Loudis - Should I go to grad school?: 41 answers to an impossible question

David Auerbach is a writer and software engineer living in New York. He has written for the Times Literary Supplement , n+1 , Bookforum , Triple Canopy , and elsewhere. He has coded for Google and Microsoft. He writes at waggish.org.

Nancy Bauer is a professor of philosophy and dean of academic affairs for arts and sciences at Tufts University. She writes about the social value of professional philosophy and is the author, most recently, of How to Do Things with Pornography .

Josh Boldt is a writer and editor in Athens, Georgia. He teaches at the University of Georgia and is the founder of the Adjunct Project.

Stephen Burt is a professor of English at Harvard and the author of several books of literary criticism and poetry, among them Belmont , Close Calls with Nonsense , and The Forms of Youth: 20th Century Poetry and Adolescence .

Terry Castle , a writer and literary critic, has taught at Stanford University since 1983. She has published eight books, including Masquerade and Civilization , The Apparitional Lesbian , and the prizewinning collection The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall . She is also a well-known essayist and has written frequently for the London Review of Books , the Atlantic , Slate , the New Republic , the Times Literary Supplement , and the New York Review of Books . Her most recent book, The Professor and Other Writings , was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Peter Coviello is a professor of English at Bowdoin College. He is the editor of Walt Whitmans Memoranda During the War and the author of Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature and Tomorrows Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America . His work has appeared in PMLA , American Literature , ELH , GLQ , and Raritan as well as in magazines like Frieze and the Believer.

Meehan Crist is writer in residence in biological sciences at Columbia University. Previously, she was reviews editor at the Believer. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times , the Los Angeles Times , the New Republic , Scientific American , and Science . She is a founding member of NeuWrite, a collaborative working group for scientists and writers, and she is currently working on a nonfiction book about traumatic brain injury.

Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He also teaches at the European Graduate School. His many books include Very Little... Almost Nothing , Infinitely Demanding , and, with Tom McCarthy, The Mattering of Matter: Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society . A new work on Hamlet titled Stay, Illusion! coauthored with Jamieson Webster, was published in 2013. He is series moderator of The Stone, a philosophy column in the New York Times , to which he is also a frequent contributor.

James Franco began his acting career in 1999 with the NBC series Freaks and Geeks , and he is best known for his roles in Spider-Man , 127 Hours , and Oz the Great and Powerful . He has directed, written, and produced films for more than a decade including Sal , a feature film about actor Sal Mineo, and literary adaptations of William Faulkners As I Lay Dying and Cormac McCarthys Child of God . Aside from his film career, Franco has attended UCLA, NYU, Columbia University, RISD, Warren Wilson College, and Yale, and he currently teaches graduate film and writing courses at UCLA, USC, and CalArts. His first novel, Actors Anonymous , was published in 2013, and he made his Broadway debut in a rendition of Of Mice and Men in 2014.

Andrea Fraser is an artist whose work has been identified with performance and institutional critique. The Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, presented a retrospective of her work in 2013, in conjunction with her receipt of the Wolfgang Hahn Prize. She is a professor of new genres in the Department of Art at UCLA.

Kenneth Goldsmith is a poet living in New York City and the founder of the online avant-garde archive UbuWeb . He teaches poetics and poetic practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

Jake Heggie is the composer of the acclaimed operas Moby-Dick , Dead Man Walking , and Three Decembers as well as more than 250 art songs, chamber, choral, and orchestral works. As a pianist, he can sometimes be heard in recital with singers Frederica von Stade, Joyce DiDonato, Susan Graham, and others. Heggie also coaches young singers, composers, and pianists internationally. He makes his home in San Francisco.

Sheila Heti is the author of five books, most recently the novel How Should a Person Be? Her work has been published in the London Review of Books , n+1 , Harpers , the New York Times , and the Believer . She lives in Toronto.

Lili Holzer-Glier is a photographer and journalist based in New York City. She received her BFA in photography and imaging from NYUs Tisch School of the Arts and her MS in digital media from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Her work has appeared in Newsday , the New York Times , Quartz , the New Yorke r, Thirteen , and the Huffington Post .

Lucy Ives is the author of two books of poetry, Orange Roses and Anamnesis , and a brief novel, Nineties. A deputy editor at Triple Canopy , she lives in New York, where she is completing a PhD in comparative literature at NYU.

Eben Klemm is a founder and partner of the food and beverage consultancy Cane & Maple. He has invented cocktails and written wine lists for Ace Hotel, the Starr Restaurant Organization, and the Marcus Samuelsson Group, and his creations have been published in the New York Times , Food & Wine , and other dining publications. A resident of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, his book The Cocktail Primer was published in 2009.

David Levine is an artist living in New York and Berlin. He dropped out of a PhD program in English literature. He is the director of the studio program at Bard College, Berlin, where he is ( cough ) a professor.

Rhonda Lieberman is a contributing editor at Artforum . She has written for Bookforum , the Baffler , the Paris Review Daily , the New York Times T Magazine , the Village Voice , and Spin . She has taught at the Yale School of Art, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, and Ume University (Sweden). Her art has appeared in Too Jewish? and Entertaining America (Jewish Museum of New York), The Fake Chanel Show (Stux Gallery), and, most recently, in The Cat Show (White Columns), which she also curated, featuring the Cats-in-Residence Program, which traveled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Erik Lindman was born in New York City, where he continues to live and work. Lindman received his BA in visual art and art history from Columbia University in 2007. Lindmans first solo exhibition was in 2009 at V&A Gallery in New York City. Recent exhibitions include the solo show Human Personality at Almine Rech Gallery in Paris, and the group exhibition Pour une grammaire du hazard . He is represented by Almine Rech Gallery, Paris/Brussels and ribordy contemporary, Geneva.

Sara Marcus is the author of Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution . Her essays and criticism have appeared in print and online publications including Bookforum , Artforum , the Los Angeles Review of Books , the Nation , Rolling Stone , and n+1 . She is currently a doctoral student in English at Princeton, where she is working on a book about twentieth-century American literature and politics.

Alexander Nagel took six and a half years to complete his MA and PhD in the history of art at Harvard University. Life got better after that. He is currently a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

Maggie Nelson is the author of four books of nonfiction, The Art of Cruelty , Bluets , Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions , and The Red Parts , as well as four books of poetry. Her next book is a work of autobiography and theory. She currently teaches in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts in Valencia, California, and lives in Los Angeles.