Geoff Dyer
Writer in Residence, Geoff Dyer, is an essayist, critic, and author of four novels.
Recipient of numerous awards such as the Somerset Maugham Prize (1992), the Lannan Literary Fellowship (2003), W. H. Smith Best Travel Book Award (2004), E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2006), ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography (2006), Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Best Comic Novel (2009), GQ Writer of the Year Award (2009), and the National Book Critics Circle Award (2012), Dyer is not only accomplished within his field but a joy to have in our department.
“One of our greatest living critics, not of the arts but of life itself, and one of our most original writers”
–Kathryn Schulz, New York Magazine
Robin Coste Lewis
Robin Coste Lewis is a renowned poet, artist, scholar, and former poet laureate of Los Angeles.
Numerous accolades highlight her stellar craftmanship: PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection (2023), National Book Award in Poetry (2015), Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship (2019) and the Guggenheim Fellowship (2019). Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Transition, and The Massachusetts Review. We are grateful to have such a beloved faculty member as our Writer in Residence.
“Lewis pushes the limits of language and image, composing lines alongside a cache of hundreds of photographs found under her late grandmother’s bed…it provokes, mourns, philosophizes, yearns, and celebrates, much like the jazz of Lewis’s ancestral Louisiana . . . Its achievement is cosmic and sonic.”
– Kevin Young, The New Yorker
Contact Details
USC Department of English
3501 Trousdale Parkway
Taper Hall of Humanities 404
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0354