David

Puretz

David Puretz is a writer, editor, and Clinical Assistant Professor of Writing at Yeshiva University, where he serves as Director of First Year Writing and Assistant Director of the Wilf Campus Writing Center. His teaching and professional work center on the practice and teaching of writing: how writers develop their voices, how students learn to move between genres and audiences, and how writing changes across disciplines, media, and technologies.

Puretz teaches courses in first-year writing, fiction, digital storytelling, narrative nonfiction, and professional and workplace writing, as well as the Advanced Seminar in Creative Writing. His interdisciplinary teaching includes Truth in Fiction and the Expression of Experience, a course at the intersection of literature and creative writing that examines how fiction conveys truth and represents lived experience.

As Director of First Year Writing, he oversees Yeshiva College’s first-year writing program, supports the development and coordination of its curriculum, works with faculty on course design and pedagogy, and helps establish shared goals and practices for introductory writing instruction. As Assistant Director of the Wilf Campus Writing Center, his work includes tutor education, writing-center pedagogy, and administration. He previously served as Director of Writing Across the Curriculum, where he oversaw Writing-Intensive course programming and worked with faculty across disciplines to strengthen the teaching of writing throughout the undergraduate curriculum.

He has presented at national and international conferences on writing pedagogy, student engagement, academic integrity, generative artificial intelligence, and the changing practices of writing and authorship.

Puretz is Editorial Director of Global City Review, the New York-based literary and cultural journal founded in 1993, where he works with writers and artists across fiction, nonfiction, poetry, visual art, and multimedia.

His own fiction and nonfiction explore family, identity, memory, place, and belonging. He is the author of the novel The Escapist, published in 2020.

Before joining Yeshiva University, Puretz taught writing at St. John’s University and the City College of New York. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York and a BA in Writing from Ithaca College. He was named Yeshiva College’s Lillian F. and William L. Silber Professor of the Year in 2021–22.