2025-2026

Ken Schept, President
Linda Raymond Ellison, Vice President
Lisa E. Melilli, Secretary
A. Mauricio Matiz, Communications Director
Michael Hirsh, At-Large Officer
Tania Moore, At-Large Officer
Richard Nochimson, At-Large Officer
Jennifer Sears, At-Large Officer
Margaret Winslow, At-Large Officer

After receiving his MFA from Columbia University, Ken sharpened his writing skills as a journalist and business writer, traveling extensively in the US and abroad. Around ten years ago, he returned to writing fiction and has since completed many short stories, three unpublished novels, and a children’s picture book, A Gift of Feathers, published by Feiwel & Friends, a Macmillan imprint. Jewish Fiction.Net published his short story The Crimson Cap.

After graduating from Mary Washington College of the University of Virginia, Linda worked on the Fredericksburg Virginia Free-Lance Star before moving to New York and Columbia Graduate School of Journalism (class of 1971). She spent a 30-year career as a reporter, editor and columnist for The Louisville Kentucky Times and The Courier-Journal newspapers. She retired to teach college writing (non-fiction), mostly at Bellarmine University, for almost 15 years. She is now Writer-In-Residence at Simmons College of Kentucky, a tiny HBCU in Louisville. Linda and her husband, William L. Ellison Jr., also worked together on two non-fiction books involving local history. Linda is working on her first novel.

Lisa (MPH, DrPH Mailman School of Public Health) was a finalist for the Alexander Capon prize in fiction. Also, she was a finalist for her first publication from Soundings Review. She received Honorable Mention twice from Glimmer Train, as well as being a semifinalist for the Pirate Alley Faulkner Society emerging writer award series. Her latest published stories were in Nivalis Review and Midway Journal. She is the recipient of an Arts Fellowship from the Drisha Institute. She holds an MFA from Goddard College and has taught creative writing in the greater New York City area.

Mauricio (E'79) is an aspiring novelist and short-story writer. He credits his two undergraduate classes with the poet Kenneth Koch for inspiring a life-long fascination with words and language, an interest he mostly put aside for career and family until recently. Over the last decade, with rekindled enthusiasm, he has been published in Latino Book Review 2025, East End Beacon, The Latinx Project at NYU, and Huellas Magazine. Find a collection of his work at his website The Ink Never Dries (medium.com/matiz). He aims to support emerging writers during his tenure in the leadership group at Columbia Fiction Foundry.

Michael is a 1990 graduate of SIPA and a career journalist based outside of Washington, D.C. He is a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine and the former foreign editor, chief diplomatic correspondent and national economic correspondent for Newsweek as well as a former national editor of Politico magazine. He has also written for The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, Foreign Affairs, and Harper's. Hirsh shared in two National Magazine Awards for Newsweek's coverage of the war on terror and was co-winner of the Overseas Press Club award for best magazine reporting from abroad. He is the author of two nonfiction books, At War with Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World (Oxford University Press, 2002), and Capital Offense: How Washington's Wise Men Handed America's Future over to Wall Street (Wiley, 2010). 

Tania's Pushcart-nominated fiction has appeared in The Madison Review, Foundling Review, Pithead Chapel, and many others. She earned her BA from Yale College and her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was the recipient of the C. Woolrich Fellowship for fiction. She’s completed one upmarket literary fiction novel and is at work on another. In addition to serving as immediate past president of Columbia University’s Fiction Foundry, she is the founder of Contemporary Fiction Collective in New York City and teaches creative writing through her Stories Alive! Writing Workshops. Visit her at www.taniamoore.com

Richard is Professor Emeritus of English at Yeshiva University. He was General Editor of the Pegasus Shakespeare Bibliographies (eleven volumes published between 1995 and 2008). After decades of teaching college students about how fiction gets created and how readers respond to fiction, Richard began to create his own fictions in December 2006. He is the author of a self-published collection of short stories: Huidekoper Cat, and Other Tales (2014). He is now fine-tuning the seven novels he has been writing and re-writing since 2007, each of which he regards as not yet published. Visit him at www.richardnochimson.com.

Jennifer (MFA/Fiction, Columbia University School of the Arts) is the author of What Mennonite Girls are Good For, winner of the 2025 John Simmons Short Fiction Award, forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her stories and essays appear in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Guernica, Fence, Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, Witness, Fiction International, Scoundrel Time, North American Review, Nabokov Studies Journal, and elsewhere. She is Associate Professor of English at New York City College of Technology (CUNY) where she co-coordinates the Minor in Creative Writing. 

Website: http://jennifer-sears.com

Margaret (Margie) is Professor emerita of Earth Sciences at CUNY. National Geographic funded her fieldwork which appeared in the PBS series “Fire on the Rim.” She published two award-winning travel/adventure memoirs about southern South America, Over My Head (2012) and The Cusp of Dreadfulness (2016), plus a best-selling animal companion memoir, Smart Ass (2018). In addition to CFF, she is a member of the International Women Writers Guild and Sisters in Crime. Visit her at www.margiewinslow.com