Amy Benson teaches creative writing, particularly literary nonfiction and fiction, and has an interest in experimental, genre-fluid prose and work from under-represented voices. She taught most recently at Fordham University where she was a Visiting Writer in Prose and in the graduate and undergraduate Creative Writing Programs at Columbia University. At Columbia she directed the Undergraduate Creative Writing Major for several years and co-created and taught Columbia’s first creative writing abroad program: Paris, Then and Now.
Benson is the author of two books: Seven Years to Zero (Dzanc Books 2017), winner of the Dzanc Books Nonfiction Prize, and The Sparkling-Eyed Boy (Houghton Mifflin 2004), winner of the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize in Creative Nonfiction, sponsored by Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. The Sparkling-Eyed Boy was chosen as an Elle magazine “Must Read Book” and a USAToday Top Ten Summer 2004 book. Recent essays and stories have been published in journals such as Agni, Black Warrior Review, BOMB, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, PANK, and Triquarterly. She has been awarded a fellowship to Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a residency at Ledig House International, and she is the co-founder of the First Person Plural Reading Series in Harlem.
The Sparkling-Eyed Boy: A Memoir of Love, Grown Up, Houghton Mifflin 2004.
SEVEN YEARS TO ZERO, Dzanc Books 2017.
