All Sackett Street instructors are professional writers, teachers and editors, who have taught at major universities and have earned MFA degrees at the most prestigious graduate writing programs in the country. More importantly, they are the most dedicated writing instructors in New York City because teaching the craft of writing is their passion.
Julia Fierro
Sackett Street founder and director Julia Fierro is the author of the novels The Gypsy Moth Summer, published June 2017, and Cutting Teeth, published in 2014. She is one half of Cassidy Lucas, pen name of writing duo Julia Fierro and Caeli Wolfson Widger. Santa Monica is their first book together and will be published by Harper in October 2020. Their second novel, The Canyon, set in Topanga Canyon on the westside of Los Angeles, will be published in 2021.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Julia founded The Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop in 2002, now a creative home to over 8,000 writers and named “New York City’s best writing class” by Time Out New York, the L Magazine, and Brooklyn Magazine; and a “Top Alternative to MFA programs” by Poets & Writers. Workshops are offered throughout NYC and online. Her work has been published in The New York Times, LENNY, Poets & Writers, Buzzfeed, Glamour, Psychology Today, and other publications, and she has been profiled in The Observer and The Economist.
She lives in Brooklyn and Los Angeles.
Andrew Greenberg
Andrew Greenberg, Online Class Manager, received a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from Northwestern University and has taught creative writing and English literature in Hong Kong. His first book, Cold Ways, was released in 2016 in collaboration with the German artist duo known as coarse. He currently lives in Los Angeles and is at work on a novel.
Siobhan Adcock
Siobhan Adcock is a novelist, essayist, humor writer, and editor based in Park Slope, Brooklyn. She is the author of two novels, The Completionist (Simon & Schuster, 2018) and The Barter (Dutton, 2014), as well as two humor books. Her short fiction has been published in Triquarterly and The Massachusetts Review, and her essays and humor writing have appeared in Salon, Slate, The Daily Beast, Ms., Medium, and the Chicago Review of Books. She has taught writing classes and workshops at the Columbia Publishing Course, the Gotham Writers Workshop, Cornell University, and the Auburn Federal Correctional Facility, as well as for Voices from War, a nonprofit writing program serving military and service families. For many (many) years she has worked in digital and print publishing, putting in time at Random House, HarperCollins, Conde Nast, the XO Group, Time Inc., and most recently at Everyday Health Media.
Zaina Arafat
Zaina Arafat is a Palestinian-American writer, teacher and editor. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, BuzzFeed, VICE, and NPR, among other publications. Her debut novel, YOU EXIST TOO MUCH, is forthcoming from Catapult, and she is also at work on a collection of essays. She was the 2018 Arab Women/Migrants from the Middle East fellow at Jack Jones Literary Arts. She holds an M.A. in international affairs from Columbia University and an M.F.A. from Iowa.
As a teacher, she has taught writing at the University of Iowa, The School of the New York Times, the International Writing Program and Sackett Street Writers, as well as abroad in Jordan, Egypt and Eritrea. She has also led workshops for dreamers and DACA recipients through the Writer’s Guild Initiative.
As an editor, she curated a portfolio of prose and poetry in response to the travel ban, as well as a Q & A series with Muslim writers for the organization’s literary magazine, The Margins. She also served as the managing editor of VinePair, the largest online publication on drinks.
Jennifer Baker
Jennifer Baker is a writer of fiction & nonfiction, and an editor with over 14 years’ experience in the publishing industry. A native New Yorker she’s a graduate of The New School’s MFA Creative Writing Program. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appeared in Eclectic Flash, Boston Literary Magazine, Newtown Literary Journal, Poets & Writers magazine, The Female Complaint (Shade Mountain Press), and The Daily Worth. She has been a contributor to e-zines AroundHarlem.com and DinnerReviews.com, and is currently a contributing writer of monthly articles on books, publishing, and the intersections of media for Forbes.com. She’s received scholarships from the Postgraduate Writers’ Workshop, Napa Valley Writers’ Workshop, and the Glen West Workshop, and has been an artist-in-residence at Jentel Artist Residency, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and Ragdale. Jennifer is a long-time member of the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books in addition to creating and hosting the podcast Minorities in Publishing. Jennifer has done various interviews/panels on diversity in media as well as podcasting.
Carmiel Banasky
Carmiel Banasky is the author of the novel The Suicide of Claire Bishop (Dzanc, 2015), which Publishers Weekly calls “an intellectual tour de force.” Her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Guardian, American Short Fiction, Slice, Guernica, PEN America, The Rumpus, and on NPR,among other places. She earned her MFA from Hunter College, where she also taught Creative Writing. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Ucross, Ragdale, Artist Trust, I-Park, and other foundations. After four years on the road at writing residencies, she now teaches, edits, and writes fiction and TV in Los Angeles. She is from Portland, Oregon.
Jensen Beach
Jensen Beach is the author of two story collections, the forthcoming SWALLOWED BY THE COLD (Graywolf), and FOR OUT OF THE HEART PROCEED (Dzanc Books 2012, 2nd Edition; 1st Edition: Dark Sky Books). He holds an MFA in fiction from the Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as well as an MA and BA in English from Stockholm University. He teaches in the BFA program at Johnson State College, where he also is the fiction editor of Green Mountains Review. He’s also a faculty member in the MFA Program in Writing & Publishing at VCFA. His writing has appeared recently in A Public Space, Cincinnati Review, Fifty-Two Stories, Ninth Letter, Sou’wester, Witness, and The New Yorker, and online at Tin House, N+1, Kenyon Review, and American Short Fiction, among others. He’s received scholarships from the Napa and Sewanee Writers’ conferences, and is one of the webeditors at Hobart. He lives in Vermont.
Jamel Brinkley
Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories (Graywolf Press/A Public Space Books). His fiction has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Best American Short Stories 2018, A Public Space, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, Epiphany, and LitMag. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was also the 2016-17 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His work has received support from Kimbilio Fiction, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Workshop, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Beginning this fall, he will be a 2018-2020 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.
Kim Brooks
Kim Brooks’ first novel, The Houseguest, will be published in 2016 by Counterpoint Press and her memoir, Small Animals: A Memoir of Parenthood and Fear, will be published in 2017 by Flatiron Books/ Macmillan. Her stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, One Story, Five Chapters and other journals and her essays have appeared in Salon, New York Magazine, and Buzzfeed.
Maisy Card
Maisy Card is the author of the debut novel These Ghosts are Family is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in March 2020. Her writing has appeared in Lenny Letter, School Library Journal, Agni, Sycamore Review, Liars’ League NYC, and Ampersand Review. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Maisy was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica, but was raised in Queens, New York. She earned an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College, an MLIS from Rutgers University and a BA in English and American Studies from Wesleyan University. She currently lives in Newark, NJ where she works as a public librarian.
Daniel Castro
Daniel Castro is a writer and journalist. His work has appeared in Harper’s, Salon, Miami Herald, and Tampa Review. He holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has won awards and fellowships from the Fulbright Association, Louisiana Press Association, Cintas Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Faulkner Society. He has taught at the University of Iowa and the Berlin Writers’ Workshop.
Bill Cheng
Bill Cheng is the author of Southern Cross the Dog. His fiction has appeared and been collected in Guernica, The Book of Men, & Tales of Two Cities: The Best and Worst of Times in Today’s New York. He received his MFA from Hunter College.
Garrard Conley
Garrard Conley is the author of Boy Erased: a memoir (Riverhead 2016). His fiction and nonfiction can be found in TIME, VICE, CNN, The Common, Lit Hub, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Elizabeth Kostova Foundation.
Diane Cook
Diane Cook is the author of the story collection Man V. Nature, and was formerly a producer for the radio show, This American Life. Man V. Nature was a finalist for the Believer Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, received Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway award, and was recently longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Her stories have appeared in Harper’s, Tin House, Granta, and elsewhere and anthologized in Best American Short Stories.
Heidi Diehl
Heidi Diehl’s debut novel, Lifelines, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in June 2019. Her short fiction has appeared in Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, Mississippi Review, StoryQuarterly, Witnes
Jessica DuLong
Jessica DuLong is an author, journalist, lecturer, U.S. Coast Guard-licensed merchant marine officer, and one of the world’s only female fireboat engineers. Winner of the 2010 ASJA Outstanding Book Award for memoir, DuLong’s My River Chronicles: Rediscovering the Work that Built America, A Personal and Historical Journey (Free Press, 2009), was lauded by The New York Times as a “very fine and gutsy book.” DuLong’s second book, Escape from Manhattan: The Untold Story of the September 11th Boatlift, is forthcoming from McGraw-Hill/International Marine. Her media appearances include the New Yorker,“CBS Sunday Morning,” USA Today, The New York Times, the “TODAY” show, WNYC, and the History Channel. Her journalism has been published in Newsweek International, Rolling Stone, Psychology Today and more. She also serves as chief engineer of retired New York City fireboat John J. Harvey.
Michele Filgate
Michele Filgate is a contributing editor at Literary Hub. Her work has appeared in Longreads, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Refinery29, Slice, The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Salon, Interview Magazine, Buzzfeed, The Barnes & Noble Review, Poets & Writers, CNN.com, Fine Books & Collections Magazine, DAME Magazine, The Brooklyn Quarterly, Time Out New York, People, The Daily Beast, O, The Oprah Magazine, Men’s Journal, Vulture, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Star Tribune, The Quarterly Conversation, The Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. She is the founder of the Red Ink series. In 2016, Brooklyn Magazine named her one of “The 100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture.” Michele is currently at work on an anthology called What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in 2019.
Libby Flores
Libby Flores is a 2008 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow. Her short fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Post Road Magazine, Tin House The Open Bar, The Guardian, The Rattling Wall, Paper Darts, Bridge Eight, FLASH: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the former Director of Literary Programs at PEN Center USA . In 2018 she directed the second annual Believer Festival. She is currently the Director of Audience Engagement and Digital Projects at BOMB magazine and the NYC Director of the Freya Project. Libby holds an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. She lives in Brooklyn, but will always be a Texan.
Xeni Fragakis
Xeni Fragakis received her BA in English from Yale University and her MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa. At Iowa, she was awarded an Iowa Arts Fellowship and taught Creative Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The New York Times and Salon, and she is a winner of the Moth GrandSLAM Championship.
Aja Gabel
Aja Gabel’s debut novel, The Ensemble, is out now from Riverhead Books. Her short fiction can be found in the Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, BOMB, and elsewhere. She studied writing at Wesleyan University and the University of Virginia, and has a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Aja has been the recipient of awards from Inprint, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and has taught at several universities and writing conferences. She currently lives and writes in Los Angeles.
Sarah Gerard
David Burr Gerrard
David Burr Gerrard is the author of the novels Short Century (2014) and The Epiphany Machine (Putnam, 2017). He received an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University, and his work has appeared in The Awl, The LA Review of Books,The Barnes and Noble Review, Full Stop, Specter, and other publications.
Anna Godbersen
Anna Godbersen is the author of numerous books for young adults, including The New York Times Bestselling series THE LUXE and the BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS series. THE BLONDE was her first book for the adult market. She has worked in the literary department of ESQUIRE, where she vetted short story submissions and wrote weekly book reviews for the magazine’s website. Her next book is WHEN WE CAUGHT FIRE, a young adult novel set during the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which HarperTeen will publish in October.
Kaitlyn Greenidge
Kaitlyn Greenidge is originally from Boston. She’s a graduate of Hunter College’s MFA program and has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Fortnight Journal. Her work has appeared in The Believer, American Short Fiction, At Length Magazine, Afrobeat Journal, Green Mountains Review and The Feminist Wire, and been reprinted in The Believer‘s collection Always Apprentices. Her debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, was published in 2016 by Algonquin Press.
Brian Gresko
Brian Gresko is the editor of When I First Held You: 22 Critically Acclaimed Writers Talk About the Triumphs, Challenges, and Transformative Experience of Fatherhood. His short fiction has appeared on Joyland Magazine and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and his essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in numerous publications, including Salon, The Atlantic, VICE, Guernica Magazine, the Literary Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, and Poets & Writers Magazine. He runs the “authors in conversation” series for Slice Literary Magazine, and is the co-host of Pete’s Reading Series. Brian received his MFA in Creative Writing from The New School, and studied film and literary theory at Oberlin College.
Anna Hecker
Anna Hecker holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from The New School. She is the author of When the Beat Drops (Sky Pony Press, May 2018) as well as several young adult ghostwriting projects for Penguin/Razorbill, Alloy Entertainment and HarperTeen. Her articles have appeared in Cosmopolitan, ELLE, Gawker, DailyCandy, Refinery29, and VICE Broadly. She is represented by Eric Smith of P.S. Literary.
Karen Heuler
Karen Heuler’s stories have appeared in over one hundred literary and speculative magazines and anthologies, from Conjunctions to Clarkesworld to Weird Tales, as well as a number of Best Of anthologies. She has published five novels and four story collections with university and small presses, and her collection The Inner City was included in Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2013 list. Her latest collection, The Clockworm, was just published by Tartarus Books and Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review. She has received an O. Henry award and been shortlisted for a Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the Bellwether Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award for Short Fiction.
Yahdon Israel
Yahdon Israel is an educator, entrepreneur, editor, writer and founder of Literaryswag, a cultural movement that intersects literature and fashion to make books cool. He teaches creative writing at The New School, City College and Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. He is the former editor-in-chief of Brooklyn Magazine. He has written for Avidly, The New Inquiry, LitHub, Poets and Writers and Vanity Fair. And he hosts the Literaryswag Book Club, a Brooklyn-based subscription service and book club that meets every last Wednesday of the month.
Amelia Kahaney
Amelia Kahaney is the author of The Brokenhearted and The Invisible, the first books in a young adult novel series published by Harper Collins. Her short stories have appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, One Story, Crazyhorse, Joyland Magazine, and other publications. She earned her MFA from Brooklyn College, where she studied with Michael Cunningham, and she has taught writing at Brooklyn College and The New School.
Lauren Kate
Lauren Kate is the #1 New York Times and internationally bestselling author of nine novels, including the Fallen and the Teardrop series. Her books have sold over ten million copies worldwide and have been translated into over thirty languages. The feature film of her novel, Fallen, was released by Sony Pictures in the fall of 2017. She holds a terminal MA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from UC-Davis and worked previously as an acquiring editor at HarperCollins Publishers.
Lisa Levy
Lisa Levy is a columnist and contributing editor at LitHub and CrimeReads. She is the former EIC of crime fiction site The Life Sentence and the former Mystery/Noir editor at the LA Review of Books. She also has written about less nefarious topics for Pacific Standard, Dame, The Believer, Slate, Salon, and other publications.
Rachel Lyon
Rachel Lyon is the author of SELF-PORTRAIT WITH BOY (Scribner 2018), which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Dublin International Literary Award. Her shorter work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, Longreads, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and other publications. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Epiphany and a cofounder of the reading series Ditmas Lit.
Rebecca Makkai
Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, and the new collection Music for Wartime — six stories from which have appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. The recipient of a 2014 NEA Fellowship, Rebecca has taught at the Tin House Writers’ Conference and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is currently on the faculty of the MFA programs at Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern Universit
Kyle McCarthy
Kyle McCarthy’s work has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2017, American Short Fiction, the Harvard Review, Southwest Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her debut novel, Everyone Knows How Much I Love You, was published by Ballantine Books in 2020.
Madeline McDonnell
Madeline McDonnell is the author of There Is Something Inside, It Wants To Get Out (Rescue Press, 2010), a collection of three stories, and Penny, n. (Rescue Press, 2013), a novella/lexicographic experiment. Other stories have recently appeared inHarvard Review, Kenyon Review Online, and CutBank. She has taught writing at the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, Cornish College of the Arts, and The University of Iowa; she has also worked as an editor and lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Sophie McManus
Sophie McManus is the author of the novel The Unfortunates, published by FSG in June 2015. Her work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Memorious, Tin House, and other publications. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Saltonstall Foundation, and the Jentel Foundation.
Heather Aimee O’Neill
Heather Aimee O’Neill has worked with hundreds of novelists, memoirists, short-story and essay writers in Sackett Street’s popular Manuscript Generator Workshop (online and in Brooklyn), helping writers finish, polish, and find publication for book-length projects. Her most recent collection of poetry, Obliterations, was co-authored with Jessica Piazza and published by Red Hen Press. A recent Lambda Literary Poetry Fellow, her poetry chapbook, Memory Future, won the University of Southern California’s Gold Line Press Award, chosen by judge Carol Muske-Dukes. She is a freelance writer for publications such as Time Out New York, Parents Magazine and Salon.com.
Tracy O’Neill
Tracy O’Neill is the author of The Hopeful. In 2015, she was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, long-listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan Prize, and was a Narrative Under 30 finalist. In 2012, she was awarded the Center for Fiction’s Emerging Writers Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, LitHub, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Literarian, New World Writing, Narrative, and Guernica. She has published nonfiction in The Atlantic, the New Yorker, Bookforum, Rolling Stone, Grantland, Vice, The Guardian, VQR, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her column Body Language appears in Catapult. She currently teaches at the City College of New York and is editor-in-chief of the literary journal Epiphany.
Sarah Perry
Sarah Perry is the author of the memoir After the Eclipse, which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Poets & Writers Notable Nonfiction Debut, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. Perry is the recipient of the 2018 Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award and a fellowship from the Edward F. Albee Foundation. Her work has appeared in Elle magazine, The Guardian, and elsewhere. She holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction from Columbia University and is the 2019 McGee Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Davidson College. She lives in Brooklyn.
Anna Qu
Anna Qu is a Chinese-American writer. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Kartika Review, Kweli Journal, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, XOJane, Jezebel, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Anna currently serves as the Nonfiction Editor at Kweli, and formerly worked in the publishing on the agency side. She lives in Brooklyn and is working on a memoir.
Austin Ratner
Austin Ratner is the author of the novels In the Land of the Living and The Jump Artist, winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. His non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times Magazine andThe Wall Street Journal and his short fiction has been honored with the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize. He attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and received his M.D. from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He is co-author of the textbook Concepts in Medical Physiology.
Josh Rolnick
Josh Rolnick’s short story collection, Pulp and Paper, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, selected by Yiyun Li (University of Iowa Press). His most recent story appeared in Meridian (spring 2020), and his latest story is forthcoming in Boulevard (spring 2021). Previous short stories have won the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize and The Florida Review Editors’ Choice Prize. His stories have also been published in Harvard Review, Western Humanities Review, Bellingham Review, and Gulf Coast, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices. He is a faculty lecturer at the Johns Hopkins MA in Writing Program and fiction editor at Paper Brigade, the literary annual of the Jewish Book Council.
Mike Scalise
Mike Scalise’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Agni, Indiewire, Ninth Letter, Paris Review Daily, and other places. He is an 826DC advisory board member, has received fellowships and scholarships from Bread Loaf, Yaddo, and the Ucross Foundation, and was the Philip Roth Writer in Residence at Bucknell University. His memoir, The Brand New Catastrophe, was the recipient of the Center for Fiction’s 2014 Christopher Doheny Award.
Amy Shearn
Amy Shearn is the author of the novels The Mermaid of Brooklyn, How Far Is The Ocean From Here, and the forthcoming Unseen City. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Poets & Writers, Real Simple, Oprah.com, and numerous other publications. She received her MFA from the University of Minnesota, and has taught at NYU and Gotham Writers Workshops. Amy hosted and curated the reading series Lit at Lark and the author interview series Bookish at the Brooklyn Public Library, has worked as an editor at several publications, and has taken part in residencies at SPACE on Ryder Farm and elsewhere. She is New York fiction editor at Joyland Magazine. Amy lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Elizabeth Silver
Elizabeth L. Silver is the author of the memoir, The Tincture of Time: A Memoir of (Medical) Uncertainty (Penguin Press, 2017) and the critically acclaimed novel, The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (Crown, 2013), which was the Amazon Best Debut of the Month, an Amazon Best Book of the Year, Kirkus Best Book of the Summer, and published in seven languages. Elizabeth’s writing has appeared in The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, Lenny Letter, New York Magazine, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review, The Millions, The Dallas Morning News, among others, and she has been awarded residencies at Ragdale, Ucross Foundation, Byrdcliffe Artist Colony, A Room of Her Own Foundation, and the British Centre for Literary Translation. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, the MA program in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia in England, and Temple University Beasley School of Law, Elizabeth lives with her family in Los Angeles.
Chandler Klang Smith
Chandler Klang Smith is a graduate of the MFA creative writing program at Columbia University. Her new novel The Sky Is Yours (Hogarth/Crown, 2018) was listed by Entertainment Weekly as a “Best New Book.” The Wall Street Journal called it “mesmeric… a great and disturbing debut,” and NPR described it as “a wickedly satirical synthesis that underlines just how fractured our own realities can be during periods of fear, unrest, inequality and instability.” Chandler has worked as an editorial assistant at literary agencies and as a ghostwriter. She is currently serving as a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards for the second year in a row. She teaches and tutors in New York City.
Timothy Taranto
Tim Taranto is a writer and visual artist from upstate New York. He is the author of ARS BOTANICA and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer, Buzzfeed, FSG’s Works in Progress, Harper’s, The Iowa Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Paris Review Daily, The Rumpus, and The Saint Ann’s Review. Tim is a graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Ted Thompson
Ted Thompson is the author of The Land of Steady Habits, which was published by Little, Brown in 2014 and was a finalist for the Center for Fiction Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. The novel is being adapted by Nicole Holofcener for a feature film starring Ben Mendelsohn, Edie Falco and Connie Britton, to be released in late 2017. His short stories have been published in Tin House, American Short Fiction, One Teen Story and Best New American Voices, and he’s had fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the MacDowell Colony. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Ted has proudly taught for Sackett for over six years, as well as at Amherst College and in the Brooklyn College MFA program. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.
Jeanne Thornton
Jeanne Thornton is the author of The Dream of Doctor Bantam (a Lambda Literary Award finalist) and The Black Emerald. She is the copublisher of Instar Books and creator of the web comics The Man Who Hates Fun and Bad Mother. She lives in Brooklyn.
Lena Valencia
Lena Valencia is the managing editor of One Story. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in CRAFT, Joyland, BOMB, Epiphany, the Tiny Nightmares anthology (Catapult, October 2020), and elsewhere. Her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and in 2019 she was awarded an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. She received her MFA in fiction from The New School, and teaches at One Story, the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, and Catapult.
Elizabeth Weiss
Elizabeth Weiss earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. She has written non-fiction for the New Yorker web site, and her debut novel is forthcoming from the Dial Press. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa and the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio.
Piper Weiss
Piper Weiss is the author of the memoir You All Grow Up and Leave Me, named one of the Best Books of 2018 by Marie-Claire, Town and Country and PopSugar, and listed among the top true crime reads by Buzzfeed, CrimeReads and Elle Australia. She had previously served as an editor at the New York Daily News, and as editorial director at HelloGiggles, in addition to writing for print, TV and film. She was a fellow at VCCA and earned her BA in the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins University. She is also a proud Sackett Street alum.
Myung! Joh Wesner
Myung! Joh Wesner graduated with an A.B. in English from Harvard, where she studied creative writing with Brad Watson. In 2008, she received her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she studied as a Henry Hoyns Fellow with Chris Tilghman, Deborah Eisenberg, Ann Beattie, and John Casey, and taught undergraduate fiction workshops. She has had short stories published in Juked, Yisei, and Two Thirds North, an essay published in Iris, and was awarded a fellowship by the Vermont Studio Center. She’s currently at work on a YA novel.
Casey Walker
Casey Walker is the author of the novel Last Days in Shanghai. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, he has a PhD in English Literature from Princeton University. His writing has appeared in The Believer, Boston Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Sackett Street instructor and novelist Karen Thompson Walker, author of The Age of Miracles.
Monica West
Monica West is the author of the debut novel Revival Season forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in May 2021. She earned a B.A. in English Literature from Duke University, an M.A. in English and American Literature from New York University, and an MFA in Fiction Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was also a Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow. She has received a fellowship from Kimbilio Fiction, and she will be a Hedgebrook Writer-in-Residence in Spring 2021. She lives in Oakland, California and is a Sackett alum.
Khaliah Williams
Khaliah Williams is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her fiction has been published in Hawaii Women’s Journal, Frontier Psychiatrist, and Day One, and her non-fiction at Buzzfeed, American Short Fiction and Book Country. She is a current fellow at the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction and an Instructor and Advisory Board member of Writers in Baltimore School. Originally from Philadelphia, she lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She is at work on a novel and collection of short stories.
Alisson Wood
Alisson Wood‘s creative nonfiction has been published in places including The New York Times, Catapult, and Epiphany. She won the inaugural Breakout 8 Writers Prize, chosen by Alexander Chee, Hannah Tinti, and Tracy O’Neill on behalf of Epiphany magazine and the Author’s Guild. A graduate of NYU, she is a Professor of Creative Writing for undergraduates at her alma mater. Alisson has edited award-winning literary magazines including Washington Square Review and Dovetail. She is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the NYC literary reading series and online prose journal, Pigeon Pages. Her memoir, Being Lolita, is forthcoming from Flatiron Books (Macmillan) in 2019.