Donald Antrim (’81) is the author of three novels, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, The Hundred Brothers, and The Verificationist, and a memoir, The Afterlife. He contributes short stories and personal essays to the New Yorker and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the American Academy in Berlin, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2013, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Robert Arellano (’91, ’94 MFA) is the author of six novels, including the web’s first interactive novel, Sunshine ’69, and the Edgar Award finalist Havana Lunar. He is Professor of Creative Writing and a founding faculty member of the Institute of New Writing\Ashland at Southern Oregon University.
M. Charles Bakst (’66) retired from the Providence Journal in 2008 after more than forty years as a reporter, editor, and political columnist. He grew up in Fall River, Massachusetts. His late mother, Anna Horvitz Bakst, was a member of the class of 1931. Bakst attended Phillips Academy, Andover, and received a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He and his wife, Elizabeth Feroe Bakst ’67, live in Providence.
Amy DuBois Barnett (’91) has shaped the pages and websites of Harper’s Bazaar, Essence, Teen People, Honey, and Ebony, where she is currently editor in chief of the oldest and largest African-American magazine in the country. Barnett has an MFA degree in creative writing from Columbia University. She is the author of the NAACP Image Award–nominated book Get Yours! How to Have Everything You Ever Dreamed of and More.
Lisa Birnbach (’78) has published twenty-two books, including The Official Preppy Handbook (1980) and True Prep (2010). She’s written for the New Yorker, Parade, New York, and other magazines. She was the Las Vegas bureau chief of Spy, and eventually its deputy editor. In addition to being a guest on many talk shows and writing for television comedy programs, Lisa was a correspondent for three years on The Early Show on CBS. The Lisa Birnbach Show, a daily syndicated radio program, won two Gracie Awards. She tweets at @LisaBirnbach.
Kate (née Al) Bornstein (’69) is an author, performance artist, playwright, and public speaker who has written several award-winning books in the field of women and gender studies, including Gender Outlaw and My Gender Workbook. Her 2006 book, Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws, is an underground bestseller that has propelled Kate into an international position of advocacy for marginalized youth.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (’95) is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Otis College of Art and Design.
Mary Caponegro (’83 AM) is the author of Tales from the Next Village, The Star Café, Five Doubts, The Complexities of Intimacy, and All Fall Down. She is the recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature. She has taught at Brown, RISD, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Syracuse University, and Bard College, where she holds the Richard B. Fisher Family Chair in Writing and Literature.
Susan Cheever (’65) is the author of E.E. Cummings: A Life and Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography. She is at work on a history of drinking in America. She has also published five novels and four memoirs. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and other publications, and she has been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Boston Globe Winship medal. She has taught at Brown, Yale, Columbia, Bennington, and elsewhere.
Brian Christian (’06) is the author of The Most Human Human, which was named a Wall Street Journal bestseller and a New Yorker favorite book of 2011, and is translated into ten languages. His writing appears in the Atlantic, Wired, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. Christian has been featured on The Daily Show, on Radiolab, and in Best American Science and Nature Writing. He lives in San Francisco.
Pamela Constable (’74) has been a newspaper reporter and foreign correspondent for nearly forty years. Since 1994, she has been on staff at the Washington Post, and before that she worked for the Boston Globe and the Baltimore Sun. She has reported from many parts of Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. She has written two books on contemporary Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, and coauthored a book on the Pinochet regime in Chile. She is also the founder of a veterinary clinic and shelter for stray animals in Afghanistan. She lives in northern Virginia.
Nicole Cooley (’88) grew up in New Orleans. She was a Comparative Literature concentrator at Brown and then attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received her degree in fiction. She has published four books of poems, most recently Breach (LSU Press) and Milk Dress (Alice James Books), and a novel. She lives outside of New York City with her husband and daughters and is the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College–City University of New York.
Dana Cowin (’82), editor in chief of Food & Wine magazine, oversees all aspects of this lifestyle brand, including books, tablet editions, and the website FoodandWine.com. She is devoted to many hunger-related causes and is on the board of City Harvest, Hot Bread Kitchen, and Wholesome Wave. Cowin lives in New York City with her husband, Barclay Palmer, and their two children.
Spencer R. Crew (’71) has served on the board of the Corporation of Brown University and as president of the Brown Alumni Association. He is Clarence J. Robinson Professor of History at George Mason University. During his more than twenty-five years as a museum professional he was the director of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, and president of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Edwidge Danticat (’93 MFA) is the author of four novels, Breath, Eyes, Memory; The Farming of Bones; The Dew Breaker; and Clair of the Sea Light. Her other works include Krik? Krak!; Brother, I’m Dying; and Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Her numerous accolades include a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, an American Book Award, being named a National Book Award finalist (twice), and a MacArthur Fellowship.
Dilip D’Souza (’84 ScM) spent years in software before realizing his passion: writing. He has written for Caravan, the Hindustan Times, the Daily Beast, and Newsweek; his books include The Curious Case of Binayak Sen and Roadrunner: An Indian Quest in America. Among his several writing awards is the Newsweek/Daily Beast Prize. Home, with wife Vibha and children Surabhi and Sahir, is Bombay. Cats Cleo and Aziz rule.
David Ebershoff (’91) is the author of three novels, The Danish Girl, Pasadena, and The Nineteenth Wife, as well as a story collection, The Rose City. He is an executive editor at Random House and teaches graduate writing at Columbia University. He lives in New York.
Jeffrey Eugenides (’82) is the author of three novels, The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex (which was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), and The Marriage Plot.
Richard Foreman (’59) has directed and designed and often written over seventy plays at major theaters here and abroad. Eight collections of his plays have been published, plus book-length studies of his work in the USA, Germany, and Japan. His awards include a MacArthur “Genius” grant, a PEN Master American Dramatist Award, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters award for literature, and he is an officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France.
Amity Gaige (’95) is the author of three novels, O My Darling, The Folded World, and Schroder, which was published by Twelve Books/Hachette in 2013. Named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and the New York Times, among other publications, Schroder has been translated into fourteen languages. Her short stories, reviews, and essays have appeared in numerous publications. She lives in Hartford, Connecticut, and is the current Visiting Writer at Amherst College.
Robin Green (’67) is a TV writer-producer who lives in New York City with her husband/writing partner, Mitchell Burgess, amidst shelves full of industry awards for their work on Northern Exposure and The Sopranos, among other shows. She likes to think that John Hawkes would have enjoyed some of it. If he even had a television . . .
Andrew Sean Greer (’92, ’95 MFA) is the bestselling author of five works of fiction, most recently The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells. He has been an NEA and New York Public Library Cullman Fellow and received a PEN/O’Henry Prize, a California Book Award, a Northern California Book Award, and a New York Public Library Young Lions Award. He lives in San Francisco.
Christina Haag (’82) is an actress and the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Come to the Edge. Winner of the Ella Dickey Literacy Award, she has been published in the Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and Hamptons magazine. She received the Dramalogue Award for Outstanding Actress and continues to work in film, theater, and television. A graduate of Juilliard, she lives in New York City and is currently working on a novel.
Joan Hilty (’89) is the creator of the long-running comic strip Bitter Girl; her artwork has also appeared in the Village Voice, the Advocate, and Ms. magazine. As a senior editor at DC Comics, she acquired numerous award-winning graphic novels. She currently develops and packages books as editor in chief of PageTurner Graphic Novels and teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art. “The Times” is dedicated to Stephen Gendin ’89. Special thanks to Louise Sloan ’88, Rebecca Hensler ’91, and Angela Taylor ’88.
A. J. Jacobs (’90) is the editor at large for Esquire magazine, an NPR contributor, and the author of four New York Times bestselling books, including The Year of Living Biblically, The Know-It-All, and Drop Dead Healthy. He lives in New York with his wife and sons. He asks that you pardon his French.
Sean Kelly (’84) has produced thousands of humorous images on politics, business, and entertainment for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Businessweek, Rolling Stone, and the Atlantic, among other publications. His visual commentaries have appeared frequently on the op-ed page of the New York Times and he has won top awards from the Society of Illustrators and the National Cartoonists Society.
David Klinghoffer (’87) is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute in Seattle. His most recent book, a collaboration with Senator Joe Lieberman, is The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath. His other books include Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History, The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism, and the spiritual memoir The Lord Will Gather Me In. A former literary editor of National Review magazine, Klinghoffer lives on Mercer Island, Washington, with his wife and children.
Jincy Willett Kornhauser (’78, ’81 AM), the widow of Professor Edward Kornhauser, is the author of short stories and novels, including Jenny and the Jaws of Life, Winner of the National Book Award, The Writing Class, and Amy Falls Down, all published by St. Martin’s Press.
Marie Myung-Ok Lee (’86), author of Somebody’s Daughter, has a new novel due out from Simon & Schuster in 2015. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Slate, the Guardian, the Nation, the Atlantic, and Salon. She was the first recipient of a creative writing Fulbright Fellowship to South Korea and has won the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts fiction fellowship and the Richard Margolis Award for social justice reporting. She has taught at Yale and Brown and currently teaches at Columbia University, where she is the Our Word Writer-in-Residence.
David Levithan (’94) is the author of Boy Meets Boy, The Lover’s Dictionary, Every Day, Two Boys Kissing, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (written with Rachel Cohn), and Will Grayson, Will Grayson (written with John Green). At Brown, he was an editor of the College Hill Independent. He is now a publisher and editorial director at Scholastic, where he started as an intern between his sophomore and junior years of college, thanks to a listing in the Brown career library.
Mara Liasson (’77) is the national political correspondent for National Public Radio. She is also a contributor to the Fox News programs Fox News Sunday and Special Report. Before coming to Washington in 1985 to work for NPR she was a radio and television reporter in San Francisco and a reporter for the Vineyard Gazette on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and two children.
Lois Lowry (’58) is a mother and grandmother. She has been a journalist and photographer and is currently a writer of fiction, primarily for young people. Of her forty-three published books, two have received the Newbery Medal, awarded each year for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children. She lives in Maine.
Ira C. Magaziner (’69) is vice chairman and CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative and chairman of the Clinton Clean Energy Initiative, both of which he cofounded with former US president Bill Clinton. From 1993 through 1998, he served as senior advisor to President Clinton for policy development at the White House. Prior to his White House appointment, he built two successful international consulting firms, advising governments on economic development and corporations on business strategy. Mr. Magaziner graduated from Brown University as valedictorian in 1969 and attended Balliol College, Oxford, as a Rhodes scholar.
Madeline Miller (’00, ’01 AM) concentrated in Classics at Brown University. She also studied in the Dramaturgy department at Yale School of Drama. For the past decade she has taught Latin, Greek, and Shakespeare to high school students. The Song of Achilles, her first novel, won the 2012 Orange Prize and was a New York Times bestseller. Her essays have appeared in publications including the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, Lapham’s Quarterly, and NPR.org. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she teaches and writes.
Christine Montross (’06 MD, ’07 MMS) is the author of Falling into the Fire: A Psychiatrist’s Encounters with the Mind in Crisis and Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab. She is an assistant professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University and also a practicing inpatient psychiatrist. She received her undergraduate degrees and a master of fine arts in poetry from the University of Michigan.
Rick Moody (’83) is the author of five novels, three collections of stories, a memoir, and a collection of essays, On Celestial Music. He is a music critic at The Rumpus, and he teaches at NYU and Yale.
Jonathan Mooney (’00) is a dyslexic writer and activist who did not learn to read until he was twelve years old. He holds an honors degree in English literature from Brown and is the author of The Short Bus and Learning Outside the Lines. Jonathan is founder and president of Project Eye-To-Eye, a mentoring and advocacy nonprofit organization for students with learning differences. Project Eye-To-Eye currently has twenty chapters in thirteen states, working with over three thousand students, parents, and educators nationwide.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips (’98 AM, ’03 PhD) is the author of The Ground and When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness and has translated Ariadne and the Grotesque Labyrinth from Catalan to English. He is a recipient of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, the GLCA New Writers Award for Poetry, and a Whiting Award, and has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and an NAACP Image Award. He is a regular contributor to the Paris Review and a writer for Artforum. He teaches at Stony Brook University.
Dawn Raffel (’79) is the author of four books, most recently The Secret Life of Objects.
Bill Reynolds (’68), a former Brown basketball cocaptain and All-Ivy player, is a longtime sports columnist at the Providence Journal. He’s also the author of nine books and coauthor of three more, three of which have been on bestseller lists. One became the background for the award-winning ESPN movie Unguarded.
Marilynne Robinson (’66) is the author of Gilead (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award), Home (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Orange Prize for fiction), and the modern classic Housekeeping, which won the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award for First Fiction and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the Academy of American Arts and Letters. Her nonfiction books include Mother Country, The Death of Adam, Absence of Mind, and When I Was a Child I Read Books. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Sarah Ruhl (’97, ’01 MFA) is a playwright whose plays have been produced worldwide. Her works include Stage Kiss; In the Next Room, or the vibrator play; The Clean House; Passion Play, a cycle; Dead Man’s Cell Phone; Melancholy Play; Eurydice; Dear Elizabeth; and Late: a cowboy song. A two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, she also received the Whiting Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a PEN Center award. She received her MFA at Brown, where she studied under Paula Vogel. She lives in Brooklyn.
Ariel Sabar (’93) is an award-winning journalist whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, Smithsonian, and Harper’s. His debut book, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. His second book, Heart of the City, was called a “beguiling romp” (New York Times) and an “engaging, moving and lively read” (Toronto Star). Visit his website at www.arielsabar.com.
Joanna Scott (’85 AM) is the author of eleven works of fiction, including the novels Follow Me, Tourmaline, Arrogance, and De Potter’s Grand Tour. Her essays and stories have appeared in the Nation, the New York Times, Conjunctions, Black Clock, the Paris Review, and other journals. She is the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at the University of Rochester.
Jeff Shesol (’91), a Rhodes scholar (Oxford University ’93), created the comic strip Thatch for the Brown Daily Herald. It was nationally syndicated from 1994 to 1998, appearing daily in more than 150 newspapers. Jeff was a speechwriter for Bill Clinton and is a founding partner of West Wing Writers. He is also the author of Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court and Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud That Defined a Decade. Jeff and his wife, Rebecca Epstein ’92, live in Washington, DC, with their two children.
David Shields (’78) is the author of fifteen books, including, most recently, Salinger, co-written with Shane Salerno. Reality Hunger was named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead was a New York Times bestseller, and Black Planet was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Shields’s work has been translated into twenty languages.
Krista Tippett (’83) is the Peabody Award–winning creator, executive producer, and host of public radio’s On Being. She was the New York Times stringer in divided Berlin and special assistant to the US ambassador to West Germany. She has an MDiv from Yale University. She is the author of Speaking of Faith and the New York Times bestseller Einstein’s God.
Alfred Uhry (’58) is one of very few writers to receive an Academy Award, Tony Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize, all for dramatic writing. His plays and musicals include The Robber Bridegroom (a musical based on Eudora Welty’s story), The Last Night of Ballyhoo, Parade, and Driving Miss Daisy (play and screenplay). His additional screenplays include Mystic Pizza and Rich in Love. He is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Afaa Michael Weaver (Michael S. Weaver, ’87 AM) is the author of The Government of Nature (University of Pittsburgh Press), his twelfth collection of poetry. He is also a playwright. In 1987, his full-length play Rosa was his graduate thesis in Brown’s creative writing program. The recipient of Pew and NEA fellowships, as well as a Fulbright, he also has two Pushcart Prizes. He holds the Alumnae Chair at Simmons College.
Meg Wolitzer (’81) is the author of novels including The Interestings, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, The Wife, and Sleepwalking, among others. Her short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize. In the fall of 2013, along with singer-songwriter Suzzy Roche, Meg Wolitzer was a guest artist in the Princeton Atelier program at Princeton University.