Our Instructors

Learn from the best.

Our instructors aren’t just great teachers—they’re editors and award-winning writers, too, whose work has appeared in a broad range of both literary and commercial outlets, from NPR to Best American Essays.

You’ll benefit from their real-world experience and their genuine desire to help you craft your next nonfiction story. See our stellar lineup below.

  • Chelsea Biondolillo

    Chelsea Biondolillo is author of The Skinned Bird and the prose chapbooks, Ologies and #Lovesong. Her work has appeared in Orion, Guernica, River Teeth, Discover Magazine, Science, Brevity, Nautilus, Vela and others.

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  • Jonathan Callard

    Jonathan Callard

    Jonathan Callard’s nonfiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Hotel Amerika, Gulf Coast, Image, PublicSource, Pittsburgh Magazine, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and the Dallas Morning News, among others.

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  • Sarah Cannon

    Sarah Cannon is the author of The Shame of Losing (Red Hen Press), which was a Finalist for the Washington State Book Awards in 2019. Her essays have been featured in The New York Times (Modern Love column), Salon, Bitch magazine, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and elsewhere.

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    Suzanne Cope

    Suzanne Cope is the author of the book Power Hungry: Women of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer and Their Fight to Feed a Movement (Chicago Review Press, November 2021) and Small Batch (2014).

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  • Joelle Fraser

    Joelle Fraser

    Joelle Fraser is a MacDowell Fellow and the author of two memoirs: The Territory of Men (Random House 2002), and The Forest House: a Journey into the Landscape of Love, Loss and Starting Over (Counterpoint 2013).

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  • Kase Johnstun

    Kase Johnstun

    Kase Johnstun (MA, MFA) lives and writes in Ogden, Utah. He is the author of Let the Wild Grasses Grow (Torrey House Press), Beyond the Grip Craniosynostosis (McFarland & Co), and the co-editor/author of Utah Reflections: Stories from the Wasatch Front. 

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  • Jessica Kehinde Ngo

    Jessica Kehinde Ngo’s writing has appeared in Epicurious, The Counter, TASTE, Stained Page Newsletter, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Harvard Review Online, Hippocampus Books and elsewhere. She studied creative nonfiction at the University of Southern California’s Master of Professional Writing program.

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  • Marissa Landrigan

    Marissa Landrigan is the author of The Vegetarian’s Guide to Eating Meat (Greystone Books, 2017), and her essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Creative Nonfiction, Orion, Guernica, the Atlantic, the Rumpus, and others.

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  • Marty Levine

    Marty Levine’s journalism and creative nonfiction have appeared in Time, Salon and throughout Pennsylvania and the U.S. He was the news editor of two alt-weeklies across a dozen years, and has won more than three dozen awards for his long-form journalism, spot reporting and columns from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, Pennsylvania Newspaper Association and elsewhere.

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  • Nancy McCabe

    Nancy McCabe is the author of the connected essays Can This Marriage Be Saved? and the memoir From Little Houses to Little Women: Revisiting a Literary Childhood, in addition to four other books.

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  • Jenna McGuiggan

    Jennifer (Jenna) McGuiggan co-authored Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: A Visual History (Clarkson Potter, 2019). Her essays have appeared in The Rappahannock Review, Essay Daily, Flycatcher, New World Writing, and online for Prairie Schooner and Brevity. 

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  • Rhonda J. Miller

    Rhonda J. Miller is a reporter and audio producer for WKU Public Radio in Bowling Green, Kentucky, the local NPR affiliate. She won a 2020 Green Eyeshades Award, 2nd place in radio, for Public Service Journalism for stories about hunger in Kentucky.

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  • Peter Mountford

    Peter Mountford is the author of the novels A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism (winner of the 2012 Washington State Book Award in fiction), and The Dismal Science (a NYT editor’s choice).

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  • Meghan O’Gieblyn

    Meghan O’Gieblyn is the author of the God, Human, Animal, Machine (Doubleday, 2021) and Interior States (Anchor, 2018), which won the 2018 Believer Book Award for nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Wired, The Guardian, The New York Times, Bookforum, n+1, The Believer, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.

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  • Joanna Cooper

    Joanna Penn Cooper

    Joanna Penn Cooper writes and teaches flash memoir, lyric essays, and poetry, and she is the author of The Itinerant Girl’s Guide to Self-Hypnosis (Brooklyn Arts Press) and What Is a Domicile (Noctuary Press).

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  • Melissa Petro

    Melissa Petro

    Melissa Petro is a freelance writer and writing instructor living in New York City. She has written for Marie Claire, New York, Pacific Standard, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Esquire, Salon, the Daily Beast, the Guardian, Al Jazeera America, Jezebel, Narratively, the New Inquiry, the Establishment, the Rumpus, and many other places.

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  • James Polchin

    James Polchin is a Clinical Professor at New York University where he teaches in areas of creative nonfiction, LGBTQ history, and crime narratives. His writing has appeared in SlateTIMEHuffington Post UKCrime ReadsParis ReviewRolling StoneNewNextNowThe New InquiryLambda LiteraryThe Smart Set, Brevity, and the Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. His

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  • Ploi Pirapokin

    Ploi Pirapokin is the Nonfiction Editor at Newfound Journal, and the Co-Editor of The Greenest Gecko: An Anthology of New Asian Fantasy forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in 2021. Her short stories and essays are featured in Tor.com,

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  • Michael Busk

    Michael Reid Busk

    Michael Reid Busk is a graduate of the University of Southern California’s Literature and Creative Writing PhD, where he was a Feuchtwanger Fellow and Town and Gown Scholar. He has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and his nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, Fourth Genre, Prairie Schooner, and Michigan Quarterly Review.  

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  • Bridgette Shade

    Bridgette Shade has been teaching writing with an emphasis on social justice since 2002. She is the co-founder of West Side Stories, a literary reading series celebrating the words of writers with a western Pennsylvania connection.

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