MFA Faculty and Staff

Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness (BOA Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016). His third collection, This Elegance, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in Spring 2026. His debut collection was honored as a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and the Norma Faber First Book Award. Tenderness was a finalist for a Golden Poppy Award, Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and a Northern California Book Award. A Cave Canem fellow, he is the recipient of a Ron Wallace Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, a Stegner Fellowship, and an Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship. He has had poems and essays commissioned by The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, The New Museum, Craft Contemporary, The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Arts, The Brick (formerly LAXART), and The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. 

ENCOUNTERS:  

• Author Site
• Book: Tenderness
• Book: Black Sand
• Poetry, Published Poetry 

Sarah LaBrie is a TV writer and the author of No One Gets to Fall Apart, a memoir published by HarperCollins in 2024. The book was named a New York Times Editors’ Pick and Notable Book of the Year and was highlighted by Elle, NPR, and Esquire as a best memoir of the year. Lorrie Moore calls No One Gets to Fall Apart “a brilliant memoir... a triumph of every kind of literary perseverance,” and the Los Angeles Times hails it as “extraordinary.”  

LaBrie has also written for The Guardian, Guernica, Joyland, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, and other publications. Her libretti have been performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Apollo Theater, and she has written on television series including Minx, Blindspotting, Made for Love, and Love, Victor. 

She has received fellowships from the Ucross Foundation, Yaddo, Sewanee, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and was nominated for Best Television Comedy Script at the 2024 Women’s Image Network Awards for her work on Blindspotting. 

LaBrie earned her BA from Brown University in Comparative Literature and Literary Arts and an MFA from New York University as a Writers in the Schools Fellow. She grew up in Houston’s Third Ward and now lives in Los Angeles with her husband, filmmaker Justin Lerner, and their dogs.

ENCOUNTERS:   

Brazilian-American artist Cyriaco Lopes has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, the Museum of Art of São Paulo (MASP), El Museo del Barrio in NYC, the Centre Wallonie Bruxelles in Paris, Casa Degli Artisti in Milan, among other international venues. In 2022 he had a solo exhibition at Satchel Projects in Chelsea, NYC. His work has been selected and curated in exhibitions by critics such as Yasufumi Nakamori, Paulo Herkenhoff and Adriano Pedrosa, as well as by artists such as Lygia Pape, Janine Antoni, Luciano Fabro, and Ryan Trecartin. He is the winner of the NYC World Studio Foundation Award, the Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis Project Award, and the São Paulo Phillips Prize of trip to Europe.     

His performances with poet Terri Witek have been seen at the Centro Nacional de Cultura in Lisbon, Portugal, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the Salford Museum, in Manchester, England, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, FL, the Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporanea, in Valencia, Spain, and Oi Futuro Center for Art & Technology, in Rio, Brazil. Their collaboration was featured at the 2023 ARCO Madrid, where their gallery, The Liminal, won one of the two special mentions by the jury.    

The artist holds two M.F.A.s: one in Imaging and Digital Arts, UMBC, Baltimore, and the other in Visual Languages, UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro. He attended artist’s residencies such as Skowhegan, the London Project, MassMoca, and the MacDowell Colony (where Lopes was a 2019 Marian O. Naumburg Photography fellow).    

ENCOUNTERS:   

• Author Site
• Exhibit, Saints & Martyrs  
• Collaboration, Guest Room: "WHERE is the photographic image?"
• Show, “Off to Elsewhere," Munich, Germany 

Urayoán Noel is the author of eight books of poetry--most recently Transversal (Arizona 2021), named a book of the year by the New York Public Library and longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award--and of the critical study of Nuyorican poetry In Visible Movement (Iowa, 2014), winner of the LASA Latino Studies Book Prize. A finalist for the National Translation Award and the Best Translated Book Award, his most recent translation is Nicole Cecilia Delgado's adjacent islands/islas adyacentes (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022). Noel has been a fellow and faculty of CantoMundo and the Macondo Writers Workshop and has also received 

fellowships from the Mellon, Ford, and Howard Foundations. Forthcoming from La Impresora in Puerto Rico is his hybrid prose text Cuaderno de Isabela / Isabela Notebook. Noel's visual work has been published in the New York Times and exhibited in museums and art spaces in New York and Puerto Rico as well as at Poesiefestival Berlin and is included in collections of Latin American and Latinx electronic literature. He lives in the Bronx and is Director of Graduate Studies for NYU's MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish.    

ENCOUNTERS:   

• Author Site  
• Book, Transversal  
• Book, Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisférico  
• Book, Los Días Porosos  
• Book, Kool Logic
• Artist Book, Troptico
• Poem Series, Wokitokiteki 

Terri Witek's newest books include Down Water Street (aboveground press) and W / \ SH, a dystopian collaborative work with poet Amaranth Borsuk (Anhinga Press/ Visual Poetry Series), both forthcoming. Her work has been included in many journals and anthologies, including 2 from 2021: JUDITH: Women Making Visual Poetry (Timglaset) and WAAVe (Women Asemic Artist and Visual Poets) Witek’s art/text mixes are often featured in collaboration: she teaches Poetry in the Expanded Field in Stetson University’s low-residency MFA of the Americas with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes; they also lead The Fernando Pessoa Game at the Disquiet International Literary Program each summer in Lisbon.  Their collaborative work has been represented at ARCO in Madrid and in Seoul, Chania (Crete), Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Lisbon, and Valencia, Spain.  

ENCOUNTERS:   

• Author Site  
• Book, The Rattle Egg
• Book, Body Switch
• Book, The Rape Kit (Slope Editions Prize)
• Book, Exit Island (Florida Book Award medalist)
• Book, The Shipwreck Dress
• Book, Carnal World
• Book, Fools and Crows
• Chapbook, copies: I loved you in the hard old way
• Chapbook, Newsers  (Yavanika Press Publications Prize)
• Chapbook, On Gavdos Ferry
• Chapbook, First Shot at Fort Sumter/Possum
• Chapbook, Courting Couples (Center for Book Arts Prize)
• Anthology, JUDITH: Women Making Visual Poetry (Timglaset)  
• Anthology, WAAVe (Women Asemic Artist and Visual Poets)  
• Publication, BEYOND THE ILLEGIBLE ON BOUNDARY AVE  
• Exhibitions with Cyriaco Lopes, The Severe Ones and Gods of Remainder (The Liminal Gallery, ARCO 2023 - Madrid) Special jury mention: E_l_ _a_i_r_e_ _c_o_m_i_e_n_z_a_ _a_ _t_o_m_a_r_ _l_a_s_ _f_o_r_m_a_s_ _l_e_n_t_a_s_ _d_e_l_ _m_ár_m_o_l_   

Staff: