fiction was awarded a fellowship from the Edward F. Albee Foundation. Prior to teaching at The New School, NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and Medgar Evers College, he worked with rescue dogs and future service dogs. He currently lives in Brooklyn.

 

Jessica Gross

Jessica Gross’s debut novel, Hysteria, was published by The Unnamed Press in fall 2020. Her essays, criticism, and articles have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The Paris Review Daily, among others. She holds an MFA in fiction from The New School, a Master’s degree in cultural reporting and criticism from New York University and a Bachelor’s in anthropology from Princeton University.

 

Shahnaz Habib

Shahnaz Habib is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her translation of Malayali writer Benyamin’s Jasmine Days won the 2018 JCB Prize for Indian Literature. Shahnaz‘s fiction, essays and criticism have been published in Agni, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Guardian, the New Yorker online, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Caravan, Afar, and other magazines.

 

Haley Hach

Haley Hach has been teaching in the First-Year Writing Program for seven years. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has a Master’s in English from Portland State University. She’s published stories in Narrative Magazine, Santa Monica Review, The Saint Anne’s Review, CutBank, Able Muse, 5Chapters, Raritan and others. She’s a finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award, finalist for the American Short Fiction contest and has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. She’s a fellow at Stony Brook’s BookEnd mentorship program, where she is working on a novel. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, two daughters and a bunch of dogs.

 

Marwa Helal

Marwa Helal is the author of Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) and winner of BOMB Magazine’s Biennial 2016 Poetry Contest. She is also the author of the chapbook I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No, Dear/Small Anchor Press, 2017) and has been awarded fellowships from Poets House, Brooklyn Poets, and Cave Canem. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, she currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

 

Liz Latty

Liz Latty is a writer and educator whose work has been featured in The Rumpus, The Establishment, HuffPost, The Feminist Wire, The Wayne Literary Review, Jupiter 88, HOLD: A Journal, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook Split (Unthinkable Creatures Press, 2012) and has received fellowships and grants from the Lambda Literary Foundation, Poets & Writers Magazine, and Vermont Studio Center, among others. Her writing was included as a Notable Essay selection in Best American Essays 2017 and nominated for Best of the Net, a Pushcart Prize, and the Jackson, Phelan, and Tanenbaum Literary Awards from the San Francisco Foundation. Liz holds an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College and lives in Brooklyn.

 

Jonathan Liebson

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Jonathan Liebson is a longtime teacher of first-year writing and an academic adviser at Eugene Lang. His courses focus on short fiction, narrative or personal essays, and issues in contemporary culture. A longer description of his teaching and writing philosophy can be found on his Lang Faculty Page. His most recent work appears in The AtlanticThe Washington Post Sunday Book World, The Texas Observer, and The Chicago Review of Books, and his previous essays, book reviews, and short stories have appeared in Time Out New York, The Georgia ReviewAmerican Book Review, Meridian, Passages North, and Harvard Review, and in the anthology Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer (Random House). His writing (and photography) can be found at jonathanliebson.com.

 

Stephen Massimilla

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Stephen Massimilla is a poet, scholar, translator, lecturer, painter, photographer, and author. His 500-page co-authored volume Cooking with the Muse (Tupelo Press, 2016), includes hundreds of original poems, recipes, essays, and color photos. Acclaim for his other books includes an SFASU Press Prize for The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat; the Bordighera/CUNY Poetry Prize for Forty Floors from Yesterday; the Grolier Poetry Prize for Later on Aiaia; a Van Rensselaer award, selected by Kenneth Koch, and other honors. He has also translated books by Pablo Neruda and others. Massimilla has recent work in hundreds of publications from AGNI to Verse Daily. He holds an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from Columbia University and teaches at Columbia University and The New School. He has exhibited his paintings in many cities, been interviewed on radio and television, presented papers at numerous conferences, and performed his work at venues ranging from The Natural Gourmet to Carnegie Hall.

 

Kyle McCarthy

Kyle McCarthy is the author of Everyone Knows How Much I Love You, published by Ballantine Books. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Best American Short Stories, American Short Fiction, the Harvard Review, the Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere.

 

Tara Menon

Tara Menon focuses, in her research and teaching, on problems of religion, experience, and secularization in the European and Indian traditions. She has taught at Cooper Union and Ashoka University and has held fellowships at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

 

M./Megan Milks

Megan Milks has taught first-year writing, creative writing, literature, and queer, transgender, and (a)sexuality studies at the college level for more than ten years. Their first novel, Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body, is forthcoming from Feminist Press in 2021, followed by a revised second edition of their first story collection, now titled Slug and Other Stories (originally published as Kill Marguerite and Other Stories, the collection won the 2015 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Fiction and was named a Lambda Literary Award finalist). Megan is the recipient of the 2019 Lotos Foundation Prize in Fiction Writing. They have published four chapbooks, most recently Kicking the Baby and The Feels, an exploration of fan fiction and affect, and a short nonfiction book Remember the Internet: Tori Amos Bootleg Webring, is forthcoming from Instar Books. Their critical writing has been published in Bookforum, 4Columns, Los Angeles Book Review, and The New Inquiry, among other venues. Their work as editor includes We Are the Baby-Sitters Club: Essays and Art from Grown-Up Readers (Chicago Review Press, 2021), The &NOW Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing, 2011-2013 (Northwestern UP, 2015), and Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives (Routledge, 2014).

 

Miller Oberman

Miller Oberman completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Connecticut in 2017, where he studied trans-temporal poetics, translation theory, and Old English poetry. His first book of poems and translations, The Unstill Ones, came out with Princeton University Press in 2017. Miller has recent poems and translations in The London Review of BooksPoetry, and the Boston Review. Miller is also interested in Queer Theory, Science Fiction, and lyric poetry, and teaches poetry workshops with Brooklyn Poets.

 

Dianca Potts

Dianca London Potts earned her MFA in Fiction from The New School and her MA in English in addition to her MA in Humanities from Arcadia University. She is a 2015 Pushcart Prize Nominee and a Best Small Fictions finalist for 2016. She is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop participant, a VONA Voices alum, the former prose editor of LIT Magazine, and the former online editor of Well-Read Black Girl. Her words have been featured in Glamour, The Village Voice, Vice, Shondaland, and elsewhere. Her memoir, Planning for the Apocalypse, is forthcoming from 37 Ink / Simon and Schuster. She currently lives and writes in Brooklyn.

 

David Palmer

David Palmer is a part-time Assistant Professor of writing at the New School University in New York City. He also teaches and tutors writing at New York University in Liberal Studies and the Opportunities Program. A queer intellectual and literary historian by training with a Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, David’s written work has been published in The Journal of the History of SexualityTrans-scripts, and The Committee on LGBT History Newsletter. He also has curated a class project on LGBTQ history in North Carolina, which was featured in outhistory.org. 

 

Rebecca Reilly

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Rebecca Reilly teaches creative writing at The New School and is a doctoral candidate at The C.U.N.Y. Graduate Center where she is writing a dissertation on repetition in the poetry of Gertrude Stein. She taught for a number of years at The University of Paris, Nanterre, and has taught at The New School, Parsons Paris, as well as Humboldt University in Berlin. Her first book, Repetition, was published by Four Way Books in 2015. The book received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was chosen by author Maggie Nelson for a Publishers Weekly round-up of the top books of 2015, as well as reviewed by Nelson as one of six “nonfiction writers to watch” in Vela. It was reviewed in The Boston Globe and selected by poet and author Susan Wheeler as one of her favorite books of 2015 in Princeton Weekly.

 

Rollo Romig

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Rollo Romig writes and has written in a wide range of customizable shapes and sizes, including theater criticism for The New Yorker magazine, feature stories about India for The New York Times Magazine, general-assignment news reporting for The Cambodia Daily, and essays about religion, culture, Detroit, and other assorted topics for other assorted publications. He also teaches journalism at New York University.

 

Helen Betya Rubinstein

Helen Betya Rubinstein‘s essays and fiction have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere, and her opinions in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jewish Currents, LA Review of Books, and The New York Times. She holds M.F.A. degrees in fiction and nonfiction, from Brooklyn College and the University of Iowa, respectively, and has enjoyed working with college writers since 2008.

 

Bureen Ruffin

Bureen Ruffin is a writer and teacher who holds an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in Liberal Studies from the New School. She has taught literature, creative writing, and English composition since 2011. Her current courses focus on cultural criticism, personal essay, and memoir. As a writer, her work is fueled by an interest in memory, its role in forming identity, and how one writes that identity. Most recently, she founded a student writers’ workshop for students engaging with race and ethnicity in their work and was awarded a Teaching Excellence Award at Pace University. Her work has most recently appeared in Of Note magazine. She is at work on her first book.

 

A.W. Strouse

A.W. Strouse is a medievalist and a poet.