Mark Farrington

Mark Farrington is the Associate Program Director of the MA in Teaching Writing program. Mr. Farrington has taught at Johns Hopkins since 1998, first as a fiction advisor and then assistant director of the MA in Writing program before becoming director of the new Teaching Writing program in 2016. His areas of special interest are teaching composition and fiction writing. In addition to Johns Hopkins, he has taught college writing as a visiting assistant professor at George Mason University, and at Mary Washington University and the University of Louisville, and taught English and Dramatics at Abington Friends School and creative writing to students in K-12 in an artists-in-the-schools program through the Massachusetts Council on the Arts. For more than twenty years, he has been a Teacher/Consultant with the Northern Virginia Writing Project and is a member of their advisory board. He has published several articles on the teaching of writing, most notably in the NWP Quarterly and Voice. Three times he received the MA in Writing Program’s Outstanding Teaching Award and has also received the Outstanding Faculty Award from the Advanced Academic Programs.

Farrington has an MFA in fiction writing from George Mason University, and a BA in English and American Literature from Colby College, graduating cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. He has published short fiction in CARVE, The Valparaiso Fiction Review, Craft Literary Magazine, The Louisville Review, The New Virginia Review, The Potomac Review, Union Street Review, and other journals. His short story, “Motherlove,” won an Editor’s Choice Award in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. Another story, “My Father’s Court,” won second place in the Dame Alice Throckmorton Prize. His short fiction has been anthologized in Confessions: Fact or Fiction, in Stress City: A Big Book of Fiction by 51 DC Area Guys, in October Mountain: An Anthology of Berkshire Writers, and in The Third Berkshire Anthology. Farrington has won a Virginia Commission on the Arts Individual Artists Fellowship, the Dan Rudy Fiction Prize, and the Metroversity Fiction Award. “Motherlove” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

A native of New England, Farrington now lives in Alexandria, Virginia, with his wife Christina and their springer spaniel Maddie.