Board of Advisors

William Miller, Board Chairperson 

William Miller directed the creative writing program at George Mason University for more than two-dozen years until his retirement in 2018. During that time, he helped establish the Cheuse Center, the Fall for the Book literary festival, the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree program in creative writing, and Stillhouse Press. Negotiations to bring the Poetry Daily web-based contemporary poetry distribution program to Mason began in his last year in the director’s position. He serves on the board of Fall for the Book, and is the current board chair of the Cheuse Center.

Helon Habila

Helon Habila is a professor of creative writing at George Mason University. He is the author of the novels Waiting for an Angel (WW Norton), Measuring Time (WW Norton), Oil on Water (WW Norton), and Travelers (WW Norton). He is the editor of The Granta Book of the African Short Story (Granta). His nonfiction book, The Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria was published by Columbia Global Reports in 2016. Habila is a contributing editor for The Virginia Quarterly Review and a regular book reviewer for the UK Guardian.

Stewart Moss

As a former Executive Director of The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, one of the largest literary centers in the USA, Stewart Moss helped establish creative writing programs for adult immigrants and members of the military being treated for neurological and psychological trauma. Prior to that, he worked as an educator and fundraiser in educational institutions around the country. He has taught literature and creative writing in both the USA and abroad; Scotland, Greece, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, and Nepal are among the countries in which he has lived and worked. Moss has essays included in Retire the Colors: Veterans & Civilians on Iraq & Afghanistan, ed. Dario DiBattista (Hudson Whitman/Excelsior College Press, 2016) and Plume Literary Journal, and poetry in Plume, Goss183, and Origins Literary Review. His chapbook of poems, For Those Whose Lives Have Seen Themselves, is being released in July. He has also been featured in “The Poet and the Poem” podcasts at The Library of Congress. He was educated at Union College (NY) and Harvard University. A native of Boston, MA he resides in Annapolis, MD.

Vivek Narayanan

Vivek Narayanan’s books of poems include Universal BeachLife and Times of Mr S. His new collection is After (NYRB Poets, 2022).  A full-length collection of his selected poems in Swedish translation was published by the Stockholm-based Wahlström & Widstrand in 2015.

Narayanan was born in India and raised in Zambia. He earned an MA in cultural anthropology from Stanford University, and an MFA in creative writing from Boston University. He has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (2013-14) and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library (2015-16). His poems, stories, translations and critical essays have appeared in journals like The Paris Review, Chimurenga Chronic, Granta.comPoetry Review (UK), Modern Poetry in TranslationHarvard ReviewAgniThe Caribbean Review of Books and elsewhere, as well as in anthologies like The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry. Narayanan is also a member of Poetry Daily’s editorial board. He was the Co-editor of Almost Island, an India-based international literary journal from 2007-2019. He teaches at George Mason University in Virginia.

Kris O'Shee

Kris O’Shee spent four decades as a modern dancer and choreographer, including a decade in London where she co-founded Junction Dance Company and taught at the London Contemporary Dance School. After returning to the US, she taught and performed in the San Francisco Bay Area before taking a position on the dance faculty at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. She then moved to Washington, DC with her husband, Alan Cheuse, and founded O’Shee Dances. She continued choreographing and performing until, in the last two decades, she earned a certificate in massage therapy and a graduate degree in psychology. But it was in 2021, when O’Shee published Our Last Blue Moon, a memoir about her marriage to Alan Cheuse and the tragic occurrence of his death in 2015, that she herself turned to writing. She is honored to serve on the board of the Cheuse Center whose mission to the cause of literary diplomacy and support of writers at risk would have been in complete alignment with her husband’s devotion to the writing life.  So many times in Cheuse’s thirty years as book critic for NPR’s All Things Considered, listeners heard about writers across the globe they otherwise would never have known! It is O’Shee’s belief that the Cheuse Center is not only a legacy to one of America’s most persistent and beloved literary ambassadors, but also a summons to all who care about the power of the written word, especially in today’s uncertain and turbulent world.

Kris O’Shee currently has a private practice in psychotherapy in DC, where she resides.

Lisa Page 

Lisa Page is co-editor of We Wear The Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America, (Beacon Press).  Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, LitHub Weekly, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, The Crisis, Playboy, the Washington Post Book World and other publications. She is assistant professor of English at the George Washington University and Director of Creative Writing. She previously served as Interim Director of Africana Studies. She is also the former President of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and a faculty member of the Yale Writers Workshop.

Susan Shreve

Susan Shreve is the author of fifteen novels, including More News Tomorrow (2019), You Are the Love of My Life (2012), A Student of Living Things (2006) and a memoir, Warm Springs: Traces of Childhood (2007). She has written thirty books for children published primarily by Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic and Knopf. Her latest children’s book The Search for Baby Ruby was published by Arthur A Levine/Scholastic in 2015. Her next book for children is in progress titled The Magician's Quintessential Girl.

She is the co-editor or editor of five anthologies including Dream Me Home Safely for which she was the editor and with Porter Shreve Outside the LawTales Out of School and How We Want to Live, and with Marita Golden: Skin Deep, essays on race. She has published several essays in magazines, some collected in anthologies, most recently in Eye of My Heart.

She’s the founder of the Master of Fine Arts Degree at George Mason University where she is a Professor of English and was founding president and later Chairman of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. She resigned from the PEN/Faulkner Board in January, 2018.

She is on the Advisory boards of Poets and Writers, Alan Cheuse International Center at George Mason University, 826 DC.

She has received a Guggenheim Award for Fiction and a National Endowment grant for Fiction.

Eric Weiner

Eric Weiner is an author, journalist, keynote speaker and writing instructor. His books include the New York Times bestsellers The Geography of Bliss and The Geography of Genius, as well as the critically acclaimed Man Seeks God and, his latest title, The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers.

His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Eric is a former aviation reporter for The New York Times and foreign correspondent for NPR. He is the recipient of several journalism and writing awards, including the Angel Award for coverage of Islamic affairs in Asia and the Borders Original Voices Award.

Eric’s work has also appeared in the New Republic, The Atlantic, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the anthology "Best American Travel Writing." Eric leads several writing workshops each year, including the Himalayan Writers Workshop and, along with fellow author Jacki Lyden, the Colton House Retreat. He lives in the Washington, DC area with his wife, daughter and a menagerie of animals.

Katherine E. Young

Katherine E. Young is the author of two poetry collections, Woman Drinking Absintheand Day of the Border Guards (Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize finalist); she is the editor of Written in Arlington and curator of Spoken in Arlington. Young has translated work by Anna Starobinets (memoir), Akram Aylisli (fiction), and numerous Russophone poets from Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. Young’s writing and translation have earned both national and international awards, including the Granum Foundation Translation Prize, the Pushkin House Translation Residency (UK), an Arlington County Individual Artist Grant (Virginia), a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship, and a Hawthornden fellowship (Scotland). She has taught courses in poetry and literature at the University of Maryland-College Park and the Catholic University of America and been invited to speak on translation, translation theory, and the ethics of translation at the University of Oxford (UK), Columbia University, and the Institut Perevoda (Russia), among others. She currently serves on the PEN America Translation Committee; she is a founding member, former co-director, and advisory board member emerita for the DC-Area Literary Translators Network (DC-ALT). From 2016-2018, she served as the inaugural Poet Laureate for Arlington, Virginia. 

Young’s work explores tension and dialogue across physical boundaries—such as national borders—and perceived boundaries of culture, genre, and medium, including language. She is a strong advocate for women and other underrepresented voices, both in her own writing/translation choices and in the writers whose work she helps promote. For several years, she co-curated and co-hosted the PEN America Women in Translation Month reading series. Since 2014, she has been the English-language voice of at-risk Azerbaijani writer Akram Aylisli, who continues to face legal proceedings initiated by his own government, which orchestrated the burning of Aylisli’s books in 2013. Young’s translations of Ukrainian writers have appeared in numerous wartime anthologies and collections.  

Emeriti Board Members:

Emma Cheuse

Linda Chavez

Nicholas Delbanco

Jessica Kallista

Jacki Lyden

Leeya Mehta

Dallas Hudgens

Debra Lattanzi Shutika

Jung Yun