Creative Writing Faculty

Full-Time Faculty

Mary Bly is a Shakespeare professor at Fordham and, as Eloisa James, the author of 26 New York Times bestselling historical romances. She also published a memoir about the year her family moved to France, the bestseller Paris in Love. Her two lives most recently overlapped on Valentine’s Day 2017, when CBS Sunday Morning filmed her Shakespeare class for a piece on romance.

Leonard Cassuto is the author or editor of nine books, most recently The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education (with Robert Weisbuch; Johns Hopkins UP, 2021). That book, like its predecessor, The Graduate School Mess (Harvard, 2015), grew out of his monthly column, "The Graduate Adviser," for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Cassuto is also an award-winning journalist who writes on topics ranging from science to sports, in venues from The New York Times to salon.com. www.lcassuto.com.

Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, A Seahorse Year, The Sky Below, and Wonderland, and the nonfiction book The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between. She is a former Stegner Fellow, the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction, and the winner of an Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation. Her essays, features, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Boston Review, Bookforum, The New England Review, and Ploughshares, among other publications. She is a Frederick Lewis Allen Room Fellow at the New York Public Library for 2016-17.

Shonni Enelow is the author of Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-drama, (Northwestern University Press, 2015), for which she won the 2015–2016 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. She is the co-author, with Una Chaudhuri, of Research Theatre, Climate Change, and the Ecocide Project(Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), which includes her play, Carla and Lewis. Other scholarly publications include articles for Theater, Theatre Survey, and Theatre Topics. She has additionally written for Film Comment, Reverse Shot, and the Criterion Collection, and also writes for the theater. She has recently taught courses on the avant-garde, modern drama, dramaturgy, modernism and fashion, ecology and representation, gender and sexuality, and the theories of comparative literature.

Anne Fernald is the author of Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader (Palgrave 2006). She has published articles on Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and modernism generally at Blackwell's Literature Compass, in Feminist Studies (2005), Modern Fiction Studies (2003), and elsewhere, including several edited collections. Her work pays particular attention to the essay, and this research focus informs her work as the Writing Director (in charge of first-year composition classes) at Fordham's Lincoln Center campus. She is currently at work on the Cambridge University Press edition of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

Elisabeth Frost is the author of the poetry volume All of Us, the critical study The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry, the chapbooks Rumor and A Theory of the Vowel, and Bindle (a collaboration with the artist Dianne Kornberg). She also co-edited Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews. The recipient of grants from the Fulbright Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, MacDowell, Yaddo, and others, Frost has published widely--poetry, criticism and collaborative text-image works. Co-director of the Poetic Justice Institute at Fordham, she edits the Poetic Justice Institute Prizes, a book series from Fordham University Press.

Sarah Gambito is the author of the poetry collections Loves You (Persea Books), Delivered (Persea Books) and Matadora (Alice James Books). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, POETRY, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, The New Republic and other journals. She holds degrees from The University of Virginia and The Literary Arts Program at Brown University. Her honors include the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets and Writers, The Wai Look Award for Outstanding Service to the Arts from the Asian American Arts Alliance and grants and fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts and The MacDowell Colony. She is co-founder of Kundiman, a non-profit organization serving writers and readers of Asian American literature and co-director with Beth Frost of Poetic Justice Institute.

Elizabeth Stone is the author of the memoir, A Boy I Once Knew: What a Teacher Learned from her Student (Algonquin, 2002), and three other books, including Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories Shape Us (Time Books, 1988; with a new introduction, Transaction Publications, 2004). Her essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Newsweek, Creative Nonfiction, Gettysburg Review and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Her essay, “Husband Emeritus,”was designated a “Notable Essay” in The Best American Essays of 2011, and her journalism has been published in various sections of The New York Times (including “The Magazine,” “Science” and “Arts & Leisure”), Smithsonian Magazine, and elsewhere. In 1980, Prof. Stone founded Fordham’s award-winning newspaper, The Observer and served as its adviser until 2016. During her tenure as adviser, The Observer won more than 50 awards, nationally, regionally and at journalism conferences ""Best in Show."" Her students have gone on to positions at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The LA Times, New York Magazine, Popular Science, Bloomberg News, NBC, Sirius Radio, and NPR.

Writers in Residence

Gerardo Sámano Córdova is the author of Monstrilio (Zando). His short stories have appeared in Catapult, The Common, Ninth Letter, Passages North, Chicago Quarterly Review, and others. Gerardo holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. He has studied at Bread Loaf as a work/study scholar and at Tin House. He’s also been known to draw little creatures.

Instructors

Christopher Hirschmann Brandt is a New York City writer, translator, and political activist. Also an actor, theatre worker, carpenter, furniture designer. He teaches poetry workshops and Peace and Justice Studies at Fordham University. Poems and essays have been published abroad in, among others, Inverse Journal (Kashmir); Laterál (Barcelona); El signo del gorrión (Valladolid); Liqueur 44 (Paris); La Jornada (Mexico); and in the US in Poiesis, Syndic, …and Then, Phati'tude, Appearances; The Unbearables; Big City Lit, and in the anthologies Crimes of the Beats (Unbearables), Classics in the Classroom (Teachers and Writers) and Off the Cuffs: Poetry by and About the Police (Soft Skull, ed. Jackie Sheeler). His chapbook, The Place Where Grief Begins (Tebot Bach 2021) was a finalist for the New England Poetry Club’s Pedrick Prize. His translations of Cuban fiction have been published in The New Yorker and by Seven Stories Press; his translations of Cuban poets are included in The Whole Island (Berkeley, ed. Mark Weiss), and he translated four collections of poetry by the late Puerto Rican poet and teacher Carmen Valle. In 2017 Medicine Show Theatre Ensemble in New York City commissioned and produced his new translation of Albert Camus’ Caligula. Seven Stories Press published his translation of Clara Nieto’s Masters of War, a history of U.S. military, economic and cultural interventions in Latin America since 1959.

Dionne Ford is author of the forthcoming memoir Go Back and Get It (Bold Type Books) and co-editor of the anthology Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (Rutgers University, May 2019). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, LitHub, More, Rumpus and Ebony among other publications and won awards from the National Association of Black Journalists and the Newswomen’s Club of New York. In 2018, she received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing. Grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Hedgebrook have also supported her work. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University and a BA from Fordham University.

Janlori Goldman’s first book, Bread from a Stranger's Oven, was chosen by Laure-Anne Bosselaar for the 2016 White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, My Antarctica, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Gerald Stern chose her poem “At the Cubbyhole Bar” for the 2012 Raynes Prize. Janlori’s poetry is widely published, including in The Cortland Review, Rattle, Beloit Poetry Journal, Connotation Press, Calyx, Gertrude, Oberon Poetry Magazine, The Sow’s Ear, Contrary, Naugatuck River Review, The Stillwater Review, WORDPEACE, and in Split This Rock. Janlori co-edited (with Cheryl Boyce-Taylor and Yesenia Montilla) The Wide Shore: A Journal of Global Women’s Poetry, (www.thewideshore.org), and worked with Paris Press on the publication of Virginia Woolf's "On Being Ill." She works at the Center for Justice, is a writing mentor at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and teaches public health, social justice, literature, and creative writing at Columbia Law School, NYU School of Law, and Fordham University. Janlori worked for over 30 years as a civil rights lawyer, and received an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College.

John Hanc is an award-winning writer, journalist and educator with over four decades of professional experience. As a writer, he has authored or co-authored 23 books, including several award-winning memoirs and numerous successful works of prescriptive nonfiction. His latest collaborations are The Innovation Mindset: Eight Essential Steps to Transform Any Industry by Lorraine Marchand with John Hanc (Columbia University Press, 2022), winner of a 2023 Axiom Business Book Award; and From Survive to Thrive: Living Your Best Life With Mental Illness by Margaret S. Chisolm, MD with John Hanc (Johns Hopkins University Press, October, 2021), which won a Nautilus Book Award in 2022. Hanc’s 2019 memoir collaboration with Dr. Arun Singh—Your Heart, My Hands: An Immigrant's Remarkable Journey to Become one of America’s Preeminent Cardiac Surgeons by Arun Singh, MD with John Hanc (Center Street/Hachette)—was honored with four awards, including Gold for best memoir/autobiography in both the 2020 Nautilus Book Awards and the 2020 American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) Writing Awards.

Joseph O. Legaspi is the author of the poetry collections Threshold and Imago, both from CavanKerry Press; and three chapbooks: Postcards (Ghost Bird Press), Aviary, Bestiary (Organic Weapon Arts), and Subways (Thrush Press). Recent works have appeared in POETRY, New England Review, World Literature Today, Best of the Net, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. He co-founded Kundiman, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to nurturing generations of writers and readers of Asian American literature.