Jenny McKean Moore Professorship

The Jenny McKean Moore Fund was established in honor of the late Jenny Moore, a playwriting student at GW who left, in trust, a fund that has, for more than 40 years, encouraged the teaching and study of creative writing in the English Department.  It allows us to bring a poet, a fiction writer or creative nonfiction writer to campus, every other year.  While in residence, the writer brings a unique experience to the GW community, teaching a free community workshop for adults along with creative writing classes for GW students.  The fellow is known as the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington.

The Jenny McKean Moore Writer in Washington

The late Jenny Moore, a playwriting student at the George Washington University, left in trust a fund to encourage creative writing. Thanks to the fund, the English Department is able to bring an established poet or fiction writer or creative nonfiction writer to campus, every other year, to teach a writing workshop for GW students and a free community workshop for adults in the larger Washington community.

Since 1976, forty-three writers have held the position of the Jenny McKean Moore Writer in Washington. Collectively, these individuals have: 

• Published over two hundred book-length works of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and drama. 
• Received the highest honors in their field, including:
  • The National Book Award
  • The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize 
  • The Robert Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Society of America 
  • The Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book 
  • The Coretta Scott King Award for Children’s Literature  
  • The Emmy Award 
  • The Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction 
  • The Grub Street Prize
  • The Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature 
  • The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction 
  • The Lambda Literary Award 
  • The Lannan Literary Award 
  • The Obie Award 
  • The PEN/Hemingway Award 
  • The Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction 
  • Multiple awards from PEN, the Poetry Society of America, and the Academy of American Poets 
  • Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute, and the Rockefeller Foundation
• Served as the Poets Laureate of the states of:
  • Alaska
  • California
  • Maryland
  • New Jersey 

Past Appointees

Marilyn Hacker 1976-1977

Marilyn Hacker is the author of fifteen books of poetry, including Separations; Taking Notice; Assumptions; and Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons. She is the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the Robert Fagles Translation Prize from the National Poetry Series, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. In 2008, she was elected as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. 

Susan Shreve 1977-1978

Susan Shreve has published fourteen novels, most recently You Are the Love of My Life (2012), and a memoir, Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood (2007). She has also published thirty books for children, most recently The Lovely Shoes (2011), and co-edited five anthologies. Shreve founded the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at George Mason University in 1980. She is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Award for Fiction, a National Endowment for the Arts grant for Fiction, the Grub Street Prize for Non-Fiction, among others. 

Amiri Baraka 1978-1979 

Amiri Baraka is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems, and The Book of Monk, as well as numerous works of drama, fiction, and non-fiction. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Langston Hughes Award from the City College of New York, the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, among others. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and served as the Poet Laureate of New Jersey from 2002-03. 

Blanche Boyd 1979-1980 

Boyd has written four novels: Nerves, Mourning the Death of Magic, The Revolution of Little Girls, and Terminal Velocity, as well as a collection of essays titled The Redneck Way of Knowledge. She has received fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the South Carolina Arts Commission, and Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program. She is also the winner of the Lambda Literary Award and the Ferro-Grumly Award for Lesbian Fiction. 

Carol Muske 1980-1981

Carol Muske is the author of eight books of poetry, four novels, and two collections of essays. She founded the Ph.D. Program in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California, and recently completed her term as Poet Laureate of the state of California. She has received fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Library of Congress Award. She has also been a finalist for the National Book Award and the L.A. Times Book Prize. 

Peter Meinke 1981-1982

Peter Meinke has published eighteen books of poems and short stories, including Lucky Bones (2014), The Contracted World: New & More Selected Poems (2006), Zinc Fingers (2000), Liquid Paper: New & Selected Poems (1991), The Night Train & the Golden Bird (1977), and the Russian-English poetry collection Maples and Orange Trees (2005). His collection, The Piano Tuner, won the 1986 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and he has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and three prizes from the Poetry Society of America.  

Lucille Clifton 1982-1983

Clifton is the author of thirteen works of poetry. She is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a grant from the Academy of American Poets, an Emmy Award, a Coretta Scott King Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and the National Book Award for Poetry. Clifton was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and served as the Poet Laureate of Maryland. In 2007, she won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and in 2010, she posthumously received the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America. 

Julia Alvarez 1983-1984

Alvarez is the author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, winner of the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, as well as four novels, three books of poetry, and three collections of essays. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. She is also the recipient of the Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Belpre Medal, and the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature.

Gloria Naylor 1984-1985 

Naylor's debut novel, The Women of Brewster Place, won the 1983 National Book Award in the category First Novel. It was adapted as a 1989 film of the same name by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions. Her work has been featured in such anthologies as Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction (ed. Terry McMillan, 1990), Calling the Wind: Twentieth-Century African-American Short Stories (ed. Clarence Major, 1992) and Daughters of Africa (ed. Margaret Busby, 1992). 

Rika Lesser 1985-1986 

Lesser has published four collections of poetry, including: Questions of Love: New & Selection Poems; Growing Back: Poems 1972 to 1992; All We Need of Hell; and Etruscan Things. She was awarded the Landon Poetry Translation Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and received the Poetry Translation Prize of the Swedish Academy in 1996 and in 2003. 

Lonnie Carter 1986-1987 

Carter is an award-winning playwright whose work has been produced by The Yale Repertory Theater, the American Place Theater, Victory Gardens Theater, the Long Wharf Theater, at the first Asian-American Theater Festival in New York City (2007), at the Los Angeles Theater Center’s Latino Theater Festival (also 2007), and at festivals abroad. He has received eight Obies, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and two fellowships each from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. 

Richard McCann 1987-1988 

McCann is the author of a work of fiction, Mother of Sorrows, which won the 2005 John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares, an American Library Association Stonewall Book Award, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. His book of poems, Ghost Letters, won the 1994 Beatrice Hawley and Capricorn Poetry awards. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. 

Bobby Jack Nelson 1988-1989  

Jane Shore 1989-1990

Shore is the author of five books of poetry: Eye Level, winner of the 1977 Juniper Prize; The Minute Hand, awarded the 1986 Lamont Prize; Music Minus One, a finalist for the 1996 National Book Critic Circle Award; Happy Family (1999); and A Yes-or-No Answer (2008), winner of the 2010 Poets' Prize. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute, the Hodder at Princeton University, the Goodyear Fellowship at the Foxcroft School, and twice from the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Pablo Medina 1990-1991 

Medina is the author of eleven books, among them the poetry collection Points of Balance/Puntos de apoyo (2005) and the novel The Cigar Roller, which was a Book Sense Notable for 2005. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Oscar B. Cintas Foundation. He served as president of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Board of Directors from 2005-2006. 

Carol Maso 1992-1993 

Maso is the author of five novels, most recently Mother & Child. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and several other grants.

John Haines 1991-1992 

Haines has published nine collections of poetry and numerous works of non-fiction, including his acclaimed Alaskan book The Stars, The Snow, The Fire. Haines received two Guggenheim fellowships, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Alaska Center for the Book, and the Alaska Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts. He was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of American Poets and served as the Poet Laureate of Alaska. 

Linda McCarriston 1993-1994 

McCarriston is the author of several poetry collections, including Talking Soft Dutch (1984); Eva-Mary (1991), which won Northwestern University’s Terrence Des Pres Prize and was shortlisted for the National Book Award; and Little River: New & Selected Poems (2000). 

Beverly Lowry 1994-1995 

Lowry is the author of six works of fiction and non-fiction, including Come Back, Lolly Ray; Emma Blue; and Daddy's Girl, which won the Jesse Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and served as president of the Texas Institute of Letters. 

Vikram Chandra 1995-1996 

Chandra’s first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, won the 1996 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. He is also the author of three other works, including Love and Longing in Bombay: Stories; Sacred Games; and Geek Sublime: Writing Fiction, Coding Software. 

Cornelius Eady 1996-1997 

Eady has published more than half a dozen volumes of poetry, among them Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (1985), winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; The Gathering of My Name (1991), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; Brutal Imagination (2001), a National Book Award finalist; and Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems (2008). Recently awarded honors include the Strousse Award from Prairie Schooner, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, and individual Fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the co-founder of Cave Canem. 

Daniel Vilmure 1997-1998 

Anne Caston 1998-1999

Caston is the author of Flying Out with the Wounded, Judah's Lion, and Prodigal. She has received an Individual Artist Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Fellowship in Poetry, and a Bread Loaf Fellowship. She was also the recipient of the Paumanok Award. 

Dan Barden 1999-2000 

Barden has published two novels: The Next Right Thing and John Wayne. 

Tony Hoagland 2000-2001

Hoagland’s books of poetry include Sweet Ruin (1992), which was chosen for the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and won the Zacharis Award from Emerson College; Donkey Gospel (1998), winner of the James Laughlin Award; What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Rain (2005); and Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (2010). He has also published a collection of essays about poetry, Real Sofistakashun (2006). His other honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry.

John McNally 2001-2002 

McNally is the author of three novels (After the Workshop, America's Report Card and The Book of Ralph) and two short story collections (Ghosts of Chicago and Troublemakers). He has written two books on writing: Vivid and Continuous: Essays and Exercise for Writing Fiction and The Creative Writer's Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist. He has also edited six fiction anthologies on subjects ranging from superheroes to baseball.  

Suzannah Lessard 2002-2003 

Lessard is the author of The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family; Dreamscape: Finding Our Way in a Time of Epochal Change; and The View From a Small Mountain: Reading the American Landscape. She is the recipient of a Whiting Award and the Mark Lynton History Prize. 

Rick Barot 2003-2004

Barot has published three books of poetry: The Darker Fall (2002), which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize; Want (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize; and Chord (2015). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow. 

Joyce Hackett 2004-2005

Hackett is the author a novel, Disturbance of the Inner Ear. She is a recipient of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. 

Dana Roeser 2005-2006

Roeser has published three books of poetry: The Theme of Tonight’s Party Has Been Changed, winner of the Juniper Prize (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), and In the Truth Room (2008) and Beautiful Motion (2004), both winners of the Samuel French Morse Prize (Northeastern University Press/University Press of New England). She has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. 

Tayari Jones 2006-2007

Jones’s first novel, Leaving Atlanta won the 2003 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction. Her second novel, The Untelling, was awarded the Lillian C. Smith Award for New Voices in 2005. Silver Sparrow, Jones's third novel, was an American Booksellers Association's number 1 "Indie Next" pick. She is the recipient of the Lillian C. Smith Award (2006), the United States Artists Collins Fellowship (2008), and the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (2011), among others. 

Ryan Van Cleve 2007-2008

Van Cleave is the author of nineteen books, including a young adult book about gun violence in schools called Unlocked, which received a Gold Medal in Young Adult Literature from the Florida Book Awards. He is also the author of the creative writing textbook Contemporary American Poetry: Behind the Scenes and the poetry collection The Magical Breasts of Britney Spears. In 2010, he published Unplugged: My Journey into the Dark World of Video Game Addiction, which was the first memoir on video game addiction.  

Mary Morrissy 2008-2009

Morrissy is the author of three novels (Mother of Pearl, The Pretender, and The Rising of Bella Casey) and two short story collections (Prosperity Drive and A Lazy Eye). She was a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, won a Hennessy Award for short fiction in 1984, a Lannan Literary Award in 1995, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize in 1996.  

Ed Skoog 2009-2010 

 

Skoog is the author of three collections of poetry (Mister Skylight, Rough Day, Run the Red Lights). He is the recipient of Marble Faun Prize in Poetry by the Pirate’s Alley William Faulkner Society, the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship  

Tilar Mazzeo 2010-2011 

Mazzeo is the author of numerous works of narrative nonfiction, including The Widow Clicquot, a biography of Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin, the eponymous founder of the champagne house Veuve Clicquot; The Secret of Chanel No. 5: The Biography of a Scent; Plagiarism and Literary property in the Romantic Period; The Hotel on Place Vendôme, the story of the Ritz Hotel in Paris during Nazi occupation; and Irena's Children, the story of Polish social worker Irena Sendler, whose efforts prevented the death of thousands of Jewish children during World War II.

Tim Johnston 2011-2012 

Johnson is the author of the novel, Descent; the story collection, Irish Girl; and the young adult novel, Never So Green. The story, Irish Girl, won an O. Henry Prize, the New Letters Award for Writers, and the Gival Press Short Story Award, while the collection itself won the 2009 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction.  

Bruce Snider 2012-2013

Snider has published two poetry collections, Paradise, Indiana, winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, and The Year We Studied Women, winner of Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. A former Wallace Stegner fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, he was also the recipient of a James A. Michener fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin.  

Molly McCloskey 2013-2014

McCloskey published her first book of short stories, Solomon’s Seal, in 1997. Protection, her debut novel, set in contemporary Ireland, appeared in 2006. Her memoir, Circles Around the Sun, was published in 2011 and was named by The Sunday Times as its Memoir of the Year. Her short fiction has also won the RTÉ Francis MacManus Award, the inaugural Fish Short Story Prize, and has been widely anthologized. 

Brando Skyhorse 2014-2015

Skyhorse is the author of a novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, and a memoir, Take This Man. The Madonnas of Echo Park won the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award and the 2011 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. 

Kseniya Melnik 2015-2016 

Melnik's debut story collection, Snow in May, was short-listed for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. She was a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 2014 and at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland in 2016.  

Melinda Moustakis 2016-2017

Moustakis is the author of Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Maurice Prize, and was a 5 Under 35 selection by the National Book Foundation. Her story “They Find the Drowned” won a PEN/O. Henry Prize. She is the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from the Lewis Center of the Arts at Princeton University, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Fiction, and a Kenyon Review Fellowship at Kenyon College.

Sally Wen Mao 2017-2018

Sally Wen Mao is the author of two poetry collections, Oculus, and Mad Honey Symposium.  She is the recipient of several fellowships, including Kundiman, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Shearling Fellowship at Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas.

Cutter Wood 2020-2021

Cutter Wood is the author of Love and Death in the Sunshine State: The Story of a Crime.  His creative nonfiction has appeared in Harpers and other publications.  He was awarded a 2018 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Johannes Lichtman 2022 - 2023 

 

 

Johannes Lichtman’s debut novel, Such Good Work, was chosen as a 5 Under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation. His second novel, Calling Ukraine, will be published in April 2023. His work has appeared in Tin House, The Sun, Travel + Leisure, Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, and elsewhere. He lives in Washington, DC, and is currently the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington at the George Washington University.

Kat Chow 2024 - 2025

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Kat Chow is a writer, journalist, and the author of Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir (Grand Central Publishing), named a Notable Book by The New York Times and a Finalist for the Connecticut Book Award in Nonfiction. She was a reporter at NPR, where she was a founding member of the Code Switch team and podcast. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, New York Magazine’s The Cut and on Radiolab, among others. She's a contributor to Pop Culture Happy Hour and Slate’s Culture Gabfest, and has hosted Slate’s The Waves. She’s received residency fellowships from Storyknife, Millay Arts and the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. She has led classes and spoken about her reporting in Amsterdam, Calgary, Karachi, Minneapolis, Louisville, Boston, Seattle and many other places. She is George Washington University’s 2024-2025 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-In-Washington.

Past Appointees