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Leslie Rubinkowski
Academic Director
Phone: 410-337-6557
Email: leslie.rubinkowski@goucher.edu

Leslie Rubinkowski is the director of the M.F.A. in Nonfiction and the author of Impersonating Elvis. A journalist, essayist, and film critic, her work has appeared in a number of publications, including Harper's, River Teeth, and Creative Nonfiction. She has also taught journalism and creative nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh, directed of the newswriting program at West Virginia University's School of Journalism, and has been a guest lecturer at The Poynter Institute and the Chautauqua Institution, among many other places. Her current book project is a hybrid: part memoir, part history of Pittsburgh.

M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction, University of Pittsburgh
B.A. in Creative Writing, California University of Pennsylvania

Porscha Burke

Porscha Burke is Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Strategy and Senior Editor at the Random House and Crown Publishing Groups. Over her twenty-year career in books, she has supported publishing executives and acquired and edited works by Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Jon Meacham, Candice Benbow, Bryant Terry, Kathy Iandoli, Queen Afua, Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., and Christopher Benson, Connie Briscoe, and Milton Washington, among others. Dr. Angelou’s last frontlist editor at Random House, and a board member of the Dr. Maya Angelou Foundation, Porscha curated Rainbow in the Cloud: The Wisdom and Spirit of Maya Angelou and a gift product program based on the phenomenal legend’s publishing catalog. She also spearheaded the publication of new editions of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Black Book. Championing the publishing industry’s mission to increase diversity in its staff, content, and audience reach, Porscha served as an inaugural board member of People of Color in Publishing and Penguin Random House’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council. A Queens, New York native and University of Virginia graduate, Porscha received her M.F.A. in Nonfiction from Ë®¹ûÅÉAV½â˵ College, where she currently teaches.  

M.F.A. in Nonfiction, Ë®¹ûÅÉAV½â˵ College
B.A. in Anthropology, University of Virginia 

Evan Hughes

 is the author of , originally published as The Hard Sell (Doubleday, 2022), a narrative nonfiction account of the dramatic rise and fall of an opioid maker. The book is the basis of the 2023 Netflix film , starring Emily Blunt and Chris Evans. Evan was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Reporting in 2015 for The Atavist’s " which was optioned for film by Universal. He has written feature-length  for The New York Times Magazine, , , New York, , Wired, the London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books. He has also been published in the New York Times Book Review, , Slate, , and Salon, among other publications. He is also the author of Literary Brooklyn from Macmillan, a work of literary biography and urban history.

Randon Billings Noble 

is an essayist. Her full-length collection was published by Nebraska in 2019 and was a finalist for the Foreword Indies Awards for Essays. Her lyric essay anthology , published by Nebraska in 2021, won a Forward Indies Honorable Mention for Essays. Randon’s lyric essay chapbook  was published by Red Bird in 2017, and her essay was listed as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2016 and selected for the anthology  (Rose Metal Press, 2020). Individual essays have been published in the column of The New York Times; The Massachusetts Review; Passages North; PANK; Brain, Child; Sweet: A Literary Confection; The Georgia Review; Shenandoah; The Rumpus; Brevity; Fourth Genre; ; Creative Nonfiction,, , and elsewhere. She is the founding editor of the online literary magazine and her next book is a lyric meditation on shadows, also forthcoming from Nebraska, in 2026. 

M.F.A. in Creative Writing, New York University
B.A. in English, University of Michigan

Michelle Orange

 is the author of Pure Flame: A Legacy, which was published by FSG in June 2021. Her previous book, , was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker. Her writing has appeared in publications including  , ²Ñ³¦³§·É±ð±ð²Ô±ð²â’s, The Nation, , , S±ô²¹³Ù±ð, and the , where she is a contributing editor and columnist. She is the editor of From the Notebook: The Unwritten Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a collection published in Issue 22 of ²Ñ³¦³§·É±ð±ð²Ô±ð²â’s. Her work appears in several anthologies, including Should I Go to Grad School? a²Ô»å The Best Canadian Essays 2020. She also teaches in the graduate writing program at Columbia University, and has been an invited guest and speaker at institutions including Yale University, New York University, and the University of San Francisco.  

M.A. in Film Studies, New York University
H.B.A. in English and Film Studies, University of Toronto

Meline Toumani

 is the author of There Was and , a of memoir, reporting, and commentary that was a finalist for the and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She has written about ideas, books, and music for  and the paper's opinion and culture pages,, The Nation,, , The Boston Globe, Newsday, GlobalPost, The National, and Travel + Leisure. As a foreign reporter, she has filed stories from Turkey, Armenia, and Georgia, and was a journalism fellow in residence at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. In addition to teaching at Ë®¹ûÅÉAV½â˵ College, her work in journalism education includes helping set up and run a reporting institute at Rostov State University in the Russian North Caucasus, teaching writing in the Bard Globalization and International Affairs , and leading workshops for undergraduate and graduate students at various schools. She has been an invited speaker for a wide range of academic and private organizations, and a guest on radio and TV programs in several countries. Toumani has also held staff editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, KQED Public Media, and GreatSchools. 
 

M.A. in Journalism (Cultural Reporting and Criticism), New York University 
B.A. in English, University of California-Berkeley