Gillian Bagley

Gillian Bagley is an MFA candidate in fiction at Columbia and is currently writing short stories for her thesis. She has recently taught creative writing at Columbia and The Dalton School.

Patricia Berry

Patricia Berry has an MFA in writing from Columbia University and a BA in English from Dartmouth College. Her essays have appeared in several anthologies. She comes to teaching after a career in youth magazine editorial, during which she wrote and edited for titles published by Sesame Workshop, Jim Henson, and Disney. She is a founding editor of Time Inc.’s Sports Illustrated For Kids and has written for The New York Times, New Jersey Life, ADDitude and This Old House. She is at work on a movie memoir.

Dan Bevacqua

Dan Bevacqua lives in Northampton, MA.  He teaches at Western New England University.

Sara Blazic

Sara Blazic received her BFA in Writing, Literature and Publishing from Emerson College in Boston, and is now an MFA candidate at Columbia with dual concentrations in Fiction and Translation.  She recently served as assistant director for the Columbia Artists/ Teachers program, and is an instructor of undergraduate writing for first-year Columbia students.

Justin Boening

Justin Boening is an Associate Editor at Poetry Northwest, and the Editor of Acquisitions at YesYes Books. He is the recipient of awards from Bucknell University, where he'll be the Roth Resident for 2012-2013, the Vermont Studio Center, where he was a Henry David Thoreau Fellow, and Summer Literary Seminars, where he won the SLS-St. Petersburg Review Award for Poetry. He was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship in 2010, a runner-up for the "Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Lyric Poetry Award. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Hotel Amerika, St. Petersburg Review, Vinyl Poetry, and elimae, among others.

Pamela Casey

Pamela Casey is originally from Montreal and received a BA with High Honours from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is currently finishing her MFA in Fiction at Columbia and has been hired to teach creative writing to Columbia undergraduates this coming year. She lived in London for many years before coming to New York City, where she co-translated a novel from Chinese, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, long-listed for the Man Asian Booker Prize, and co-wrote the screenplay for ‘UFO In Her Eyes’, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2011. She is at work on her first novel.

Lollion Chong

Lollion Chong is completing her MFA in Fiction at Columbia University's Writing Program.  She received a BA in Literature from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and studied French and film production at Université Paris VIll and is currently working on a collection of short stories and a novella.  She was born and raised in New York City.

Zinzi Clemmons

Zinzi Clemmons is an MFA candidate in Fiction at Columbia University. She has served in editorial departments at Little, Brown and Company and The New Yorker. Last year, she was Fiction Editor of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and  co-founded Apogee Journal with fellow students of color from Columbia's MFA program. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Transition Magazine, Joyland Magazine, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora and African American Review. She graduated from Brown University with honors in Critical Theory and Literary Arts. She is working on her first novel.

Iris Cohen

Iris Cohen received a B.A. from Bard College and a certificate in creative nonfiction from the Graduate Center, CUNY. She has written for The New York Sun, Bookforum, and The New Yorker, among other publications. She is completing an M.F.A. in fiction at Columbia University where she has taught introductory writing classes in the Summer High School Program. She lives in Brooklyn.

Julia Cooke

Julia Cooke is an M.F.A. candidate in nonfiction writing at Columbia University. She holds a B.A. in English and Art from Georgetown University. Prior to moving to New York, she worked as a cultural journalist in Mexico City and Havana. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, Conde Nast Traveller, Design Observer, and the web edition of The Atlantic.

Erin Ehsani

Erin Ehsani is an Alabama native who lives and writes in Harlem. She is a MFA candidate in Nonfiction at Columbia, where she also teaches Undergraduate Writing.

Emily Firetog

Emily Firetog is an M.F.A. candidate in fiction at Columbia University. She received a B.A. from Swarthmore College and an M.Phil. from Trinity College, Dublin. She has wide experience in publishing, including working for The Paris Review, A Public Space, and The New Yorker, as the Editor-in-Chief of Columbia: A Journal of Literature in Art, and as a contributing editor to The Stinging Fly literary magazine in Dublin. She is a recipient of the Henfield Prize for Fiction.

Megan Foley

Megan Foley is an M.F.A. candidate in creative nonfiction in the Columbia University School of the Arts Writing Program, where she also served as Managing Editor of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art from 2011-2012. She received a duel-B.A. in Creative Writing and English literature with high honors from George Washington University in 2003. Her writing has appeared in The Village Voice, Canteen Magazine, Flaunt Magazine, Poet Lore, The Rumpus and many others. She is a 2012-2013 Creative Writing Teaching Fellow at Columbia University and is currently at work on a family memoir.

Sara Freeman

Sara Freeman is Montreal born and completing an MFA in Fiction and Literary Translation at Columbia University. She is also an instructor in the university's Undergraduate Writing Program. She is currently working on a collection of her own short stories and looking for a young Quebecois novelist to translate into English.

Jesse Garcés Kiley

Jesse Garcés Kiley has an M.F.A. in Poetry from Columbia University. A former recipient of Columbia's Undergraduate Writing Program teaching fellowship, Jesse now teaches at Bard's High School Early College in Manhattan. He is working on his first collection of poetry, and lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife and son.

Tatiana Gutheil

Tatiana Gutheil was born in Boston, MA. She is a MFA candidate in fiction at Columbia University and will teach an undergraduate writing workshop there in Spring 2013. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and is working on a collection of short stories.

Malcolm Hansen

Malcolm Hansen is a second-year M.F.A. candidate in fiction at Columbia University and holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Stanford University. He is a recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Jr. Fellowship and his fiction has been selected to appear in the debut issue of Apogee Journal. Malcolm has lived, worked, and written in Europe and South America. He currently lives in Manhattan with his wife and two sons.

Dale Megan Healey

Dale Megan Healey is an M.F.A. candidate in nonfiction writing at Columbia University. She has taught creative writing to veterans, college freshmen, and GED students, among others. Her essays and fiction have been published in Prick of the Spindle, On the Commons, Untapped New York, Pequin, Blue Stocking Society and is forthcoming in Unsaid. She is currently working on a collection of essays on grief and conceptual art.

Channing Kehoe

Channing Kehoe is an M.F.A. candidate in creative nonfiction at Columbia's School of the Arts. Before moving her studies uptown, she received her BFA from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU, where she concentrated in psychoanalysis and 2D animation. Before that she spent all of her time on the beach in Florida. She lives in Brooklyn and writes about listening to music, feeling uncomfortable, and growing up in the South (these topics are sometimes but not always related).

Alexandra Kleeman

Alexandra Kleeman was raised in Boulder, Colorado and lives in Brooklyn. Her short fiction has appeared in journals such as The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Conjunctions, and DIAGRAM. Essays and other nonfiction pieces have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House and Triple Canopy. In addition to her work in the M.F.A. fiction program at Columbia, she holds a B.A. from Brown University and an M.A. in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley, where she did work on the intersection of experimental poetics and brain science. She is currently completing her dissertation, and working on a novel about snack cakes and cartoons.

Eliza Kostelanetz Schrader

Eliza Kostelanetz Schrader grew up in New York City and went on to live in the Twin Cities and San Francisco. She has published stories in Hanging Loose and was selected for the Top-25 for Glimmer Train’s February 2012 Short Story Award for New Writers. She is currently pursuing her M.F.A. at Columbia University, where she is at work on interconnected stories about a young woman who works with developmentally disabled adults.

Brandon Kreitler

Brandon Kreitler’s poems have been published in Boston Review, DIAGRAM, Web Conjunctions, Indiana Review, Cutbank, Eoagh, Sonora Review, The Poetry Blog, and Maggy. He is from Arizona and is working on the manuscript for a first book.  A chapbook will be published by Argos Books in June. A former teaching fellow at Columbia, he now teaches English at a couple campuses of the City University of New York.

Tsering Lama

Tsering Lama is an M.F.A. candidate in fiction at Columbia University. She is also a Teaching Fellow in the University Writing Program. Tsering has previously taught creative writing at the Summer High School Program at Columbia, through Columbia Artist/Teacher at Brandeis High School, and through The Rubin Museum. Her work has been published in Grain, The Malahat Review, Himal SouthAsian and The Brave New Play Rites Anthology. She was born and raised in Nepal and is of Tibetan heritage.

Sean Madigan Hoen

Sean Madigan Hoen was raised in Dearborn, Michigan and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. His fiction has appeared in BOMB Magazine, where he won the 2011 Fiction Contest, among other places. He has taught undergraduate creative nonfiction at Columbia University. His first book is currently under submission.

Ricardo Maldonado

Ricardo Maldonado was born and raised in Puerto Rico. His poems and translations have appeared in Boston Review, Guernica, DIAGRAM, and Sidebrow. A 2011 Poetry Fellow from the New York Foundation for the Arts, he is Managing Director at the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center in New York City.

Sarah-Jane Martin

Sarah-Jane Martin comes from South Africa and has lived and worked in the US and abroad for many years. Sarah-Jane has a writing diploma from Oxford University and is an M.F.A. candidate at Columbia. Her background is in the arts and non-profit education. Her first novel is called "Lake Swede."

Suzanne Mozes

Suzanne Mozes is a writer and editor. Her work has appeared in Travel + Leisure and New York, among other magazines and books. At present, she is at work on several book manuscripts while completing an M.F.A. in Nonfiction Writing at Columbia University School of the Arts. She will return to the Summer High School Creative Writing Program for her third year of teaching.

Tanya Paperny

Tanya Paperny is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor and translator who teaches creative writing and composition at Columbia University and The College of New Rochelle. Tanya received her M.F.A. in Writing from Columbia University, where she completed concentrations in nonfiction and translation. Her writing and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in The Literary Review, The Massachusetts Review, Bitch, Campus Progress, Pushback and The Prose-Poem Project. Tanya is also the managing editor of Circumference, a journal of international poetry in translation.

Sarah Perry

Sarah Perry was born in Maine. After attending Davidson College in North Carolina, she stayed in the South for most of her twenties before coming to New York to attend the graduate writing program at Columbia. She is a recipient of a Javits Fellowship, and last year served as Publisher of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. She was also a member of that journal's nonfiction editorial board. She has been published in the literary journal Bluestockings and the roller derby magazine, Blood & Thunder. She is currently at work on a memoir.

Abigail Rasminsky

Abigail Rasminsky's work has been published in The New York Times, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Forward, The Millions, The Faster Times, and Dance Magazine, among other publications. She was the 2010-2011 nonfiction editor of Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art and a 2011 Teaching Fellow in the Undergraduate Creative Writing program. She is *this close* to earning her M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and got her B.A. from Oberlin a million years ago. In her former life, she was a professional dancer and yoga teacher.

Chelsea Slaven-Davis

Chelsea Slaven-Davis is an M.F.A. candidate in fiction at Columbia University and holds a B.S. in Creative Writing and Performance Studies from Northwestern University. She is currently working on a novel and lives in Harlem with her family.

Johanna Smith

Johanna Smith is an M.F.A. candidate in fiction at Columbia University. She received her B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia in 2007.

Lynn Strong

Lynn Strong is an M.F.A. candidate in fiction in Columbia's School of the Arts. She has taught literacy, reading and writing in Taiwan, Florida, New Orleans and New York and is an instructor in the Columbia Undergraduate Writing Program as of Fall of 2012.

Emily Thibodeaux

Emily Thibodeaux is from Cajun Country, Southwestern Louisiana. She studied English, French and Cajun French at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where she completed her B.A. She studied Fiction at Columbia and taught Beginning Fiction Workshop at Columbia. She currently interns at the Earth Institute and contributes to the Earth Institute blog as a guest blogger.

Jesse Thiessen

Jesse Thiessen holds a B.A. in English from Portland State University and an M.F.A. in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University. A native of Canada and Oregon, she has taught in Columbia's undergraduate Creative Writing Department and her nonfiction has been published in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Line Zero, and Cavalier Literary Couture. Her fiction will appear in the inaugural short story collection of Topside Press.

Liz Topp

Liz Topp is a nonfiction author whose work has been published in eleven countries and nine languages. Currently, she is working on her first memoir about hitchhiking through Africa with a stranger. Always looking to help writers of all ages refine their prose, Liz recently co-founded an editorial consultancy--www.pacetopp.com.

David Varno

David Varno is a fiction writer and M.F.A. candidate in the School of the Arts. His work has appeared in BOMBLog, Brooklyn Rail, Cleveland Plain Dealer, L Magazine, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere.

Starre Vartan

Starre Vartan is the founder and editor-in-chief of Eco Chick and its sister site, Eco Chick Escapes, all about ethical travel and style. She’s the author of The Eco-Chick Guide to Life (St. Martin’s Press), and a problogger and often-quoted green living expert who has been featured in the New York Times, Elle, Glamour and Self magazines. She is currently a contributor to The Huffington Post, MNN.com and Inhabitat, and is editor-at-large for Coco Eco Magazine and contributor-at-large for Martha Stewart’s Whole Living magazine.

Sarah Ulicny

Sarah Ulicny is an M.F.A. Fiction candidate at Columbia. During the 2011-2012 school year, she taught a creative writing workshop as a teaching fellow. She's been active in Columbia's CA/T program, which offers M.F.A. students a chance to teach creative writing in diverse settings.  In 2008, her short story, "You Are Here", was selected as a finalist for Glimmer Train's 2008 Winter Fiction Open. She has completed a novel and aquired an agent. The novel went on submission to publishers in September.

Kassi Underwood

Kassi Underwood's essays have appeared in The New York Times, the New York Daily News, and elsewhere. She is an M.F.A. candidate in literary nonfiction at Columbia University, where she taught in the Undergraduate Writing Program. Currently at work on a memoir of her quest for post-abortion therapies and cultural rituals, she lives in New York City, but you can find her here: www.kassiunderwood.com