contributed to his reputation as a literary critic: he edited a book on Paul Durcan, The Kilfenora Teaboy (1997), and The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (1999); and wrote The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English since 1950 (1999), with Carmen Callil. He wrote a collection of essays, Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar (2002), and a study on Lady Gregory, Lady Gregory's Toothbrush (2002). In his 2012 essay collection New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families he studies the biographies of James Baldwin, J. M. Synge, and W. B. Yeats, amongst others. In 2015, he released On Elizabeth Bishop, a critical study which made The Guardians Best Books of 2015 list twice. In June 2016, Tóibín visited Israel, as part of a project by the "Breaking the Silence" organization, to write an article for a book on the Israeli occupation, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War. The book was edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, and was published in June 2017 under the title Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation. Tóibín's play, Beauty in a Broken Place, was staged in Dublin in August 2004. He first wrote poetry while attending secondary school in Wexford. In 2011, The Times Literary Supplement published his poem "Cush Gap, 2007". The December 2021 issue of The New York Review of Books included his poem "Father & Son", which may be autobiographical (as the description of the son's developing stammer in the second stanza—particularly on hard consonants—is similar to Tóibín's description of his own stammer). His personal notes and work books are deposited at the National Library of Ireland. Lecturing Tóibín has been visiting professor at Stanford University, The University of Texas at Austin and Princeton University. He has also lectured at several other universities, including Middlebury College, Boston College, New York University, Loyola University Maryland, and The College of the Holy Cross. In 2017 he lectured in Athens, Georgia as the University of Georgia Chair for Global Understanding. He was a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester, succeeding Martin Amis in that post, and currently teaches at Columbia University. Commenting on the absence of gay students from his lectures, Tóibín said: "Whatever aura I have, it’s not as a gay guru—I'm not Edmund White. 'My mother's reading your book'—I get that a lot".