Ms. Liesl Schwabe is a writer and educator.  Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders, and LitHub.  She was awarded the 2020 Donald Murray Prize and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Ms. Schwabe has been a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar and was a scholar associate at the Institute of Language Studies and Research Kolkata, where she facilitated writing workshops for the faculty and graduate students.  In 2024, she was named an English Language Specialist by the U.S. Department of State.  Formerly the director of the Writing Program at Yeshiva College, she currently oversees the Writing Center and the Writing Across the Curriculum program at Berkshire Community College.  She holds an MFA in nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars.

The teaching portion of Ms. Schwabe’s Fulbright-Nehru project involves setting up writing workshops for undergraduate and graduate students; it is also working on the professional development of the faculty interested in integrating more writing instruction into their classes.  For the research portion of this project, she is writing a collection of essays that explore specific instances of U.S. and Indian interactions – artistic, environmental, and social.  The cornerstone essay is focusing on the play, Maanusher Adhikare (The Rights of Man), written and performed in Bengali in 1968, which is on the 1930s trials of the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama.  Blending personal narrative, historical context, and contemporary reporting, the collection is about the limitations and possibilities of solidarity, while illuminating upon interdependence and shared humanity.

Ultimately, Ms. Schwabe hopes to establish a writing and research center in Kolkata which will serve as a resource for a consortium of public universities, with its workshops and one-on-one support for student and faculty, along with research and publication.  She believes that writing centers help foster curiosity and exchange of ideas, on the page, around the campus, and in the world.