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New York State Summer Writers Institute

Writers-in-Residence and Public Readings 

The New York State Summer Writers Institute will offer evening readings by an extraordinary line-up of distinguished writers this June and July. The 2025 readings will be free and open to the public and a schedule will be available here in the spring. Click here for a PRINT version of the 2024 schedule.  

2025 Writers-in-Residence:

April BernardApril Bernard's sixth book of poems, The World Behind the World, has just been published by W.W. Norton; previous collections are Brawl & Jag, RomanticismSwan Electric, Psalms, and Blackbird Bye Bye, which won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her novels are Pirate Jenny and Miss Fuller; she has also published short fiction in Little Star, Electric Literature, and The Southampton Review.  A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and other journals, she is Professor of English and Creative Writing at 鶹ƽ College as well as a faculty member of the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars.

mary gaitskill Mary Gaitskill is the author of three novels (The Mare, Veronica and Two Girls, Fat and Thin) and three collections of short stories (Bad Behavior, Don’t Cry and Because They Wanted To), Mary Gaitskill is one of the most celebrated writers in the country. Her most recent books include a collection of essays (Somebody With A Little Hammer) and a controversial novella called This Is Pleasure which appeared in a summer 2019 issue of The New Yorker Magazine. Stacey D’Erasmo wrote of her in The NY Times Book Review that “Ambiguity—the inseparability of light and darkness, love and pain, nurture and destruction, progress and regress—is her métier. The question she seems to ask again and again, and with astonishing force…is how to feel, how we do feel.” She has taught at the summer writers institute for seventeen years.

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year. His second book, Cleanness, was named a Best Book of 2020 by over thirty publications. His most recent novel, Small Rain, published in 2024, tells the story of how a medical crisis brings one man close to death―and to love, art, and beauty. It is a work that The Washington Post described as “profound . . . a paean to some of life’s most meaningful pleasures.” An alum of the Writer’s Institute, Greenwell also writes regularly about books, music, and film for the Substack newsletter To a Green Thought
 
Tom Healyis the author of three books of poetry, Velvet, Animal Spirits and What the Right Hand Knows, which was a finalist for the 2009 L.A. Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award. He has taught on the faculties of NYU, The Pratt Institute and The New School. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, and is author of the poetry collections School of Instructions: a Poem, House of Lords and Commons and Far District and the book of essays, Fugitive Tilts. Among his recognitions are the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Hutchinson is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University. 
 
 

John McWhorteris a regular columnist for The New York Times whose most recent book is WOKE RACISM: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. He has taught linguistics, American Studies, and classes in the Core Curriculum program at Columbia University, since 2008 where he is currently an Associate Professor in the English and Comparative Literature department. He was Contributing Editor at The New Republic from 2001 to 2014. From 2006 to 2008 he was a columnist for the New York Sun and he has written columns regularly for The RootThe New York Daily NewsThe Daily Beast, CNN and Time Ideas. He has published a number of books on linguistics and on race relations, of which the better known are Power of Babel: A Natural History of LanguageOur Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of EnglishDoing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why You Should, Like, Care, and Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. He makes regular public radio and television appearances on related subjects.

Jim Miller photo is Professor of Politics and Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research in New York City. His latest book is The Passion of Pedro Almodóvar (2024). Other books include Can Democracy Work? From Ancient Athens to Our World (2018); Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche (2011); Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock’n’Roll (1999); The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993); and “Democracy is in the Streets” (1987).  The former executive editor of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, he was also for ten years a general editor at Newsweek magazine, where he covered books and music.     

 's newest book, Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury, was published on by W.W. Norton on March 10. Moore’s previous memoir, The Bishop’s Daughter, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, and many other journals and anthologies. For the Library of America, she edited Amy Lowell: Selected Poems and Poems from the Women’s Movement, an Oprah Summer Reading List pick. She has been poet-in-residence at Wesleyan University and the University of Richmond, visiting professor at the Columbia School of the Arts, and three times the Visiting Distinguished Writer in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. When still in her twenties, Mourning Pictures, her play in verse about her mother’s death, was produced on Broadway. The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter, published in 1996 and recently reissued, was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives and writes in New York, where she is on the graduate writing faculty of The New School.

Joyce Carol Oates 2023 won the National Book Award for her novel them and has since written dozens of novels and short story collections that have made her one of the most celebrated writers of her generation. Among her best known works are Blonde, We Were The Mulvaneys, Zombie and The Gravedigger’s Daughter. The Falls won the 2005 Prix Femina as the best novel in France. John Updike wrote of her in The New Yorker: “If the phrase ‘woman of letters’ existed, Joyce Carol Oates would be, foremost in this country, entitled to it.” Apart from her many works of fiction, Oates has also written acclaimed books of poetry and a number of books of non-fiction and memoir, the best known of which are On Boxing and A Widow’s Tale.

Robert Pinsky was the Poet-Laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2002, and is the author of many books of poetry and prose. His books of poetry include The Figured Wheel, Jersey Rain, The Want Bone, Gulf Music and others. His translation of Dante’s Inferno was a national best-seller, and his latest book, a memoir, is called Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet. He teaches at Boston University.

 

 

 

 

Francine Prose is the author of many acclaimed works of fiction, including Guided Tours of Hell, Primitive People, and Bigfoot Dreams. Her novel, Blue Angel, was hailed in Publishers Weekly as “a peerlessly accomplished performance…timelessly funny,” and in Mademoiselle as a “funny yet devastating novel that will rock literary and academic worlds alike.” Prose is a contributing editor of Harper’s and writes for The New Yorker, Gentleman’s Quarterly, and Atlantic Monthly. Recent books include The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & The Artists They Inspired, Caravaggio, and A Changed Man. Other recent titles include the novels Goldengrove and Lovers at the Chameleon Club. Her recent non-fiction books include Reading Like A Writer, and Anne Frank. (Photo by Frances F. Denny.)

 

 

Jerald Walker's collection How to Make a Slave and Other Essays was a Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in Nonfiction, in which the judges noted how it "shows us something knotty, fraught, and unforgettable, not just about race and the commonplace, 'living while black,' but about living while human. Walker is furious and funny. He is talking to himself about his life and allows us to listen in.” Also the winner of the 2020 Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction, Walker is the author of two previous books of nonfiction. 

 

More Writers-in-Residence to be announced soon!

Faculty bios can be found here: