The MFA Program for Writers is delighted to welcome the following writers as our new fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction faculty. Starting in January 2026, we will be launching our new creative nonfiction track, and applications are open for creative nonfiction students through September 1st.

Steven Kleinman, Poetry

Steven Kleinman is the author of Life Cycle of a Bear, Winner of the 2019 Philip Levine Poetry Prize. His writing has appeared in the journals Copper Nickel, The American Poetry Review, Poet Lore, the Beloit Poetry Review and elsewhere. His poems have appeared in the anthologies Best American Poetry, 2020 and Ensnaring the Moment. He lives in Philadelphia where he is a contributing editor at the American Poetry Review, and co-host of the American Poetry Review Podcast.

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Creative Nonfiction

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices Elle, the Prix des Libraires du Quebec, and the Prix France Inter-JDD. It has been translated into 11 languages and optioned for television. Their essays appear in the 2020 and 2022 editions of Best American Essays as well as in The New York Times, Harper’s, Agni, Yale Review, and many other publications. The recipient of fellowships from United States Artists, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Black Mountain Institute, and the Camargo Foundation, and a three-time fellow at both MacDowell and Yaddo, they live in Vancouver, where they are the Rogers Communications Chair in Creative Nonfiction at the University of British Columbia. Marzano-Lesnevich’s next book is the transgender and trans-genre memoir Both and Neither, forthcoming from Doubleday and publishers internationally.

Beth Nguyen, Fiction

Beth Nguyen is the author of the memoirs Owner of a Lonely Heart and Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, and the novels Short Girls and Pioneer Girl. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Book Award, and her work has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Essays. Nguyen is a professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Elena Passarello, Creative Nonfiction

 Elena Passarello is the recipient of a Whiting Award, the Oregon Book Award, and the Blackwell Prize. Her essays on performance, pop culture, and the natural world have been translated into six languages. She is the author of two collections, the most recent of which, Animals Strike Curious Poses, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. It made the best-of-year lists from several publications including the Guardian, Publisher’s Weekly, and the New York Times Book Review. Her reviews and features have appeared in the McSweeney’s, National Geographic, Paris Review, Oxford American, Audubon, and the Best American Science and Nature Writing. In 2019, Outside named her one of the “25 Essential Women Authors Writing about the Wild.”

Elena appears weekly on over 200 radio stations as a part of PRX’s culture and variety program LiveWire! She is on the MFA faculty at Oregon State University, and she also leads nonfiction workshops at the Sewanee Writers Conference and the Kenyon Adult Writing Workshops. Her next book, on Elvis Presley’s motley film career, will be released by Penguin Press in 2027.

Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Fiction

Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the author of Heads of the Colored People, which won the PEN Open Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Award for Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her collection was longlisted for the National Book Award, the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Award, and several other prizes, including an NAACP Image Award.

She earned a doctorate in English from ­­­­Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from ­­­­­­the University of Illinois. With dark humor and covering topics from identity to chronic illness, her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review Daily, New York Magazine’s “The Cut,” The Root, The White Review, Ploughshares,400 Souls: A Community History of African America 1619-2019, and The 1619 Project, among other publications. New writing appears in Fourteen Days: A Community Gathering, edited by Margaret Atwood.

In addition to a debut novel with Scribner, The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Rich Milford, her young adult debut is forthcoming with Make Me a World (Penguin Random House). She is the recipient of a 2024 United States Artists Grant and a 2019 Whiting Award.