School of the Arts Faculty Tenured in 2023
Writing professors Leslie Jamison and Shane McCrae joined Columbia's tenured faculty in 2023. Tenure is a distinction that recognizes scholarly excellence, demonstrated capacity for imaginative, original work, and great promise for continued contributions at the forefront of a field.
Leslie Jamison, Associate Professor of Writing in the Faculty of the Arts
Leslie S. Jamison is a New York Times bestselling author whose writing blends personal narrative, cultural criticism, and literary reportage. She has written about a wide array of subjects ranging from addiction to ultramarathons, C-sections to chronic illness, bathhouses to past life memories, for a wide range of publications including The New Yorker and The New York Times.
Her two essay collections, The Empathy Exams (2014) and Make It Scream, Make It Burn (2019) explore loneliness, intimacy, and the limits of shared feeling. Her critical memoir, The Recovering (2018), grapples with the relationships between addiction, creativity, and recovery; and her novel, The Gin Closet (2010), explores family estrangement across multiple generations. Her forthcoming memoir Splinters examines single parenting in the aftermath of divorce. Jamison has been a finalist for the PEN/ Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award and a National Magazine Award; she was the guest editor for Best American Essays 2017.
Jamison earned her MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and her PhD at Yale University before joining the Columbia University faculty in 2015, earning tenure in 2023.
Leslie Jamison’s Faculty Profile
Shane McCrae, Associate Professor of Writing in the Faculty of the Arts
Shane A. McCrae is an acclaimed writer who explores matters of race, racism, and the legacy of slavery in both poetry and memoir, often by employing specific historical figures or by drawing from his own experiences of growing up as a mixed-race child in the United States. McCrae’s poetry is noted for its ability to both incorporate and disrupt traditional poetic forms with results that are both surprising and moving.
His many publications include In the Language of My Captor, the winner of the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and Sometimes I Never Suffered, which was shortlisted for the 2020 T.S. Eliot Prize. Recently, McCrae was awarded the highly prestigious Arthur Rense Poetry Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry series, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, among others.
McCrae earned a JD at Harvard and two master’s degrees from the University of Iowa, and was on the Oberlin College faculty before joining the Columbia faculty in 2017, earning tenure in 2023.
Shane McCrae’s Faculty Profile