Margot Singer

Margot Singer teaches English courses in creative writing and literature, with a specialty in fiction and creative nonfiction writing. In 2018, she was recognized with Denison’s Bonar Family Mentorship and Teaching Award.

Singer is the author of four books: a collection of personal essays, Secret Agent Man (Barrow Street Press, 2025); a novel, Underground Fugue (Melville House, 2017); a collection of linked short stories, The Pale of Settlement (University of Georgia Press, 2007). She is also the co-editor, with Nicole Walker, of the critical essay collection Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction (2013, 2nd ed. 2023).

Singer’s publications have received many honors, including a gold medal in the Independent Publishers “IPPY” Book Awards, a New York Times Book Review “Notable Book” designation, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for American-Jewish Fiction, the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Reform Judaism Prize, and an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Two of her essays have been listed as “Notable” in the Best American Essays series.

Her individual stories and essays have appeared in many literary magazines such as The Sun, the Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, the Gettysburg Review, The Normal School, and many others. She has received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, the Nancy Dasher Book Award, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, the Thomas H. Carter Award for the Essay, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in prose. She has also been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo, Ucross, and Ragdale.

From 2020 to 2025, Singer served as the Director of Strategy for the Arts. From 2016 to 2019, she directed Denison’s Lisska Center for Scholarly Engagement, and, from 2013 to 2016, served as the Associate Director of the Gilpatrick Center for Fellowships and Student Research. From 2009 to 2022, she directed the Reynolds Young Writers Workshop, Denison’s summer creative writing program for high school writers.