Deborah Eisenberg, the short story writer, is leaving the University of Virginia to join the faculty at Columbia University’s writing program. Ms. Eisenberg has taught at UVA since 1994, but the lure of Morningside Heights and brilliant students willing to bank $100,000 on their own literary promise (through a combination of scholarships and loans, of course) has proven as irresistible to Ms. Eisenberg as it has to many other MacArthur geniuses. And of course, there must be the appeal of living closer to her beloved longtime companion, Wallace Shawn.
Here’s a story by Ms. Eisenberg in a recent New York Review of Books.
In other Columbia MFA news, Phillip Lopate has been named the head of the MFA concentration in creative nonfiction and Victor LaValle will become director of the fiction program.
