Mark Steinbach has been named Cornell’s 2026-27 Distinguished Visiting Writer by the Center for the Literary Arts. He will teach TV Writing during Block 8 in the spring of 2027.
Robert P. Dana director of the Center for the Literary Arts, Professor Rebecca Entel, is excited that the Department of English and Creative Writing is welcoming another Distinguished Visiting Writer to Cornell.
“We're particularly excited about offering this course with Mark Steinbach, an Emmy-nominated writer for “Saturday Night Live,” who has also worked for Scarlett Johansson's and Colin Jost's production companies,” Entel said. “It's highly unusual for a writer in Mark's line of work—and at the level he's reached in his career—to teach undergraduate students at a small liberal arts college. I'm thrilled we can offer our students such a special opportunity, and I'm grateful for the Catharine Phelps Warmbrod ’51 Fund for Creative Writing, which allows us to do so.”
In Steinbach’s TV writing course, students will take their ideas, stories, and aesthetic impulses and transform them into language that is meant to be performed. They will explore a variety of steps, like beat sheets and pitches, and learn from readings and viewings. Workshopping will accommodate different writing styles, whether a person prefers to work alone or as part of a collaborative team. By the end of the course, students will have produced the best script possible and leave with a draft of a full television pilot.
“We're able to best meet our students' needs through a combination of standard courses and Distinguished Visiting Writer seminars in such topics as screenwriting (2026) and TV Writing (2027),” Entel said. “In addition to taking a once-in-a-lifetime course, students gain industry knowledge from the professional experience of the writer.”
Steinbach has been a TV writer for almost ten years and has been nominated for two Emmys and three Writers Guild of America Awards for his work on “SNL.” He has also written for The Onion and was president of the Harvard Lampoon, the campus comedy magazine. He received a B.A. in English from Harvard, where he spent most of his time writing for and editing the Lampoon. Steinbach also taught TV writing at Wellesley College.
Each year the Center for the Literary Arts brings in distinguished writers to teach topic-based, upper-level creative writing courses not typically taught by the standing faculty. The writers rotate among fiction, poetry, journalism, creative nonfiction, children’s literature, and a range of other topics. While on campus, the writers also give readings or lectures that are open to the public.