MFA in Creative Writing Creative Advisors 

Shalom Auslander 

Shalom Auslander is an internationally-acclaimed writer of fiction, non-fiction, stage, TV and film. His memoir Foreskin’s Lament was an international bestseller, his novel Hope: A Tragedy was a finalist for the James Thurber Award and his recent Feh was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He is the creator and writer of Showtime’s Happyish, and a long-time contributor to NPR’s This American Life. He has published fiction and essays in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, and GQ, among many others.

Joseph Cedar

Two time Academy Award-nominated filmmaker (for his films Footnote—2012 and Beaufort— 2008), Joseph Cedar is a recipient of Best Director award at the Berlin Film Festival and Best Screenplay award at the Cannes Film festival. Cedar wrote and directed Time of Favor (2001), Campfire (2004) Norman (2017), Our Boys (2019), the 10 episode limited series for HBO. He also recently directed the show Constellation for Apple TV+. 

Jessica Cohen

Jessica Cohen is an independent translator born in England, raised in Israel, and living in Denver. She translates contemporary Hebrew prose by authors such as Amos Oz and Etgar Keret, Ronit Matalon, and Maya Arad, as well as other creative workers including filmmakers Ari Folman and Nadav Lapid. In 2017, she shared the Man Booker International Prize with David Grossman, for her translation of A Horse Walks Into a Bar. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. 

Alex Edelman 

One of the most critically hailed comedians of his generation, Alex Edelman is best known for solo shows that blur the line between his stand-up comedy roots and narrative-driven storytelling. His last offering, Just for Us, played more than 500 performances all over the world, including on Broadway, before premiering as an HBO original comedy special in April of 2024 earning him a place on the Time 100 list, a Tony Award, and an Emmy award.

Ira Glass 

Ira Glass is the host and executive producer of the public radio program This American Life. The show is heard each week by three million people as a podcast and radio show. It has won the highest honors for journalistic and broadcasting excellence, including the Pulitzer Prize. 

Jane Hirshfield

Poet, co-translator, and essayist Jane Hirshfield’s most recent book is The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Knopf, 2023). Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and Columbia University’s Translation Center Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, et al. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected in 2019 into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Rachel Kadish

Rachel Kadish is an award-winning fiction writer and essayist. Her work has been read on National Public Radio and has appeared in The New York Times, Paris Review, and Ploughshares; her most recent novel, The Weight of Ink, was a U.S.A. Today bestseller and recipient of a National Jewish Book Award. She has been a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute, the Bellagio Center, and the Bogliasco Foundation, a Koret writer-in-residence at Stanford University, and a Fordham Jewish Studies Fellow at the New York Public Library. 

Ilya Kaminsky

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odesa, Ukraine and currently lives in New Jersey. He is the author of Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press) and Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press) as well as translator and editor of many other books. His work won the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and he was a finalist for the National Book Award. Kaminsky teaches at Princeton University. 

 Jodi Kantor 

Jodi Kantor is a Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter and author whose work reveals hidden truths about power. In 2017, Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the story of sexual abuse allegations against the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, setting off a global reckoning. Jodi’s current focus is one of our most critical, secretive institutions: the Supreme Court.

Nicole Krauss

Hailed by the New York Times as “one of America’s most important novelists and an international literary sensation,” and by the Financial Times as “one of the great novelists working today,” Nicole Krauss is the author of the international bestsellers, Man Walks Into a Room; Forest Dark; Great House, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Orange Prize; the Wingate Literary Prize-winning short story collection To Be a Man; and The History of Love. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories.

Alicia Ostriker

Alicia Ostriker is the author of 19 poetry collections and a leading feminist critic. She has been twice nominated for the National Book Award and twice received the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry. Her critical works include Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America, as well as studies of poetry and the Bible such as The Nakedness of the Fathers and For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book. Her recent poetry collections include The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems 2002-2019 and The Holy and Broken Bliss: Poems in Plague Time. Her work is widely translated. She served as New York State Poet Laureate and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Liev Shreiber 

Liev Schreiber is an acclaimed actor, director, and writer known for his powerful performances in film, TV, and theater. Dubbed “the finest American theater actor of his generation” by The New York Times, he has starred in Spotlight, Ray Donovan, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, The Manchurian Candidate, and Everything Is Illuminated. A dedicated humanitarian, he co-founded BlueCheck Ukraine and serves as a United24 ambassador. His work reflects a deep commitment to storytelling, advocacy, and cultural heritage.

Judith Shulevitz

Judith Shulevitz is a critic and contributing writer to The Atlantic and the author of The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time (2010). She was the founding culture editor of Slate and a founding editor of Lingua Franca and has been a columnist at The New York Times Book Review, Slate, The New Republic, and New York Magazine. She is currently writing a book for the Yale Jewish Lives series. You can find some of her recent essays here.

Regina Spektor

The Russian-Jewish-American singer, songwriter, pianist, and Grammy nominee gained commercial success with her Gold-certified LP Begin to Hope, featuring the Billboard Hot 100 single “Fidelity.” Her albums Far (2009) and What We Saw From the Cheap Seats (2012) both debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200. She has performed at The White House, on Broadway, Saturday Night Live, and contributed to many projects spanning music, film, and television.

Deborah Treisman 

Deborah Treisman has been the fiction editor at The New Yorker since 2003. She is the host of the award-winning New Yorker Fiction Podcast, and the editor of the anthologies 20 Under 40: Stories from The New Yorker and A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker: 1925–2025.