Creative Writing Faculty

Rebecca Chace, Associate Professor of Creative Writing; Director of the MA in Creative Writing for Educators

Rebecca Chace is the author of the novel, Leaving Rock Harbor (Scribner), Capture the Flag (Simon & Schuster), Chautauqua Summer (Harcourt-Brace), and June Sparrow and The Million Dollar Penny, her first novel for middle readers (Harper Collins). Plays: Colette (Theatre for the New City); The Awakening (adaptation of novel by Kate Chopin) premier, Book-It Repertory Theatre at Seattle Rep; third production, Voices of the South, Memphis. Ms. Chace adapted her novel, Capture the Flag, for the screen with director Lisanne Skyler; the Showtime Tony Cox Screenwriting Award (short film), Nantucket Film Festival, 2010. She has written for the New York Times Magazine, New York Times Sunday Book Review, the Huffington Post, The LA Review of Books, Guernica Magazine, Lit Hub, NPR’s All Things Considered and other publications. She has been awarded numerous artist residencies and fellowships including MacDowell; Yaddo; Dora Maar House; the Ragdale Foundation and others. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MA Program in Creative Writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

David Daniel, Associate Professor of Creative Writing

David Daniel’s book, Seven-Star Bird (Graywolf), won the Larry Levis Reading Prize for the best first or second poetry book of the year, and his most recent book, Ornaments (University of Pittsburgh Press), inspired poet Tom Sleigh to write, “No one in any generation is writing poems like these: smart, visceral, and immensely pleasurable to read.” He has just completed a new collection, What Love Is, as well as a book on music and poetry called Spellbound: The Tangled Lives of Words and Music. His poems and essays have appeared in A Field Guide to Prose Poetry, The Poetics of American Song Lyrics; The Library of America’s Anthology of American Religious Poetry, Connotation Press, APR, and Memorius. Daniel was the poetry editor of Ploughshares for more than a decade while teaching at Emerson College. He is also the creator and producer of FDU’s WAMFest: The Words, Art, and Music Festival. WAMFest has been celebrated for its progressive arts programming by the National Endowment for the Arts, and has featured Bruce Springsteen, Robert Pinsky, Chuck D, Rosanne Cash, Talib Kweli, Neil Gaiman and dozens of the most important artists and writers of our time.

David Grand, Associate Professor of Creative Writing

David Grand’s third novel, Mount Terminus, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014. He is the author of Louse (Arcade), a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, and The Disappearing Body (Nan A. Talese), which Bookforum described as “satirical noir at its mesmerizing best.” Jonathan Lethem has described Grand as “a stealth operator, a magician-architect in prose, building elegant mysterious structures.” He received his MFA from New York University, where he held the Fellowship in Fiction and studied with E.L. Doctorow. His writing has appeared in anthologies as well as The New York Times Magazine, Travel and Leisure, BlackBook, and elsewhere. David Grand teaches workshops in fiction writing and the course Reading as Writers.

Minna Zallman Proctor, Editor, The Literary Review

Minna Zallman Proctor is an editor, award-winning translator, and writer. She is the author of the essay collection Landslide: True Stories (Catapult), Do You Hear What I Hear? (Viking), an exploration of religious calling, and co-author with Bethany Beardslee of I Sang the Unsingable: My Life in 20th Century Music (University of Rochester Press).  Her recent translations from Italian include Fleur Jaeggy’s These Possible Lives and Natalia Ginzburg’s Happiness, As Such (both New Directions). She has written for Bookforum, The American Scholar, The Nation, Aperture, NPR.org, The New York Times Book Review, and others. Before coming to FDU to run The Literary Review, she was the Editor of COLORS and Managing Editor at BOMB. She teaches creative nonfiction, literary translation, and publishing.

René Steinke, Professor of Creative Writing; Director of the MFA in Creative Writing

René Steinke’s most recent novel, Friendswood (Riverhead), was named one of National Public Radio’s “Great Reads” of 2014, and it was shortlisted for the St. Francis Literary Prize. It was also an Amazon Book of the Month, and one of O Magazine’s Fall Book Picks. Her novel Holy Skirts (Harper Collins) was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award and was listed among the Best Books of 2005 by the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post. Translated editions of the novel have been published in Italy and Spain. She is also the author of The Fires (Harper Collins). Her writing has appeared in anthologies and in the New York Times, Vogue, Bookforum, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She served as a judge on the 2013 National Book Awards in Fiction, is the Director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at FDU, and regularly teaches undergraduate fiction and literature courses at FDU.