2026-2027

Ken Schept, President
Seth Ribner, 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
Christy Oglesby, At-Large Officer
Melisa Ozen Ryan, 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 Around ten years ago, he returned to writing fiction and has since completed many short stories, three unpublished novels, and a children’s picture book, A Gift of Feathers, published by Feiwel & Friends, a Macmillan imprint.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 Columbia Law School, Seth clerked for a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He then began a thirty-year career as a litigator in New York and Los Angeles at two international law firms working on major cases involving, among other areas, securities, insurance coverage, and energy. During his time as an attorney, he published a number of legal articles and lectured at continuing education seminars. For more than ten years, he has been working full time as a novelist. He has completed two historical novels, and is currently working on a third.

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. In addition to serving on the Executive Committee of Columbia Fiction Foundry, she’s the founder of Contemporary Fiction Collective in New York City and teaches creative writing through her Stories Alive! Writing Workshops, where her students continually inspire her. She’s hard at work on her latest novel. 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. And he has begun work on an eighth novel: After The Jellyby Man. Visit him at www.richardnochimson.com.

Christy received a BA in English and a BA in African and African-American Studies from Emory University. She subsequently received her masters from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. During her decades as a reporter, editor, writing coach and managing editor for print, broadcast, magazine, digital and investigative news outlets, she wrote, produced and edited thousands of stories for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, CNN Digital, CNN/US, Cox Media Group and The Times Picayune and several magazines. Christy is querying her debut novel and writing her second. In addition to CFF, she is a member of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association.

Jennifer (MFA/Fiction, Columbia University School of the Arts) is the author of What Mennonite Girls are Good For (University of Iowa Press, 2025), winner of the John Simmons Iowa Short Fiction Award. 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 Professor of English at New York City College of Technology (CUNY) where she is Coordinator of the Minor in Creative Writing and the 2026-2027 Scholar on Campus. Website: http://jennifer-sears.com

Margaret (Margie) is Professor Emerita of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the City College of CUNY. She holds degrees in Geological Sciences, from Columbia's GS (B.S.), GSAS (MS, MPhil, PhD.) Her fieldwork on prehistoric earthquakes brought her to the Aleutians, Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, and the Dominican Republic. Author of three award-winning memoirs: Over My Head, The Cusp of Dreadfulness, and Smart Ass. Her novel, Cradle of Storms, was shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger Award (2023) and the HNS's Historical novel category (2026). She is a member of MWA, SinC, HNS, CWA, and IWWG. Visit her at www.margiewinslow.com