The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU has named its incoming class of fellows for the year 2015. The 20 new fellows—who include poet and memoirist Meghan O'Rourke, Paris Review editor Lorin Stein, and journalist Rebecca Traister—represent accomplished writers, critics, and scholars from a range of backgrounds.

The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU has named its incoming class of fellows for the year 2015. The 20 new fellows—who include poet and memoirist Meghan O'Rourke, Paris Review editor Lorin Stein, and journalist Rebecca Traister—represent accomplished writers, critics, and scholars from a range of backgrounds.

The NYIH recognizes these individuals, through lifetime appointments as fellows, for their outstanding achievement in individual fields—history, poetry, journalism, and literature, among others.

A full list of NYIH Fellows may be found at nyihumanities.org.

2015 Class of NYIH Fellows

NUAR ALSADIR is a psychoanalyst, writer, and poet. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Slate, Grand Street, Poetry London, and the Poetry Review, and a collection of her poems, More Shadow Than Bird, was published by Salt in 2012. She is on the faculty at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

JAMES ATLAS is the author of two biographies: Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (nominated for a National Book Award) and Bellow: A Biography. He is the founding editor of the Penguin Lives. A former editor and writer at the New York Times and staff writer at the New Yorker, Atlas is at work on a book entitled The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer's Tale.

LOUISE BERNIKOW writes about American women’s radical history, and has published two memoirs that feature herself and a four-legged companion with a Spanish name. Her books include Among Women, The World Split Open and Alone in America. She has been a U.S. Fulbright Fellow to Spain and a Lowenstein Fellow at the American Jewish Archives, as well as a founder of the Women & Society Seminar at Columbia University and the Women Writing Women’s Lives group at the CUNY Graduate School.

AVA CHIN is the author of Eating Wildly: Foraging for Life, Love, and the Perfect Meal (2014) and the editor of Split: Stories From a Generation Raised on Divorce. She was the New York Times’ “Urban Forager” from 2009 to 2013 and has written for the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Marie Claire, Saveur, the Village Voice, and Eating Well, among other publications. A poet and Chinatown activist, she is an associate professor of creative nonfiction and journalism at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island, and a contributing editor to the Offing literary magazine.

ROBYN CRESWELL is assistant professor of comparative literature at Yale University and poetry editor of the Paris Review. He is the translator of Abdelfattah Kilito’s The Clash of Images (New Directions, 2010) and Sonallah Ibrahim’s That Smell and Notes from Prison (New Directions, 2013). His essays and reviews have been published in Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, among other publications. A former fellow of the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library, he is the recipient of the 2013 Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism.

PETER FILKINS is a poet, translator, and the Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon's Rock. He has published four books of poetry, the most recent being The View We're Granted, co-winner of the 2014 Sheila Motton Best Book Award from the New England Poetry Club. His translations from German include Ingeborg Bachmann's collected poems, Darkness Spoken, and three novels by H.G. Adler, Panorama, The Journey, and The Wall. Filkins, who has been the recipient of a Berlin Prize and of fellowships from the James Merrill House, Leon Levy Center for Biography, and National Endowment for the Humanities, is currently at work on a biography of Adler, to be published by Oxford University Press.

MICHELLE GOLDBERG is a journalist and the author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award and the Ernesta Dinker Ballard Book Prize. She is a senior contributing writer at the Nation, and her work has also appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Newsweek, and the Washington Post. Her third book, The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Brought Yoga to the West, will be published by Knopf in June.

ANNA HOLMES has written and edited for numerous publications, including the New York Times, Newsweek, and the New Yorker online. She is the founder of the website Jezebel.com and the 2012 recipient of a Mirror Award for Best Commentary for her columns in the Washington Post. She is the editor of two books, including The Book of Jezebel, and works as a columnist for the New York Times Book Review and as an editor of Digital Voices at Fusion.

LUIS JARAMILLO is the author of The Doctor’s Wife, winner of the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Contest, an Oprah Book of the Week, and one of NPR’s Best Books of 2012. His work has also appeared in Open City, Gamers (Soft Skull Press), Tin House Magazine, H.O.W. Journal, and Chattahoochee Review, among other publications. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program at the New School, where he teaches fiction and is the co-editor of the Inquisitive Eater: New School Food.

DAPHNE MERKIN, a novelist and critic, has been a staff writer for the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. Her most recent publication is a collection of essays, The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontes, and the Importance of Handbags (FSG). She has also published a novel, Enchantment, and a prior collection of essays, Dreaming of Hitler: Passions & Provocations. Merkin teaches memoir writing at Hunter College's Writing Center.

DAVID MIKICS is the author of numerous books, including Slow Reading in a Hurried Age; The Annotated Emerson; and (with Stephen Burt) The Art of the Sonnet. His book Bellow's People will be published by W.W. Norton in 2016. A columnist for Tablet, he lives in Brooklyn and Houston, where he is John and Rebecca Moores Professor in the Honors College and the English Department at the University of Houston.

LAURA MILLER is a journalist and critic living in New York. She is a co-founder of Salon.com, where she is currently a staff writer. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, the Guardian, and the New York Times Book Review, where she wrote the “Last Word” column for two years. She is the author of The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia (Little, Brown, 2008) and editor of The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors (Penguin, 2000).

MEGHAN O’ROURKE is the author of the poetry collections Once and Halflife, and the memoir The Long Goodbye, about grieving in America. A poet, critic, and essayist, her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Harper's, Best American Poetry, and many other venues. She is currently at work on a book about the cultural implications of chronic illness.

MARC ROBINSON is Professor of English, Theater Studies, and American Studies at Yale University and Professor Adjunct of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the Yale School of Drama. He is the author of The American Play: 1787-2000 (winner of the 2009 George Jean Nathan Award) and The Other American Drama; and the editor of The Myopia and Other Plays by David Greenspan (winner of the 2012 Lambda Literary Award for Drama); The Theater of Maria Irene Fornes; and Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile. His articles and reviews have appeared in the TLS, the New Republic, the New York Times, and the Drama Review, among other publications.

DAMION SEARLS has translated 25 books from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch, mostly modern classics, from Proust to Patrick Modiano, Nietzsche to Elfriede Jelinek, Rilke, Hesse, Robert Walser, and Alfred Döblin. He edited Thoreau’s The Journal: 1837-61 for New York Review of Books Classics and is the author of What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, a book of short stories. He is currently the language columnist for the Paris Review Daily and is writing a history of the Rorschach test including the first biography of its creator, Hermann Rorschach (Crown Books, 2016).

ADAM SHATZ is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books and a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, the Nation, and other publications. He has reported from Algeria, Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon. He has been a visiting professor at New York University and a fellow at the Cullman Institute for Writers and Scholars. In 2016, he is publishing a collection of essays and reportage with Verso.

ILEENE SMITH is vice president and executive editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and editorial director of Jewish Lives, a series of interpretive biography published by Yale University Press. She is a former fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale, a fellow of Berkeley College at Yale, and a trustee of Austen Riggs Psychiatric Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

LORIN STEIN is the editor of the Paris Review. His criticism has appeared in the New York Review of Books and Harper's. His translations include works by Grégoire Bouillier, Michel Houellebecq, and Édouard Levé. He was for many years an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where he worked with such authors as Lydia Davis, Jonathan Franzen, Vivian Gornick, Richard Price, and James Wood. He is a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

CLIFFORD THOMPSON is a novelist and essayist. He received a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction in 2013 for Love for Sale and Other Essays, published by Autumn House Press, which will release his memoir, Twin of Blackness, in July. He is the author of the novel Signifying Nothing, and his essays on books, film, jazz, and American identity have appeared in the Threepenny Review, the Iowa Review, Cineaste, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Black Issues Book Review, among other publications. Thompson has taught at both Columbia University and NYU.

REBECCA TRAISTER is a journalist who covers women in politics, media and culture. Currently senior editor at the New Republic and contributing editor at Elle, she spent 10 years at Salon and has also written for the New York Times Magazine, the Nation, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. Her first book, Big Girls Don't Cry, about women in the 2008 election, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 and the winner of the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize. Her second book, about unmarried and late married women in the United States, will be published by Simon & Schuster in early 2016.

For all press inquiries -- including image requests for any of the new fellows -- contact Stephanie Steiker, New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU: 917.640.2122 or stephanie.steiker@nyu.edu.

About the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU
Founded in 1976, the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU has for almost four decades brought together a distinguished group of scholars and intellectuals for the purposes of fostering discussion concerning the role and aspirations of the humanities in individual work as well as in the greater civic life beyond the academy. It has since become a model for humanities centers on numerous campuses and in several cities. The roster of NYIH fellows comprises leaders across a variety of fields, from scholarly endeavors to the creative arts. Through public events, panels, and lectures, the NYIH has brought attention and focus to bear on topics of importance to the broader community, while its weekly fellows’ luncheon has for some forty years been a critical forum for the presentation and discussion of key projects by fellows and guest speakers.
 

Press Contact

James Devitt
James Devitt
(212) 998-6808