Stephanie Vaughn, longtime creative writing professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, passed away on November 12. She was 81 years old.
A native of Millersburg, Ohio, Professor Vaughn earned her bachelor’s degree and master’s degree from Ohio State University and her master of fine arts degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She then served as a Stegner Fellow, and later as the Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University in California.
In 1983, Professor Vaughn came to Cornell as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow before joining the faculty full-time. During her nearly four-decades-long tenure, she taught creative writing and literature courses, directed the creative writing program for several years, and spent over two decades as co-director of a summer writing program and art studio in Rome. Professor Vaugh was also a longtime editor of Cornell’s literary journal, Epoch. While at Cornell, she also published her own collection of short stories, Sweet Talk (Random House, 1990).
Professor Vaughn retired from Cornell in 2022 as professor of literatures in English emerita and the Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences.