Graduate School of Arts & Sciences : English Department  

Fiction
 Leslie Epstein
 Ha Jin
 Allegra Goodman

Poetry
 Robert Pinsky
 David Ferry
 Louise Glück
 Rosanna Warren

Playwriting
 Kate Snodgrass
 Richard Schotter

Leslie Epstein - Fiction/Program Director


Leslie Epstein was born in Los Angeles to a family of film makers. His father and uncle together wrote dozens of films in the late thirties and forties and on, including The Man who Came to Dinner, Arsenic and Old Lace, Strawberry Blonde, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and Casablanca. Not surprisingly, films have made up a good part of the subject matter of his fiction.

He left California for an undergraduate degree at Yale and a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. He has published ninebooks of fiction (P.D. Kimerakov, The Steinway Quintet Plus Four, King of the Jews, Regina, Goldkorn Tales, Pinto and Sons, Pandaemonium, Ice Fire Water: A Leib Goldkorn Cocktail, and San Remo Drive), of which the best-known, King of the Jews, has become a classic of Holocaust Fiction and published in eleven foreign languages. His most recent book is entitled The Eighth Wonder of the World, and is due out this year.

His articles and stories have appeared in such places as Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Playboy, the Yale Review, TriQuarterly, Tikkun, Partisan Review, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. His article, "Pictures at an Extermination: a Child of Hollywood Discovers Auschwitz and Himself," appeared in the September 2000 issue of Harper's and can be read online. In addition to the Rhodes Scholarship, he has received many fellowships and awards, including a Fulbright and a Guggenheim fellowship, an award for Distinction in Literature from the American Academy and Institue of Arts and Letters, a residency at the Rockefeller Institute at Bellagio, and grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

He has been the director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University for more than twenty years.