Samina Ali
Novel and Memoir Writing Certificate Instructor
Samina Ali's new memoir, Pieces You'll Never Get Back, was named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and a Best Book of March by The Los Angeles Times. Her novel Madras on Rainy Days received France's Prix du Premier Roman Étranger award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award in Fiction. Her work has been featured in The Economist, The Guardian, Vogue, on NPR, and elsewhere.
Leslie Contreras Schwartz
Memoir Writing Certificate Instructor
Leslie Contreras Schwartz is a 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, the 2019–21 Houston Poet Laureate, and the author of the 2022 C&R Press Nonfiction Award winner From the Womb of Sky and Earth, a lyrical memoir. She has published five collections of poetry. Her work has appeared on the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day and in AGNI, The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, and The Best Small Fictions 2019. Contreras Schwartz is a poetry and nonfiction faculty member at Alma College’s MFA low-residency program in creative writing and a lecturer at Rice University, where she received a BA in English. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
John Evans
Memoir Writing Certificate Instructor
John W. Evans is the author of four books. His latest, The Fight Journal (2023), received the Rattle Prize. Should I Still Wish: A Memoir was selected for the "American Lives" series. Young Widower: A Memoir received the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize and a Foreword INDIES award. The Consolations: Poems was named the 2015 Peace Corps Writers Best Poetry Book. His work has appeared in Slate, The Missouri Review, Boston Review, Zyzzyva, Poets & Writers, and The Best American Essays.
Rachel Howard
Novel and Memoir Writing Certificate Instructor
Rachel Howard is the author of a memoir about her father’s unsolved murder, The Lost Night, and a novel, The Risk of Us. Her personal essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times "Draft" series, The Los Angeles Review of Books, StoryQuarterly, and O, The Oprah Magazine. She is the recipient of a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship and is working on a new memoir. Howard received an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College.
Deborah Johnson
Novel Writing Certificate Instructor
Deborah Johnson’s novel The Secret of Magic received the 2015 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. Her previous novel, The Air Between Us, received the Mississippi Library Association Award for Fiction. She worked in Rome for many years as an editor and translator and as a broadcaster at Vatican Radio. She has recently completed a new novel, Washington and Leigh, a ghost story about the beginnings of rock and roll set in 1950s Mississippi.
Lauren Kate
Novel Writing Certificate Instructor
Lauren Kate is the author of 13 novels, including the Fallen series, the Teardrop series, By Any Other Name, and the forthcoming Spirit of Love. Her books have sold over 10 million copies worldwide and have been translated into more than 30 languages. The feature film Fallen was released in 2017 and the TV show premiered in 2025. She received an MA in creative writing from UC Davis and is a former acquiring editor at HarperCollins.
Ammi Keller
Novel Writing Certificate Instructor
Ammi Keller’s teaching focuses on the intersection of mindfulness and creative writing. Her short stories appear in American Short Fiction, The Common, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She has edited fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for Soft Skull Press and has received residencies from the Lambda Literary Writer's Retreat and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Keller was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford.
Thomas McNeely
Novel Writing Certificate Instructor
Thomas McNeely is the author of Pictures of the Shark: Stories, a Foreword INDIES award finalist and a Massachusetts Book Awards "Must Read" longlist selection, and the novel Ghost Horse, recipient of the Gival Press Novel Award. He has received an NEA fellowship in prose, and his stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, and other magazines and anthologies and been shortlisted for The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and the Pushcart Prize. McNeely was a Jones Lecturer and Stegner Fellow at Stanford and received an MFA from Emerson College.
Joshua Mohr
Novel and Memoir Writing Certificate Instructor
Liza Monroy
Novel and Memoir Writing Certificate Instructor
Liza Monroy is the author of the forthcoming novel The Distractions, the novel Mexican High, the memoir The Marriage Act, and the essay collection Seeing As Your Shoes Are Soon To Be On Fire. Her essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, O, Marie Claire, Longreads, Newsweek, Self, and Jezebel, among others, and they have been widely anthologized. She received an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia School of the Arts and has taught writing at Columbia and UC Santa Cruz.
Ron Nyren
Novel Writing Certificate Instructor
Ron Nyren’s novel The Book of Lost Light received Black Lawrence Press’s 2019 Big Moose Prize and was the finalist for the 2020 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, The Missouri Review, The North American Review, Glimmer Train Stories, Mississippi Review, and 100 Word Story, and his stories have been shortlisted for the O. Henry Award and the Pushcart Prize. He is the co-author, with Sarah Stone, of Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers. He received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. Nyren was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford.
Elizabeth Percer
Novel Writing Certificate Instructor
Elizabeth Percer is the author of two novels, All Stories Are Love Stories and An Uncommon Education, as well as Ultrasound, a book of poems. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has received awards from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund. She received a PhD in arts education from Stanford and a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Writing Project at UC Berkeley.
Angela Pneuman
Novel Writing Certificate Instructor
Angela Pneuman is the author of the novel Lay It on My Heart and the short story collection Home Remedies. Her fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, Iowa Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and The Los Angeles Review. She is a contributor to Salon, The Believer, and The Rumpus. She received an MFA in writing from Indiana University and a PhD in English from the State University of New York at Albany. Pneuman was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford.
Stephanie Reents
Novel Writing Certificate Instructor
Stephanie Reents is the author of The Kissing List, a collection of stories that was an Editors' Choice in The New York Times Book Review, and I Meant to Kill Ye, a bibliomemoir chronicling her journey into the strange void at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. She has twice received an O. Henry Prize for her short fiction. Her novel We Loved to Run is coming out in 2025. Reents received a BA from Amherst, a BA from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and an MFA from the University of Arizona. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford.
Dominic Russ-Combs
Novel Writing Certificate Instructor
Dominic Russ-Combs’s fiction has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Kenyon Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, among others. His poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in Third Coast and Indiana Review. He received an Emerging Artist Award from the Kentucky Arts Council and a PhD in English from Texas Tech. Russ-Combs was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford.
Mike Scalise
Memoir Writing Certificate Instructor
Mike Scalise is the author of the memoir The Brand New Catastrophe (Sarabande, 2017) which received praise from The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Kenyon Review, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere, and won the Christopher Doheny Award for excellence in illness writing from The Center for Fiction. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bon Appétit, Agni, and elsewhere. He has received awards, grants, and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Art Omi, Bread Loaf, Yaddo, and Ucross, and he was the Philip Roth Writer in Residence at Bucknell University.
Julia Scheeres
Memoir Writing Certificate Instructor
Julia Scheeres has written three books. Her memoir Jesus Land was a New York Times and London Times bestseller. Her narrative history of the Jonestown tragedy, A Thousand Lives, was named a "Best Book of the Year" by several papers and included in The Guardian's "Top 10 Books about the 1970s." Her most recent book, Listen, World!, is a critically acclaimed biography of Hearst columnist Elsie Robinson. A regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review, Scheeres works with private clients as a writing coach. She is a member of The Writers Grotto in San Francisco.
Nina Schuyler
Novel Writing Certificate Instructor
Nina Schuyler has taught creative writing for nearly two decades. She was an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of In This Ravishing World, which won the W.S. Porter Prize and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature. Her novel Afterword won the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Literary and Science Fiction; The Translator received the Next Generation Indie Book Award for General Fiction and was a finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing; and The Painting was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Her nonfiction book How to Write Stunning Sentences and her craft book Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal are Small Press Distribution bestsellers. Schuyler received an MFA in creative writing from SF State, a JD from Hastings, and a BA in economics from Stanford.
Rachel Smith
Novel Writing Certificate Instructor
Rachel Smith’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Seattle Times, The Rumpus, Brevity, and elsewhere. She has received residencies and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Marquette, and the Elizabeth George Foundation and has taught creative writing at Stanford, the University of San Francisco, and the University of Mississippi, where she received an MFA in creative writing. She is at work on a novel. Smith was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford.
Christine Sneed
Novel Writing Certificate Instructor
Christine Sneed is the author of three novels, Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos; Paris, He Said; and Little Known Facts. In addition, she has published the story collections Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry, The Virginity of Famous Men, and Direct Sunlight. She is the editor of the short fiction anthology Love in the Time of Time’s Up. She has received the Chicago Public Library Foundation's 21st Century Award and the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award, among other honors. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Ploughshares, and numerous other publications.
Sarah Stone
Novel Writing Certificate Instructor
Sarah Stone is the author of Hungry Ghost Theater and The True Sources of the Nile and co-author of Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, StoryQuarterly, and The Writer’s Chronicle. She received an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan, and is on faculty in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Wendy Nelson Tokunaga
Novel Writing Certificate Instructor
Wendy Nelson Tokunaga is the author of Midori by Moonlight, Love in Translation, Falling Uphill, His Wife and Daughters, and the self-published novel No Kidding, which received a Writer’s Digest award. She’s also written the nonfiction book Marriage in Translation: Foreign Wife, Japanese Husband and the short story collection Postcards From Tokyo. Her new novel, Brenda Barker's Next Chapter, will be published in 2027. Tokunaga received an MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco.
Malena Watrous
Novel Writing Certificate Instructor (Stanford Continuing Studies Writing Certificates Program Lead)
Malena Watrous is the author of the novel If You Follow Me and co-author of the novel Sparked and the cookbooks My Mexico City Kitchen and Scandinavian from Scratch. She has contributed to The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. Watrous was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow.
Rose Whitmore
Memoir Writing Certificate Instructor
Rose Whitmore’s writing has appeared in The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, The Sun, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the James Jones First Novel Fellowship and has received residencies and fellowships from the Hemingway House in Ketchum, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Hedgebrook. She has taught creative writing at the University of New Hampshire and Stanford, where she was the recipient of the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize and was a Jones Lecturer and Stegner Fellow.
Antoine Wilson
Novel Writing Certificate Instructor
Antoine Wilson is the award-winning author of the novels Mouth to Mouth, Panorama City, and The Interloper. He has taught fiction writing at the University of Iowa, University of Wisconsin, UC San Diego, UCLA Extension, and Otis College of Art and Design. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, Best New American Voices, and he is a contributing editor at A Public Space.
Greg Wrenn
Memoir Writing Certificate Instructor
Greg Wrenn, a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, is the author of Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis, a memoir about using coral reefs and psychedelic plants to heal from trauma, and Centaur, which received the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. His work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Georgia Review, New England Review, AGNI, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, and elsewhere.
Anne Zimmerman
Memoir Writing Certificate Instructor
Anne Zimmerman’s first book was An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher. She has compiled and published two subsequent collections of Fisher’s work: Love in a Dish…and Other Culinary Delights and M.F.K. Fisher: Musings on Wine and Other Libations. She has written for Mix, TASTE, and Mother magazines, The Kitchn, Tasting Table, and Edible Communities.