Session I Faculty

Sybil Baker is the author of five works of fiction, including Apparitions (2024 IPPY Gold winner), and of the essay collection, Immigration Essays. Recent work has appeared in Panorama, The Critical Flame, Drunken Boat, and The Compressed Journal for the Arts. A UC Foundation Professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and Director of the Meacham Writers' Workshop, Sybil received a 2017 Individual Artist's Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission.

Kate Bolick is an author, journalist, and lecturer in the English Department at Yale University. Her first book, the best-selling Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2015 and translated into multiple languages. Her journalism and criticism appear in The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and Vogue, among other publications.

Mary Collins has written award-winning nonfiction books on America's sedentary culture, the Wright brothers, National Public Radio, a memoir co-authored with her transgender son. She’s written for Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic, the Times, Lit Hub and elsewhere. She is currently working on a book that involves having conversations with her dead relatives (because it's so hard to speak to the living). This is her eighth year (or ninth, if you count COVID) teaching at Yale.

Trey Ellis is an American Book Award Winning novelist, two-time Emmy and Peabody winning filmmaker, NAACP Image award winning playwright, essayist and Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.  He is the author of Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single-Fatherhood, Home Repairs and Right Here, Right Now.  His acclaimed first novel, Platitudes, was reissued by Northeastern University Press along with his influential essay, “The New Black Aesthetic.”

Derek Green is the author of the books New World Order and Jackson State. As a screenwriter, he has worked for Warner Bros Studios and Carousel Productions, and has co-created, written, and presented television projects at major studios including HBO, AMC, Sony Productions, and Jerry Bruckheimer Television. Derek teaches at Yale, where he currently serves as director of the creative writing program.

Lisa Page is co-editor of We Wear The Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America,  (Beacon Press).  Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Crisis, Playbill, Virginia Quarterly Review, Playboy, The Washington Post Book World, American Fiction and other publications.  She is assistant professor of English at George Washington University and Director of Creative Writing. She previously served as Interim Director of Africa Studies. She lives with her family outside Washington, DC.

Adam Sexton is a Senior Lecturer and Course Director in the English Department at Yale, where he teaches The Craft of Fiction and the Creative Writing Concentration Senior Project.  His books include Master Class in Fiction Writing: Techniques from Austen, Hemingway, and Other Greats, as well as the forthcoming Hang Us in the Louvre: How Pop Music Became Art.  He has taught writing at Columbia, NYU, and the New School.

Sergio Troncoso is most recently the author of Nobody’s Pilgrims. He also wrote A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son, which Luis Alberto Urrea called "a world-class collection" and Junot Díaz hailed as “a masterwork.” Troncoso edited Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds, which received a starred review from Kirkus. A past president of the Texas Institute of Letters, Troncoso was inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame.