Ben Marcus is the author of several books of fiction. His newest novels are Leaving the Sea (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) and The Flame Alphabet (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012). His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications including Harper's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the New York Times, Salon, McSweeney's, and Time. Marcus is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories and a 2009 recipient of a grant for Innovative Literature from the Creative Capital Foundation. In 2008 he received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he has also received a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, and three Pushcart Prizes. He is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow and a fall 2013 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He taught at Brown University for several years before joining the faculty at Columbia University's School of the Arts. He served on the Center's Pew Fellowships panel in 2009.