At Gotham, we believe that teaching is every bit as much of an art as writing, and we know through vast experience that the ability to teach creative writing is a unique and valuable skill. That's why all of our teachers are professional writers and professional teachers. They know what it means to work at the craft of writing - they've been in the trenches - and they are expert at conveying the larger concepts and nuances to students of writing. And, most importantly, they don't just talk about writing, they get you writing.

"Happily, I’ve written about everything," says Gotham teacher Fran McNulty. "Tenure disputes, medicine, business, ice cream, bathrooms, intermarriage. You name it."

Fran has always been restlessly interested in everything and everyone. She writes and teaches (and even takes classes) in both Fiction and Nonfiction, and her restlessness keeps her in a state of perpetual animation.

Growing up in Brooklyn, Fran was a curious combination of nervous and bossy. She spent her high school days studying hard and graduated at sixteen. "It was a disaster, Fran says. "In New York City, they used to skip people with abandon. I skipped fourth grade and had a December birthday."

It was at Harvard that Fran started writing journalistically for the school’s newspaper. When Fran gradua...
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Gotham Travel Writing teacher David Farley has just seen the publication of his book, An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town.

David spent a year in the Italian hill town of Calcata researching the relic, which is none other than the foreskin of Jesus Christ. And therein lies a tale no less byzantine and page-turning than the Da Vinci Code (but this one is all true). Kirkus Reviews calls it “Genre bending at its best,” and noted author Tom Bissell says of the book, “Christianity has never seemed weirder to me, and it seemed plenty weird before.”

Here’s how the book ...
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• Josh Weil: The New York Times Sunday Book Review Editor's Choice (6/7/09) list includes Josh Weil's The New Valley. Read it at www.nytimes.com. The Charleston Sunday Gazette (6/13/09) includes a terrific review at wvgazette.com.  The Rumpus, literary blog, includes a discussion about The New Valley, at therumpus.net.  Josh will be reading on Wed., July 9 at 7pm at Book People in Austin, TX; and Tues., July 28 at 7PM at Borders Books & Music in Bryn Mawr, Pa. For details, visit joshweil.com. • Tania James: The New York Times Sunday Book Review (June 19, 2009) included a review Tania James’s debut novel, Atlas of Unknowns. Read the review online at NYTimes.com. • Ana Maria Spagna: River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative awarded Ana Maria Spagna their 2009 prize for literary nonfiction. • Carole Bugge: Independent Publisher Book Awards honored Riffing on Strings, (Scriblerus Press, 2008)with an IPPY Silver Medal. The anthology of prose and poetry about string theory,  includes Carole Bugge's playscript Strings. • Heather Swain: Penquin Group has released Heather Swain's YA novel, Me, My Elf and I. Find it online at bn.com. • Michaela Roessner: Cats, a forthcoming anthology from Nightshade Publications, includes a reprint of Michaela Roessner's Schrödinger's Cat story “Mieze Corrects an Incomplete Representation of Reality.” The story was originally published in OMNI Magazine.