Faculty

2020 program faculty

Josh Lambert is the academic director at the Yiddish Book Center and visiting assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture, which won a Canadian Jewish Book Award and the Jordan Schnitzer Award from the Association for Jewish Studies, and American Jewish Fiction: A JPS Guide. His reviews and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Haaretz, the Forward, the Globe and Mail, and many academic journals. 

David Leavitt’s novels and story collections include Family DancingThe Lost Language of CranesArkansasThe Indian Clerk, and The Two Hotel Francforts. He is also the author of two nonfiction books, Florence, A Delicate Case and The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer. A new novel, Shelter in Place, will be published in October. David is co-director of MFA@FLA, the creative writing program at the University of Florida, where he is Professor of English and edits the journal Subtropics.

Lisa Olstein is a member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas, Austin, where she teaches in the New Writers Project and the Michener Center for Writers. She is the author of Radio Crackling, Radio Gone, winner of the Hayden Carruth Award; Lost Alphabet, a Library Journal best book of the year; and Little Stranger, a Lannan Literary Selection. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Centrum. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, The Iowa Review, jubilat, American Letters & Commentary, and New Voices. She is the lyricist for Cold Satellite, a rock band fronted by acclaimed songwriter Jeffrey Foucalt. The band's first record, Cold Satellite, topped Greil Marcus' 2010 "Real Life Rock Top Ten" list in The Believer. Its second album, Cavalcade, was released in spring 2013.

Eileen Pollack teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. Her most recent nonfiction book, The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys' Club, was excerpted in the New York Times Magazine in 2013 and published by Beacon Press in 2015. Her novel Breaking and Entering, published in 2012, won the Grub Street National Book Prize and was named a New York Times Editor's Choice selection. She is also the author of the novel Paradise, New York, and two collections of short fiction, In the Mouth and The Rabbi in the Attic, as well as a work of creative nonfiction, Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull. Her essay "Pigeons" was selected by Cheryl Strayed for Best American Essays 2013 and her novella "The Bris" was chosen by Stephen King for Best American Short Stories 2007.