R. Clifton Spargo - Director of Testimonial Writing Program

A novelist, short story writer, cultural critic, and rock’n’roll enthusiast, Clifton Spargo is an expert in testimony and ethics and a dedicated teacher of creative writing.

He is the author of the novel Beautiful Fools, which Pulitzer Prize-winner Andrew Sean Greer describes as a “marvel of a book” that reminds us of “what we fight for, what we fail to win, and the beauty that abides between.”

Clifton became involved in the fight to end gender-based violence because of the hurt it caused to several people who are dear to him. He co-created our writing program to empower new voices of witness. “Testimony,” he explains, “brings to light what our political and social systems push aside, ignore, even actively suppress.”

An Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum, Clifton’s award-winning stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Glimmer Train, The Kenyon Review and his essays on culture and music, in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Huffington Post, and Chicago Tribune. He holds a master’s degree from Yale Divinity School and a doctorate from Yale University. He is a former fellow at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the author of two books on literature and philosophy, The Ethics of Mourning and Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death. He currently teaches creative writing at Yale University.

“Storytelling, as that fundamental activity through which we work out our humanity,” says Clifton, “is essential to human rights advocacy. It tells us not just who we are but who we should be, and it lays the imaginative ground for getting there.”