Accomplished writers and alums discuss their craft, different careers paths in writing and publishing, and the question of the benefit and purpose of an MFA program.

Cynthia Zarin (moderator), Senior Lecturer in English, is the Coordinator of the Writing Concentration at Yale. Cynthia is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, Orbit (2017) as well as five books for children, and a collection of essays, An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History (2013). Honors and awards include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the New York Women’s Press Award for Writing on the Arts, and a Parent’s Choice Award for Children’s Literature. She is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, where she currently writes about books and theatre, as well as The New York Times, The Paris Review, and other publications, and a former contributing editor for Gourmet Magazine. She is Resident Writer for the New York based dance company, BalletCollective.

Paul La Farge (JE ‘92) is the author of four novels: The Artist of the Missing, Haussmann, or the Distinction, Luminous Airplanes, and The Night Ocean; and a book of imaginary dreams, The Facts of Winter. His stories and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Harper’s, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the American Academy in Berlin. He never got an MFA, but has somehow been teaching in MFA programs for the last sixteen years.

Caitlin Macy (SY ‘92) is the author of Mrs., Spoiled, and The Fundamentals of Play. She majored in Classics at Yale before receiving her MFA from Columbia. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Slate. The recipient of an O’Henry award, she lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

Ed Park (SY ’92) is the author of the novel Personal Days, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and one of Time’s top 10 fiction books of the year. He is a founding editor of The Believer and was most recently executive editor at Penguin Press. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Bookforum, and many other places, and he has taught at Columbia’s MFA program and the Gallatin School at NYU. He also writes a column for the New York Times Book Review on graphic novels.

Sonya Huber’s newest book is Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System. Her other books include Opa Nobody, Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, The Evolution of Hillary Rodham Clinton and a textbook, The Backwards Research Guide for Writers. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other outlets. She teaches at Fairfield University and directs Fairfield’s Low-Residency MFA Program.