Dana Czapnik

Native New Yorker Dana Czapnik entered Hunter’s MFA program in creative writing after having a successful career as a sports editor at ESPN and other outlets. At Hunter she was recognized with a Hertog Fellowship, and worked with Rivka Galchen. After the program, Czapnik was an Emerging Writers Fellow at the Center for Fiction in 2017 and a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction in 2018. She also worked as an assistant for Salman Rushdie, a post she earned after receiving a recommendation from Hunter professor Colum McCann.

Czapnik is confident none of this would have happened if not for the relationships she made at Hunter. “Perhaps most importantly Hunter changed my brain,” she said. “I received an incredible intellectual education there and got to study with, learn from, and engage with the greatest literary minds of our time. I’m still close with many of my classmates. We share our lives and our writing and will be each other’s biggest supporters and collaborators throughout our lives.”

Czapnik’s debut novel, The Falconer (2019), which she began developing at Hunter, was published by Atria/Simon & Schuster in the US and Faber & Faber in the UK, and has been translated into German and Italian. The Falconer was a New York Times Editors’ Choice Pick, an O: The Oprah Magazine Reading Room Pick, and was long-listed for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. An television adaptation based on her teleplay is in development at John Wells Productions.

Her essays, interviews, and fiction have been published in The Guardian, ESPN, Lit Hub, Refinery 29, and Electric Literature. In 2019, she was included on the “Forward 50” list of the most influential Jewish Americans. Czapnik has taught creative writing at Hunter College and is currently a visiting professor at Barnard College.