The Center’s success depends on the talent and commitment of our Writing Fellows and Writing Associates. Our staff is diverse in terms of backgrounds, areas of expertise, and teaching styles, and they are all excellent and committed teachers.

Administration

Director
Kit Nicholls (kit.nicholls@cooper.edu) received a Ph.D. in English at New York University and a B.A. in creative writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything, co-authored with William Germano (Princeton University Press, 2020). His essays have appeared in venues such as European Romantic Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Psyche.

Associate Director
John Lundberg (john.lundberg@cooper.edu) is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University who holds an MFA in creative writing from The University of Virginia. His poems have appeared in Poetry, VQR, The Southern Review, and New England Review among others. He has extensive experience teaching composition, creative writing, and engineering writing.

Writing Associates and Fellows

Hicham Awad (hicham.awad@cooper.edu) holds an M.A. in Film and Visual Studies from Harvard University and has taught courses in film/media history and studio art at Harvard and the American University of Beirut. His writing explores subjects such as the British films of Jerzy Skolimowski; music and sex; and cinema and/against television in the work of French film critics Serge Daney and Louis Skorecki.

Kōan Brink (koan.brink@cooper.edu) (they/them) received their B.A. in English from Barnard College and their MFA in Poetry from Columbia University, where they were a Teaching Fellow in the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program. They are the author, most recently, of a chapbook of poems, Pale Interiors (The Song Cave, 2024) and an artist's book, What Sleeps under Lacquer (NECK, 2022). Their work has been featured in places such as Best New Poets 2022, Another Earth, Narrative, and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. In addition to being a writer ad teacher, they are a lay ordained Sōtō Zen practitioner. Kōan is currently a Ph.D. student in English Literature at The University of Texas at Austin, where they focus on Early Modern poetry, form and temporality, and the history of the book. 

Jesse Chevan (jesse.chevan@cooper.edu) is a musician, student worker, and Ph.D. in ethnomusicology based in New York City. His dissertation fieldwork with the trombone shout bands of the United House of Prayer for All People, a US-based Black church, grapples with religious marginality, the peculiarity of instrumental worship music, and the ways in which musical sound can facilitate direct encounters with the divine. Jesse also works as a professional drummer and percussionist on the NYC music scene and internationally, touring with the Lucky Chops Brass Band and Nava Tehila, as well as freelancing in a wide range of music styles.

Stephen Higa (stephen.higa@cooper.edu) earned a Ph.D. in history from Brown University and a B.A. in history from UC Berkeley. He studies medieval religion and has taught courses in history, religion, theology, gender, sexuality, music, and performance. He currently teaches high school world history and is a performer of medieval music.

Karen Holmberg (karen.holmberg@cooper.edu) is an archaeologist and volcanologist who looks at radical climate changes of the past to determine what they can or cannot tell us about our environmental present and future. She holds an M.A., MPhil, and Ph.D. from Columbia University and a B.A. from the University of Virginia. Her research has been funded by Fulbright, Mellon, Wenner-Gren, National Geographic, and Make Our Planet Great Again awards. She has taught at Brown and Stanford Universities.  In addition to serving as the Engineering Writing Fellow at Cooper Union, she is a Research Scientist at NYU, Director of the NYU-Gallatin WetLab, and member of the *This is Not a Drill* working group on technology, the climate emergency, equity, and creative practice through the Future Imagination Fund at NYU-Tisch. She is deeply interested in how creative outreach of science and engineering insights can contribute to more sustainable and equitable societies.

Sophia Holtz (sophia.holtz@cooper.edu) earned her B.A. from Hampshire College, and an MFA from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Writing Fellow. She is also an alum of TENT: Creative Writing at the National Yiddish Book Center. Her poems have appeared in Indiana Review, Bennington Review, and elsewhere. Sophia has worked as an educator for many years, supporting learners at all levels with the writing process.

Yu-Yun Hsieh (yu-yun.hsieh@cooper.edu) earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the CUNY Graduate Center, with a certificate in Film Studies. She is a writer from Taiwan and has taught at NYU, the Cooper Union, Hunter College, and City College. She received some literary awards for her fiction in Chinese. She was a fiction fellow of the Writers’ Institute at CUNY and a recipient of the Zora Neale Hurston Fellowship at Bard College. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Times Literary Supplement, World Literature Today, Asymptote Journal and others. She teaches writing and literature at Baruch College and Queens College. She is currently working on her first novel in English. 

Marie Hubbard (marie.hubbard@cooper.edu) is a Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and holds a B.A. from Stanford University and an M.A. and MPhil from Columbia University. She studies and writes about the history of anglophone literature in British colonial settings, as well as U.S. involvement in Third World literary production during the Cold War. She has several years’ experience as a writing instructor and consultant at the high school and undergraduate level. In addition to her role as a writing associate at Cooper Union, Marie is currently an instructor of first-year academic writing in the General Studies program at Columbia University.

Theresa Lin (theresa.lin@cooper.edu) received her B.A. in Psychology and English Literature from Rutgers University and her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, where she was awarded the De Alba Fellowship and taught Undergraduate Writing. She currently teaches The Personal Essay, Experimental Prose, and first-year Humanities and Social Sciences at The Cooper Union. She is represented by Janklow & Nesbit Literary Agency and is currently working on her first novel. 

Vijay Masharani (vijay.masharani@cooper.edu) is an artist and writer. He received his M.A. in Race, Ethnicity, Postcolonial Studies from University College London in 2022, completing a dissertation on the last works of W. E. B Du Bois. His critical writing has appeared in BOMB, artforum, ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. He is represented by Clima in Milan.

Tara Menon (tara.menon@cooper.edu) focuses, in her research and teaching, on problems of religion, experience, and secularization in the European and Indian traditions. She is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University and has held fellowships at many institutions, including Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. 

Meriam Soltan (meriam.soltan@cooper.edu) is writer and researcher interested in the design of fictions and how they are manifested in various contexts politically, culturally, and otherwise. She received her Master of Science in Architecture Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2022 and her Bachelor of Architecture from The American University of Beirut in 2019. She is a recipient of the MIT Architecture Thesis Award and the Berkeley Essay Prize, and her writing has been featured in Postmedieval, The Funambulist, Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal, MIT’s Thresholds, and ETH Zurich’s Trans Magazin. She is the author of Lebanon and The Split of Life: Bearing Witness Through the Art of Nabil Kanso, forthcoming with Anthem Press in 2024.

Liza St. James (liza.StJames@cooper.edu) earned her B.A. in comparative literature and literary theory from the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA in fiction and literary translation from Columbia University, where she was a teaching fellow in the Undergraduate Writing Program. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, The Collagist, BOMB, The Believer, The Paris Review Daily, and other publications. She is editor-at-large for Transit Books and a senior editor of the literary annual NOON.

Angela Starita (angela.starita@cooper.edu) is senior writer in The Cooper Union’s Office of Communications. Before coming to Cooper, she was a freelance writer with articles in a wide range of publications including Salon, Print, The Believer, and The New York Times. She has a Ph.D. in architecture history and continues to write about urbanism and the built environment.

Stella Tan-Torres (stella.tantorres@cooper.edu) earned her B.A. in Anthropology and English Literature from Brown University, and her M.A. in Humanities and Social Thought from New York University. She worked for several years in Student Services and Admissions at NYU and Columbia University. Her primary focus was on international student communities and career counseling, having trained at NYU’s Wasserman Center for Career Development. With over a decade of editing experience, Stella has taught students at all levels of higher education and professional backgrounds to improve their writing and communication skills and has provided career counseling for people across a diverse range of industries.

Augusta X. Thomson (augusta.thomson@cooper.edu) earned her B.A. in Archaeology and Anthropology from Oxford University. She is currently a Ph.D. student and Teaching Fellow in Anthropology at New York University, where her research meanders between mobility studies, ecology, theories of place and space, memory, digital media, visual culture, video ethnography, personhood, material culture, art, religion, and pilgrimage. Trained in NYU’s Graduate Certificate Program in Culture and Media, Augusta makes (often) abstract and experimental films that reflect on the natural world. She is the director and DP of Nine-Story Mountain, a feature film about the pilgrimage around Mount Kailash; the director, DP, and editor of flotsam, a short film about Brooklyn’s Dead Horse Bay; and is currently working on Crossings, a multi-media, interactive documentary and mapping project, inspired by the Camino de Santiago, her ethnographic field site.

Alex Verdolini (alex.verdolini@cooper.edu) is an adjunct assistant professor at the Cooper Union and a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at Yale University. He is also active as a literary translator, most often of Latin American poetry. 

Neena Verma (neena.verma@cooper.edu) is a practicing architect, teacher and writer (and former attorney) based in New York City. Neena’s work has appeared broadly, most recently in Urban Omnibus; she is currently writing a novel. She is the Architecture Writing Fellow and an Instructor at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, Part-time Faculty at The School of Constructed Environments at Parsons The New School, and Principal of an eponymous practice. 

Hindley Wang (Wenjia) (hindley.wang@cooper.edu) (she/her/hers) is a bilingual writer/critic and curator from Shanghai, based in New York. She obtained her M.A. in Art History from University of Chicago in 2022, and B.A. in Art History and Political Science from Vassar College, NY. Her academic research focused on the interdisciplinary discourse of “death” in the making of museum and conceptual art, through the works of Chris Marker, Huang Yongping and Adorno. Her essays and criticism are published in frieze magazine, e-flux criticism, Flash Art International, artnet etc. Her curatorial work explores decolonial feminism and neoliberal world order. She loves her interviews with artists. Previously, she worked for the artist Xu Bing in New York as his studio manager and translator.

Buck Wanner (buck.wanner@cooper.edu) studies Dance History and completed his Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance at Columbia University. He performs, choreographs, and writes about contemporary experimental dance, and has previously edited Movement Research Performance Journal, Culturebot, and the American Realness catalog READING.

Leonora Zoninsein (leonora.zoninsein@cooper.edu) is a researcher and artist with a Ph.D. in Human Geography from UC Berkeley. She has an MSc in Water Science, Policy and Management from the University of Oxford, and a B.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University. She writes at the intersection of the History of Science, Environmental Philosophy and Post-Colonial Natures, and her book manuscript, How a Whale Becomes a Molecule: A Geography of Modern Olfaction, explores how the production of notions of essence shape political atmospheres today. She makes signature and conceptual scents through her perfume studio, Night Air.