M.F.A. announces more acclaimed writers to guest faculty

Three new faculty members will join Randolph’s Master of Fine Arts in creative writing program for the spring 2022 semester: 

Jos Charles (poetry) 

Jos Charles
(Photo by Sergio De La Torre)

Charles is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her poetry collection, feeld. 

The 2018 collection—described by her publisher as “a lyrical unraveling of the circuitry of gender and speech, defiantly making space for bodies that have been historically denied their own vocabulary”—was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series, selected by fellow poet Fady Joudah. 

Charles, who lives in Long Beach, California, served as the founding editor of THEM, a trans literary journal, from 2013 to 2018. She is the recipient of the 2015 Monique Wittig Writer’s Scholarship and the Poetry Foundation’s 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. 

In addition to her 2016 poetry collection Safe Space, her work has been published in Poetry magazine, PEN, The Feminist Wire, Washington Square Review, Poem-a-Day, and Action Yes. 

Charles holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of California Irvine. Her next collection, a Year & other poems, will be available in March. 

Read more about Charles and her work at www.joscharles.com.

Crystal Hana Kim (fiction)

Crystal Hana Kim
(Photo by Nina Subin)

Kim, who teaches at Columbia University, is the author of If You Leave Me, a Booklist Editor’s Choice title that was named a best book of 2018 by more than 10 publications, including The Washington Post. 

She was a 2021 Jerome Hill Artist finalist, a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner, and has received scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, among others.

Kim holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia and a master’s in education from Hunter College. A Teach for America alum, she has taught elementary and high school, as well as collegiate writing.

Her work has been published in Elle magazine, The Paris Review, and Guernica, and she is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal. 

Find out more at https://crystalhanakim.com.

Clare Beams (fiction) 

Clare Beams
(Photo by Kristi Jan Hoover)

Beams’ 2016 story collection, We Show What We Have Learned, won the Bard Fiction Prize, in addition to being named a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016 and longlisted for the Story Prize. It was also a finalist for prestigious awards including the Shirley Jackson Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award.

She followed up that success with her 2020 novel, The Illness Lesson, which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a best book of 2020 by Esquire and Bustle, and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.  

Beams is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She taught high school English for six years, as well as creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and St. Vincent College. 

Her next novel, The Garden, will be published by Doubleday in 2023. 

Read more about her work at www.clarebeams.com.