Professor emerita Stephanie Vaughn, ‘writer’s writer,’ dies at 81

Stephanie Vaughn, fiction writer and professor of writing, died in Ithaca on Nov. 12. She was 81. 

Vaughn taught creative writing and literature at Cornell for 39 years, retiring in 2022 as professor of literatures in English emerita and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S). As a writer, she contributed influential stories to a resurgence of American short fiction. As a teacher and administrator, Vaughn helped to lift Cornell’s Creative Writing Program to national prominence and helped shape the next generation of emerging writers.

“Stephanie gave all of herself to our program, to the young writers,” said Valzhyna Mort, associate professor of literatures in English (A&S) and director of the Creative Writing Program. “She was a generous colleague – loving, wry, fiercely intelligent, a welcoming host of her famous garden parties she threw with her late husband, Michael Koch. I’d run into her dressed in all black in the hallway in Goldwin Smith and then at home I’d often return to her book ‘Sweet Talk’ for clarity and companionship.”

“Sweet Talk,” Vaughn’s 1990 book of short stories, won the Southern Review award for fiction and earned a New York Times notable book of the year citation. It has been reprinted multiple times and translated into several languages. In his introduction to a reissued edition, the author Tobias Wolff calls “Dog Heaven,” the concluding piece in the collection, “one of the most surprising, stirring, beautiful stories in our literature.”

“Stephanie was a writer’s writer,” said Stewart O’Nan, M.F.A. ’92. “During the 1980s renaissance in the American short story, her stories in the New Yorker were lauded by critics and prized by colleagues. They drew me and many other aspiring writers to Cornell, where she was a force, overseeing a program that helped produce a generation of writers.”

“Stephanie was very kind, but she was not afraid to tell you the truth,” said Ling Ma, M.F.A. ’15. “She was sweet and shrewd. And she was always generous with her time and attention.”

Vaughn and Koch, longtime editor of Cornell’s literary journal Epoch, played a special role together as a center of the Creative Writing Program, Ma said: “The school year did not seem to begin until Stephanie and Michael's backyard party had commemorated it. They created a kind of hearth for many of us writers, each pursuing a book project in solitude.” 

Vaughn gave endlessly to her students and championed the cause of Cornell’s Creative Writing Program on a national scale, said Lamar Herrin, professor of literatures in English emeritus – a dedication she and Koch shared.

“They both became teachers, editors par excellance, and the writing of their students shows just how good they were,” Herrin said. “They were both extraordinarily generous with their attention, their affection and their time, and the results are seen in their students' work.”

Stephanie Vaughn was born in Millersburg, Ohio, on Dec. 15, 1943. The daughter of a career Army officer, she lived in many places growing up, including Oklahoma, Texas, New York City, the Philippines and Italy.

She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Ohio State University and an M.F.A. at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and later the Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing there.

Vaughn came to Cornell in 1983 as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow before becoming a faculty member. She directed the Creative Writing Program for multiple terms and served on the committees of dozens of M.F.A. students.

For more than 20 years, Vaughn led a summer writing and art studio in Rome with Koch and Stan Taft, professor of art emeritus in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning.

Vaughn’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Redbook, Antaeus, and O. Henry and Pushcart Prize collections. She wrote the introduction for an edition of Willa Cather’s “My Ántonia.”

Vaughn is survived by her sister, Barbara Vaughn.

Read the story in the Cornell Chronicle.