News
This Is Who We Are is a series featuring Columbia School of the Arts professors, covering careers, pedagogy, and art-making. Here, we talk with Lecturer in Discipline Lars Horn about his unconventional journey from language loss to writing, his teaching philosophy, and the value of embracing specificity.
Writing alum Kimberly King Parsons '10 has won the 2025 Ken Kesey Award for Fiction at the Oregon Book Awards for her debut novel We Were the Universe (Knopf, 2024).
Columbia University School of the Arts alum Marie Howe ’83 has been awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton & Company).
Inside a classroom at Columbia’s Kraft Center, students aren't only reconstructing their memories through writing—they're also building remembered worlds so that readers can explore them.
In his first book, American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest (Pantheon), alum Kyle Paoletta ’16, reaches back to the 17th century desert—Albuquerque (where Paoletta grew up), Phoenix, Tucson, El Paso, and Las Vegas.
Adjunct Professor Alice Quinn has been a mainstay in Columbia’s Writing program for 35 years, and a defining figure in poetry for the last half century.
After celebrating the publication of four novels and one collection of short stories over the past ten years, Nonfiction alum and Adjunct Assistant Professor Catherine Lacey ’10 is publishing her debut work of nonfiction, The Möbius Book—a catalogue of the wreckage that ensued after a broken relationship, the broken trust of a shared mortgage, and her ensuing battle with depression.
In his fourth poetry collection, The Bear Wrestler (Saturnalia Books), Writing alum Robert Ostrom ’08 blurs fact and fiction, deception and truth.
Writing alum Latif Askia Ba ’23 recently published his second poetry collection, The Choreic Period, with Milkweed in January of 2025.
This Is Who We Are is a series featuring Columbia School of the Arts' professors, covering careers, pedagogy, and art-making. Here, we talk with Professor Alan Gilbert about finding poetry through music, the importance of discovering your own artistic links, and why pushing students beyond their comfort zones can lead them to unexpected horizons.
Writing alum Antoinette Cooper '20 examines the experiences of Black women's bodies in her debut poetry collection Unruly (Legacy Book Press, 2025).
