Core Faculty
Michelle Latiolais is the Director of the Programs In Writing. She is the author of the novel Even Now which received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. Her second novel, A Proper Knowledge, was published in 2008 by Bellevue Literary Press. Widow, a collection of stories, Involutions and essays, was released in January 2011 from Bellevue Literary Press, and was a finalist for The Believer Award. She was released in May 2016 by W.W. Norton & Company, a novel with embedded stories. Recent work has appeared in Zyzzyva, Santa Monica Review, Juked and The Kenyon Review.
Claire Vaye Watkins was born in Bishop, California and raised in the Mojave Desert. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, she earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. She is the author of the novels I Love You but I've Chosen Darknessand Gold Fame Citrus, and the short story collection Battleborn, which won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Claire's fiction and essays have appeared in Granta, The Paris Review, The Believer, either/or, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Tin House, Freeman’s, Story Quarterly, One Story, The Yale Review and many others. Her work is anthologized in New American Stories, Best of the West, Best of the Southwest, The Future is Feminist, Pushcart Prize XLIII, and The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story. A Guggenheim Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow, and one of Granta's "Best Young American Novelists," Claire lives in Orange County and the Mojave Desert. Her fourth book, a novel called Yellow Pine, is forthcoming in the summer of 2026.
Natalie Shapero's most recent poetry collection is Stay Dead (Copper Canyon, 2025), longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Her previous collections are Popular Longing, Hard Child, and No Object, and her poems appear in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.
Monica Youn is the author of four poetry collections, most recently From From, which was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Award and was a New York Times Notable Book and Best Poetry Book of 2023, and a Time, NPR, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Electric Literature Best Book of 2023. Her books have twice been finalists for the National Book Award, as well as being finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Voelcker Prize, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. She has also been awarded the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bytter Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a Stegner Fellowship. A former constitutional lawyer, she is the current judge of the Yale Younger Poets Prize and is president of the board of Poets House.
Visiting Faculty
Once a year the Programs in Writing welcomes two visiting writers to teach the Graduate Writers’ Workshop. In recent years, visiting writers have included: Percival Everett, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Colette LaBouff Atkinson, Charles Baxter, Ann Beattie, Frank Bidart, Don Bogen, Jennifer Clarvoe, Killarney Clary, Stuart Dybek, Doreen Gildroy, Louise Glück, Glen David Gold, Andrew Sean Greer, Linda Gregerson, Robert Hass, Ursula Hegi, Brenda Hillman, Edward Hirsch, Cynthia Huntington, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, William Kittredge, Margot Livesey, Thomas Lux, Heather McHugh, James McMichael, Maile Meloy, Carol Muske-Dukes, Ann Patchett, Robert Pinsky, Martha Rhodes, Mark Richard, Christine Schutt, Jim Shepard, Mona Simpson, Ted Solotaroff, Pamela Stewart, Robert Stone, Mark Strand, Melanie Thernstrom, Lawrence Thornton, Brad Watson and C.K. Williams.
