Zadie Smith Joins NYU Creative Writing Faculty

New York University announced this month that it has appointed Orange Prize-winner Zadie Smith as a full professor in its creative writing program. Smith, who currently teaches at Columbia University, will begin her tenure in September 2010. She will teach both graduate and undergraduate courses in fiction.

“Zadie Smith is a brilliant writer, critic, and teacher—one of the most gifted writers of her generation—and we will be extraordinarily fortunate to have her with us,” said program director Deborah Landau in a press release. In addition to Smith, NYU has recently hired Anne Carson, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Charles Simic as Distinguished Writers in Residence.

Smith, born in London in 1975 and educated at Cambridge, is the author of White Teeth (Random House, 2000), The Autograph Man (Random House, 2002), and On Beauty (Penguin Press, 2005), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She is also the editor of the collections Piece of Flesh (ICA, 2001) and The Book of Other People (Penguin, 2008).