Faculty – New Paltz Creative Writing

KRISTOPHER JANSMA

Associate Professor, Director of Creative Writing

M.F.A, Columbia

Kristopher Jansma is the author of the forthcoming novel Our Narrow Hiding Places (Ecco, 2024), as well as Why We Came to the City, and The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (Viking/Penguin). His nonfiction book, Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers will be out with Quirk Books in 2024.

Kristopher is the winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the recipient of an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His short fiction, distinguished in The Best American Short Stories 2016 has been published in The Sun, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Story, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. His nonfiction, noted in The Best American Essays 2014, has been published in the New York Times, The Sun, America Magazine, The Center for Fiction, The Millions, The Rumpus, Lithub, Salon, Real Simple, The Believer, and Electric Literature.

HEINZ INSU FENKL

Full Professor

M.A., UC Davis

HEINZ INSU FENKL is a writer, translator, folklorist, and editor. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in creative writing and literature for the English department with courses cross-listed in Asian Studies, Philosophy, and Religion. He is known internationally for his collection of Korean folktales and his translations of contemporary Korean fiction, classical Buddhist texts, and North Korean comics. His translation of the 17^th-century Koran Buddhist classic, The Nine Cloud Dream, by Kim Man-jung, was published by Penguin Classics in 2019. He is also the author of the novel Memories of My Ghost Brother (Dutton, 1996), a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist and a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection. “Five Arrows,” an excerpt from his most recent novel, Skull Water (Spiegel & Grau, 2023) was first published in The New Yorker. His most recent translation is a collection of short stories and novellas by the South Korean director, Lee Chang-dong, who is best known for the film Burning.

TIMOTHY LIU

Assistant Professor

M.A., University of Houston

Timothy Liu (Liu Ti Mo) was born in 1965 in San Jose, California to immigrant parents from Mainland China. He is the author of twelve books of poems, including Of Thee I Sing, selected by Publishers Weekly as a 2004 Book-of-the-Year; Say Goodnight, a 1998 PEN Open Book Margins Award; and Vox Angelica, which won the 1992 Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. He has also edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry.

Translated into a dozen languages, Liu’s poems have appeared in such places as Best American Poetry, Bomb, Kenyon Review, The Nation, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, Virginia Quarterly Review and The Yale Review. His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.

AARON RICCIARDI

Visiting Assistant Professor

MFA, Playwriting: Indiana University

Aaron writes plays and musicals about people who are unable to communicate with each other successfully or healthily, and he often covers perception, delusion, cult behavior, abuse, and triangular relationships. His work is political but accessible and funny, and it often experiments with form. His plays and musicals include The Star Killers, Only Child, A Bushel and a Peck, Nice Nails, The Travels, and Hanukkah Harriet, which is published and licensed by Stage Partners. His work has been produced and developed by Clubbed Thumb, the Playwrights’ Center, the New York Musical Festival, Jewish Theatre of Bloomington, Stages Bloomington, and the BMI Workshop. Awards and residencies include the Clubbed Thumb Constitution Commission, Clubbed Thumb Early-Career Writers’ Group, Playwrights’ Center Core Apprenticeship, BMI Advanced Musical Theatre Workshop, and Roundabout Space Jam. Aaron graduated from the Theatre program at Northwestern University, where he studied playwriting under Laura Schellhardt, and he received his MFA in Playwriting from Indiana University, where he studied under Peter Gil-Sheridan. Aaron is on faculty at SUNY New Paltz and Manhattan School of Music. www.aaronricciardi.com

CAROL GOODMAN

Carol Goodman is the author of twenty-five novels, including The Lake of Dead Languages, The Seduction of Water, which won the 2003 Hammett Prize, The Widow’s House, which won the 2018 Mary Higgins Clark Award, and The Night Visitors, which won the 2020 Mary Higgins Clark Award. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family and teaches literature and writing at The New School and SUNY New Paltz.

CLAIRE HERO

Claire Hero is the author of four books of poetry, including Sing, Mongrel and Dollyland. Her recent short fiction and poetry have appeared in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, Potomoc Review, Prairie Fire, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere.

KIM WOZENCRAFT

M.F.A. Literature and Writing, Columbia University

Neglect (Arcade/Simon and Schuster) is Kim Wozencraft’s latest novel. Wozencraft has authored six, including the internationally bestselling Rush, which was adapted into a film starring Jennifer Jason Leigh. Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays, the Los Angeles Times, and Texas Monthly, as well as in various literary journals and anthologies.