Faculty S-Z

Sarah M. Sala is the author of Devil's Lake (Tolsun Books 2020), which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. She encourages experimenting with radical revision to forge surprising new connections within a draft. In addition, she aims to create an inclusive classroom because we all benefit from each other’s knowledge and experience. She received her BA in English literature and creative writing at the University of Michigan and her MFA in Poetry from New York University. She is the founder of Office Hours Poetry Workshop, and is currently at work on Migrainer, a lyric essay examining the interstices of migraine and creativity.

Leeore Schnairsohn holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University, with a dissertation on Osip Mandelstam. His fiction, reviews, and translations have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Painted Bride Quarterly, Big City Lit, The Write Launch, the Slavic and East European Journal, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, Portals, and elsewhere. 

Brian Schwartz is an essayist and fiction writer whose work has been published in a variety of literary and scholarly journals, including Washington Square, Harvard Review and Rhetoric Review. His writing classes foster a collaborative spirit through peer workshops emphasizing that “audience” is not a shadowy lineup of expert judges, but a community of interested, informed learners. In his classes, writing and revision are tools for moving closer to a dynamic account of students' evolving views. Schwartz received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (fiction) from U.C. Irvine and a Ph.D. in English Education from New York University. He has been part of the Expository Writing Program at N.Y.U. since 2003. 

Megan Shea is a Clinical Associate Professor and Faculty Mentor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, where she teaches in the Tisch School of the Arts. Dr. Shea is currently finishing her first book Tragic Resistance: Feminist Agency in Performance, which is compelled by performers and performances that explode gender norms for the purpose of gaining feminist agency. Her articles on feminist performance have been published in Theatre Journal and The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. She also researches creative and anti-oppressive pedagogy and has published research on these subjects in Theatre Topics.  Professor Shea is an actor, director, and playwright; she has performed with Title:Point Productions and Hudson Valley Shakespeare festival. Her gender-bending play Penelope and Those Dang Suitors was selected as a 2018 winner in Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s ten-minute play contest.  She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family and has worked diligently to become a Level 41 Pokemon Go player.

Normandy Sherwood has been teaching in the Expository Writing Program since 2012. She has taught in Tandon and Tisch, and is now serving as EWP's Assistant Director for Tisch. In addition to her teaching, Normandy is a playwright, costumer, director and performer. Her plays include Beast Visit, Madame Lynch, Tiny Hornets, Permanent Caterpillar, and The Golden Veil and they have been presented in NYC at The New Ohio Theatre, The Public Theater, The Kitchen, Dixon Place, The Brick and more. She and Craig Flanagin make no-wave music driven spectacles with their company, The Drunkard’s Wife and play together in the band God Is My Co-Pilot. She was a co-Artistic Director of the OBIE-award-winning National Theater of the United States of America (2000-2017, R.I.P.). She is a 2020-2023 HARP artist in residence at Here Arts Center, developing a show called Psychic Self Defense. She was a 2018 Fellow in the Target Margin Theater Institute and has been an artist in residence at MacDowell, Yaddo, Millay Arts, NACL and more. She has been awarded grants to support her creative work from NYSCA, ART-NY, the Mental Insight Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. As a costumer, she has designed for Rachel Chavkin, Tina Satter, Young Jean Lee, Faye Driscoll (BESSIE Award, 2009) and many more. She has created two books with Illustrator Jesse Hawley-- A New Guide to Rhetorical Gesture and Action (introduced by James Stanley) with 53rd State Press and ANIMALS VS. Furniture with Ugly Duckling Presse. She has an MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College, and BA from Gallatin here at NYU. Normandy can be reached at nrs214@nyu.edu.

Born and raised in Houston, Texas, Michael Shum eventually found himself dealing poker in a dead-end casino in Lake Stevens, Washington. Two doctorates bookend this strange turn of events: the first in Psychology from Northwestern, and the second in English from the University of Tennessee. Along the way, Michael spent a dozen years in Chicago, touring the country as a rave DJ, and three years in Corvallis, Oregon, where he received his MFA in Fiction Writing. He resides in NYC with the writer Jaclyn Watterson, their child, and two cats.

Noel Sikorski is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing Program. Her poems have appeared in American Poets Magazine, Georgetown Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and The Bellevue Literary Review.

Leah Souffrant (MFA, PhD), is the author of Entanglements: Threads woven from history, memory, and the body (2023) and Plain Burned Things: A Poetics of the Unsayable (2017). Her work as a writer and artist is informed by interdisciplinary studies in 20th century and contemporary literature, feminist theory, aesthetics, and translation. At NYU, Leah Souffrant has taught Writing The Essay, Advanced College Essay, Writing Tutorial, Intersections: Writing for Scholarly Publics, and a seminar on Poetics of the Unsayable, and she serves as a mentor in the Writing Tutors Program. Prof. Souffrant can be reached at ljs17@nyu.edu.

College writing classes, for me, are a microcosm of all intellectual work: by asking questions about the unfamiliar in the context of the familiar, reconsidering and explaining our thinking along the way, we gradually develop expertise. I’ve been teaching like this for over fifteen years at universities (here in the US and abroad), and most of my working life these days is dedicated to teaching. I come at it, though, from a creative-writing background (I got my Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Pittsburgh) so my students and I frequently experiment, improvise, and have fun with class activities and assignments. My own recent creative projects include translations of contemporary poetry between Spanish and English, and a bilingual adaptation of a Shakespeare play. In the past, I’ve written for magazines as well as published essays and poems in literary journals such as AGNI, Fourth Genre, North American Review, and Tin House. I’ve received teaching awards from the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh and this program, Expository Writing, at NYU. My work has also been among the notable selections in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing.

Avia Tadmor holds an MFA in Poetry and Literary Translation from Columbia University and a BA in Psychology from Harvard University. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in The New Republic, New England Review, Iowa Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. Her research appears in the Journal of Palliative Medicine and the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry. Prior to joining NYU, Avia co-directed the Medical Humanities writing courses at Columbia University’s Undergraduate Writing Program. In the past, she taught creative writing at Gilda’s Club, a day center for individuals affected by cancer, and directed the Columbia Artist/Teachers program, promoting no-cost arts education in schools and community organizations in NYC. Avia received a Gregory Djanikian Scholarship in poetry from The Adroit Journal. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from Yaddo, The Vermont Studio Center, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation/Bread Loaf Writer’s Workshop Series.

Kimberly Thomas specializes in composition and rhetoric, second language acquisition, English as a Second Language pedagogy, and Second Language (L2) writing. She received her Ph.D. from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she studied rhetoric and composition and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, and her M.A. in linguistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before joining the Expository Writing Program, she taught English language, academic literacy development, English literature, and composition courses at Temple University, Indiana University Bloomington, Greenville Technical College, Lander University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and trained pre-service and secondary school teachers as an English Language Fellow with the U.S. Department of State in Malawi. At NYU, she volunteers in the Office of Residential Life and Housing Services, the Office of Global Awards, and mentors high school students in K-12 STEM Education at the Tandon School of Engineering. Her current research examines racial identity, mentoring, and the role of culture and literacy in professionalization. 

When I matriculated through undergrad and graduate school, I was fortunate enough to encounter Professors who taught me what it meant to be a teacher. What I learned from Professors is that students are makers. They learn. They grapple. They make decisions. I try my very best to learn with students. As they learn, grapple, and make decisions, I, too, am doing the same. My teaching has always been deeply rooted in understanding the human condition; how we construct, think through problems, and develop philosophical outcomes all tells a valuable story about us. I stand for inclusivity. In knowing this, my lessons in and out of the classroom are framed to give voice to marginalized groups within science and engineering. To that end, I want to continue emulating my old Professors so that students may have the opportunity to enhance their voices in my classroom.

Michael Tyrell, a Clinical Professor, is the author of the poetry collections The Arsonist's Letters, The Wanted, and Phantom Laundry. With Julia Spicher Kasdorf, he edited the anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn. His poems have appeared in AGNI, The Best American Poetry, BOMB, The Iowa Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of NYU and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has worked as an actor at the New York Fringe Festival and HB Studio, on television, and in several short films.

Zach Udko studied at Stanford University (BA and MA, English) and NYU (MFA, Dramatic Writing; MA, Applied Psychology). He has written and directed shows in New York and the UK, and has contributed to Condé Nast Traveler, Christie's, British Airways’ High Life Magazine, Backstage West, and The Huffington Post. Professor Udko has served as the Coordinator of the NYU College Writing Workshop for the past 7 years and as the Faculty Affiliate for the "Laughing Matters" Comedy Explorations Community since 2005. He is the 2022 recipient of the departmental Teaching Innovation Award, and he is also a psychotherapist in Manhattan.

Joe Vallese began teaching in the Expository Writing Program in 2006 while earning his Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from NYU. In 2013, he became founding director of a liberal arts college program in a women's correctional facility for the Bard Prison Initiative, where he oversaw three graduating classes and, as reentry coordinator, helped dozens of formerly incarcerated students find housing and enroll in transfer and graduate programs. Joe returned to EWP in 2018, specializing in working with international students, though he also frequently teaches sections of Writing the Essay. Joe's classes are specifically organized around acts of conversation -- in-class conversation, conversations between students and the texts they're working with, rhetorical conversations between texts, and individualized conversations between student and teacher in the form of written feedback and questions on assignments and essay drafts. Joe's fiction, creative nonfiction, and pop culture criticism appear in a variety of publications including The Rumpus, VICE, and Backstage. Joe has been a Pushcart Prize nominee and named a Notable in Best American Essays. He is editor of It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror Film (Feminist Press, 2022), an anthology of personal essays by queer and trans writers reflecting on the relationship between horror movies and queer identity and experience. 

Christina Van Houten specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and culture, with an emphasis on late modernism. Other research interests include critical and feminist theory and critical regionalism. Recent work has been published in Comparative Literature Studies, Women’s Studies, and Politics and Culture.

Christopher Wall (BA, Dartmouth College, MFA New York University) writes plays, lyrics, and essays. He was commissioned by New World Symphony to write a mixed-genre play about what it’s like to live with PTSD. His play Dreams of the Washer King premiered Off Broadway and was subsequently produced in LA. Songs from his musical The God of In-Between, co-written with Howard Fishman, have been performed at Joe’s Pub and other venues across the city.

He was a fellow in nonfiction at the Norman Mailer Center, and his essays have appeared in Longform, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Missouri Review, Poets & Writers, The Gettysburg Review, and other magazines. Three works have been cited as a Notable Essay of the Year in the Best American Essays anthology. He was interviewed by Phillip Lopate on the Leonard Lopate Show and read from his prizewinning essay “The Size of the Room.” He enjoys innovating in the classroom and has developed a progression that allows Tisch students to do research into their own creative process. He currently teaches at Bard College and New York University, where he was the recipient of a Teaching Design Award for innovative teaching approaches in 2021. Find out what he’s working on these days at www.christopherwall.org.

Sara Wallace is a Clinical Professor in the Expository Writing Program. As a teacher, she emphasizes workshop and peer review in a supportive environment. She is the author of The Rival (selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize) and the chapbook Edge (selected for The Center for Book Arts Poetry Chapbook Competition). Her poetry has appeared in such publications as Agni, Hanging Loose, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, Yale Review, and others. A recent participant in the Festival Internacional de Poesia (Santiago, Chile) and a finalist for a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, she is a recipient of grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts and the Millay Colony for the Arts. 

Justin Warner is a playwright, lyricist, librettist, and journalist. His plays have been produced throughout the US, UK, and Canada. He is a recent finalist for the Kleban Prize in Musical Theater, the Sundance Theater Lab, and the Jonathan Larson Grants, and is writing the libretto for a musical-theater adaptation of Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree, currently in development. Previously, Justin was a longtime staff writer, editor, and audio producer for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and won a Peabody Award for his work on a National Science Foundation-funded children's radio show. He was a founding member of DC's Washington Improv Theater, and has written for New Scientist, Popular Science, American Theatre, and McSweeney’s, among other publications.

Justin's teaching approach emphasizes collaboration, spontaneity, and taking unusual paths to any destination.  He frames essay structure in terms of storytelling, particularly plays and screenplays, and encourages students to write concisely, specifically, and vividly, but most importantly, in the best version of their own natural style.

Joshua Ewing Weber is the co-writer of the forthcoming feature films Focus Puller and Mission Road. His short fiction has appeared in Concepts and Elysian Fields. A Senior Language Lecturer in the Expository Writing Program, he holds a B.A. from Southern Methodist University and an MFA in fiction from NYU.

Laura Weinert-Kendt is a writer and Clinical Associate Professor at NYU. Her articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Newsday, and Back Stage West. Her fiction has appeared in Witness and The Mechanics' Institute Review. At NYU, she created the course Writing in Community, which pairs college writing mentors with NYC high school students. She also serves as a Writing in the Disciplines consultant. In 2012, she received NYU’s Golden Dozen Teaching Award.

Greg Weiss has been teaching in the Expository Writing Program since 2014 and is the author of the poetry collection Interstate. Greg can be reached at at gw50@nyu.edu.

Wil Weitzel received a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and an MFA in Fiction Writing from New York University Writers Workshop in Paris. His story collection, Nights From This Galaxy, was a finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and chosen by Electric Literature for its Must-Read Debut Short Story Collections of 2023. His stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Conjunctions, EPOCH, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and Prairie Schooner, among others. He received a New York City Emerging Writers Fellowship at the Center for Fiction and won the Washington Square Review Flash Fiction Award. His fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and been a finalist for the American Short Fiction Halifax Ranch Prize, and his creative nonfiction was recognized as notable in Best American Essays. He is currently at work on a novel focused on the natural world and connecting with other species.

Tana Wojczuk's debut biography, Lady Romeo: The Radical, Revolutionary Life of Charlotte Cushman, America's First Celebrity (Simon & Schuster / Avid Reader Press), was a finalist for a LAMBDA Literary Award, Publishing Triangle Award, and Marfield Prize in Arts Writing. The book received a starred Kirkus review and was named an Amazon Editor's Pick, American Library Association's Over the Rainbow longlist, and one of Get Literary's Most Anticipated Reads of 2020. She is nuts about Shakespeare and once got to wax poetic about Lady Macbeth on Rhiannon Giddens' opera podcast Aria Code. She writes about books, theater, film, and mental health at: The New York Times, New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Tin House, Slate and elsewhere. An NYU Global Research fellowship gave her the opportunity to research her first book at NYU's campus in Florence, Italy. She previously worked as a course director in Columbia University's Undergraduate Writing Program, where she developed themed courses in American Studies and Writing: Law and Justice. She joined the NYU EWP Faculty in 2017 and was a 2019 NYU Global Research Fellow. She is a contributing editor at Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics.

Amanda Yesnowitz was born, bred, and bageled in Brooklyn. As a musical theatre lyricist, she has won major accolades like the Kleban Prize, Jonathan Larson Award, Dramatists Guild Fellowship, and Berklee Alumni Achievement distinction. Her work has been widely produced, most recently at the legendary Goodspeed. She's also a New York Times crossword puzzle constructor and competitive speed solver. She loves language, like love loves it. In the classroom, puns abound. Affectionately dubbing her courses Tischful Thinking, Amanda runs a fairly analog operation (pen! paper! discussion!) that values the relationship between work and play. Her prompts foreground voice and creativity, and her guidance shepherds students to cultivate their own style. Writing the Essay may be a required course, but for some students it's a-manda-tory one.

Natasha Zaretsky received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Princeton University. Her research interests include human rights, migration, and memory in the Americas and the Jewish diaspora. Her latest book, Acts of Repair (Rutgers University Press 2021), examines transitional justice and the politics of memory in Argentina through the lived experiences of ordinary people facing the aftermath of genocide and political violence. She also co-edited Landscapes of Memory and Impunity (A. Levine; Brill 2015) and her articles have appeared in Religious Studies and Theology, The Tablet, Global Americans, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and Foreign Affairs. A former Fulbright scholar, she has also been awarded an NYU Global Research Institute Fellowship and received a 2020 NYU Arts and Science Teaching Innovation Award. At EWP, she currently coordinates the Senior Honors Thesis Writing Group Program, and has served on the Diversity and Inclusion Committee, the Professional Development Committee, and the Steering Committee, as well as organizing the Advanced College Essay Student Symposium. In addition, she leads the Truth in the Americas program as a Visiting Scholar at the Rutgers University Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights. She loves teaching writing and has also taught first-year seminars on Borderlands and Belonging in the Americas. In addition to writing and teaching, she is currently working on a documentary film, 1000 Mondays, about memory and social justice in Argentina.  For her latest projects, please visit www.natashazaretsky.com.