Antonio Elefano

In 2024, Antonio Elefano was awarded the USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching, the highest honor for teaching given at USC.  That same year, he received his second USC Mentoring Award for Mentoring Undergraduates (his first was in 2019).  

Antonio Elefano joined USC’s Writing faculty in the fall of 2014.  Before coming to USC, he was a corporate litigator in New York City and a writing fellow/visiting assistant professor at the University of Houston.  A graduate of Yale Law School and the author of Legal Writing for the Undergraduate from Wolters Kluwer/Aspen, he is the Writing Program’s legal writing specialist, teaching WRIT 340: Moot Court, WRIT 320: Competitive Moot Court (focused on oral argumentation), WRIT 340: Advanced Writing for Pre-Law Students (which he teaches as an Introduction to Legal Writing) and WRIT 440: Advanced Legal Writing.  He is the faculty advisor for Southern California Moot Court (which placed second in the nation in brief writing in 2023 and third in 2024 and third in oral argument in 2020 and 2021 and fifth in oral argument in 2024), Phi Alpha Delta (USC’s pre-law fraternity), and the Survivor Support Community at USC. 

Elefano is also a fiction writer whose stories have been published in The Los Angeles Review, 236 and The Journal. In August 2014, his story “Italy” was one of Buzzfeed’s “29 Short Stories You Need to Read in Your Twenties.”  

• M.F.A. Creative Writing, Boston University, 9/2011
• J.D. , Yale Law School, 6/2005