Sigrid Nunez is an author of novels including her debut, A Feather on the Breath of God: A Novel (1996, ISBN 0-06-092684-8) and a creative writing teacher at Columbia University. She was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin for Spring, 2005. She has received a Whiting Writers' Award and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. Columbia University is a private university whose main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of the Borough of Manhattan in New York City. ... The Whiting Writers Award is an American award presented annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and plays. ... American Academy of Arts and Letters is an organization whose goal is to foster, assist, and sustain an interest in American literature, music, and art. ...