Writer’s Studio
Instructors
Our instructors are accomplished and experienced writers of all genres.

Matthew Abbott
Instructor
Matt Abbott is the Director of Government and Diplomatic Programs at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Prior to his work at the Council he spent a decade serving as a staff member in the United States Congress. He completed his undergraduate work at Dartmouth College with a double major in government and history.

Randall Albers
Writer's Studio Instructor
Randall is Professor/Chair Emeritus in the Department of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago, was founding producer of the Story Week Festival of Writers and is a recipient of Columbia’s Teaching Excellence Award. His work appears in Writing in Education, TriQuarterly, Writer’s Digest, Brevity, and elsewhere. Two chapters from his novel-in-progress, All the World Before Them, have been nominated for Pushcart prizes.

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong
Acclaimed Author and Graham School Instructor
Jennifer Keishin Armstrong has written seven books, including the New York Times bestseller Seinfeldia; When Women Invented Television; Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted; and Sex and the City and Us. Formerly a staff writer at Entertainment Weekly, where she worked for a decade, her writing appears in many publications, including BBC Culture, The New York Times Book Review, Vice, New York magazine, and Billboard. She created and co-hosts two podcasts, Pop Literacy (about pop culture-related books) and, via the American Writers Museum, Dead Writer Drama (examining classic writers through a modern lens). She also curates and writes the weekly “Peabody Finds” recommendation newsletter for the prestigious Peabody Awards in broadcasting.

Mary Ruth Clarke
Instructor, Screenwriter, and Playwright
Mary Ruth Clarke writes for the stage, screen, and little screen.
She co-wrote and starred in the original low-budget Meet the Parents and adapted it into the blockbuster Meet the Parents, starring Robert De Niro, for which she shares Story credit with Greg Glienna. The original Meet the Parents was chosen by critic Dave Kerr as his favorite home-grown Chicago movie and was featured at the Gene Siskel Film Center's grand opening. She also shares Characters Creation credit with Greg for Meet The Fockers and Little Fockers.
She has written many plays, and some have found their way to productions.
Recent productions include Bonhoeffer's Cost at Provision Theater in Chicago, and Suffer The Long Night, a play she co-wrote with her MTP partner, Greg Glienna, which enjoyed a long successful run at Meta Theater in LA.
Mary Ruth is also a Resident Playwright at Chicago Dramatists, where she teaches screenwriting. She's a dramaturge with the Prop Thtr New Plays festival.
She has doctored many screenplays, three of which have gone on to be produced: Relative Strangers, A Guy Thing, and The Godfather of Greenbay.
Mary Ruth has had poems published in the anthology The Thing About Second Chances, An Ode to Ralph Mills, and InPrint.
She has an MFA from Emerson College, a BFA in Theater and a BFA in Art History from Ohio University. She is a member of Writers Guild East, the Dramatist Guild.

Lauren Cowen
Writer's Studio Instructor
Lauren is the author of three essay collections, including the New York Times Bestseller Daughters and Mothers, and a host of pieces in publications such as Chicago magazine. Her work has also been featured on NPR. She has written for numerous magazines and newspapers, including Chicago Magazine, Philadelphia Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine and the Los Angeles Times. Her investigative work earned her one of journalism's highest honors, the Sigma Delta Chi Gold Medal.

Kevin Davis
Writer's Studio Instructor
Kevin is a longtime journalist, magazine writer, and author of The Brain Defense: Murder in Manhattan and the Dawn of Neuroscience in America's Courtrooms, Defending the Damned, and The Wrong Man.

Dina Elenbogen
Writer's Studio Instructor
Dina has published a memoir, Drawn from Water: an American Poet, an Ethiopian Family, an Israeli Story; a poetry collection, Apples of the Earth; as well as award-winning nonfiction pieces and poems. She is the recipient of the 2012 Graham School Excellence in Teaching Award for the Humanities, Arts, and Sciences.

Eileen Favorite
Writer's Studio Instructor
Eileen is the author of the novel The Heroines, which has been translated into Finnish, Italian, Russian, and Korean. Her poetry and prose has appeared in many publications, including The Toast, Triquarterly, Folio, the Chicago Reader, Poetry East, and Diagram. Connect with her at eileenfavorite.com.

Stephanie Friedman
Writer's Studio Instructor
Stephanie has had work published in Michigan Quarterly Review, among other venues, and a “distinguished” story listed in Best American Short Stories. She holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and an MA in English from the University of Chicago.

Esther Hershenhorn
Writer's Studio Instructor
Esther serves on the board of advisors of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Her publications include Chicken Soup by Heart (winner of the Sydney Taylor Award) and The Confe$$ion$ and $ecret$ of Howard J. Fingerhut.

Susan Hubbard
Writer's Studio Instructor
Susan is an award-winning screenwriter whose work has screened internationally. She co-wrote feature film Realization, and has pitched to Hollywood executives. She holds an MFA in cinema art & science. Her play, Thundersnow, was produced in Chicago in 2015.

Becca Klaver
Writer's Studio Instructor
Becca Klaver is a poet, teacher, scholar, and editor. The author of three collections of poetry, including Ready for the World (Black Lawrence, 2020), she was a founding editor of Switchback Books and is currently coediting the anthology Electric Gurlesque.

Patrick Morrissey
Writer's Studio Instructor
Patrick Morrissey is the author of three collections of poetry: The Differences (Pressed Wafer, 2014), World Music (Verge Books, 2017), and Light Box (Verge Books, 2022). He is a lecturer in the Humanities Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago, and from 2014 to 2016, he was the poetry editor of Chicago Review.

Dipika Mukherjee
Award-Winning Author and Graham School Instructor
Dipika Mukherjee, PhD, is an award-winning author of fiction and poetry and an instructor in the Writer’s Studio of the University of Chicago’s Graham School. Her book Shambala Junction won the UK Virginia Prize for Fiction and her book Ode to Broken Things was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize.
Her creative work is included in The Best Small Fictions 2019 and appears in World Literature Today, Asia Literary Review, Del Sol Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review, and her essays appear in Newsweek, Los Angeles Review of Books, Hemispheres, Orion, Scroll, The Edge and more.

Cecilia Pinto
Writer's Studio Instructor
Cecilia has had her poetry and prose published in a variety of journals including Quarter After Eight, Fence, The Seneca Review, Triquarterly, and RHINO. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for poetry and an Illinois Arts Council award and won the Esquire short fiction contest. She is also a CAAP grant recipient. In 2015, she was voted a writer to watch by The Guild Literary Society.

Delia Pless
Writer's Studio Instructor
Delia Pless holds a BA in Comparative Literature from New York University and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her poetry has appeared in Prelude, Sixth Finch, Forklift, Ohio and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Columbia College Chicago and DePaul University.

Douglas Post
Writer's Studio Instructor
Douglas Post’s plays and musicals have been produced in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Canada, England, Wales, Germany, Austria, Russia, and China. He has received the L. Arnold Weissberger Playwriting Award, the Midwestern Playwrights Festival Award, the Cunningham Commission Award, the Blue Ink Playwriting Award, and three Playwriting Fellowship Awards from the Illinois Arts Council, and has been nominated for three Jeff Awards and an Emmy Award. He is a founding member of the Victory Gardens Playwrights Ensemble.

Marjorie Robertson
Writer's Studio Instructor
Marjorie Robertson is an essayist, novelist, short story writer, and multi-linguist. Her interests include creating art + text, studying how visual and sound affect the written word, and teaching writing to second language learners.

Sarah Terez Rosenblum
Writer's Studio Instructor
Sarah’s debut novel, Herself When She's Missing, was called “poetic and heartrending” by Booklist. She has written for publications and sites including Salon, The Chicago Sun Times, The Satirist, XO Jane, afterellen.com, Curve Magazine, and Pop Matters. Her fiction has appeared in literary magazines such as Third Coast, Underground Voices, and The Boiler. She was a 2011 recipient of Carve Magazine's Esoteric Fiction Award, and the 2015 first runner up for Midwestern Gothic's Lake Prize, as well as a finalist for Washington Square Review’s 2016 Flash Fiction Award. In addition, she was shortlisted for Zoetrope All Story’s 2016 Short Fiction Contest, receiving an honorable mention. Sarah holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. To learn more, visit https://www.sarahterezrosenblum.com.

Alex Sanchez
Author and Writer's Studio Instructor
Alex Sanchez has authored ten novels for young people, including Rainbow Boys, his groundbreaking debut about a love triangle between three teenage boys. School Library Journal praised Rainbow Boys as “a book that can open eyes and change lives.” Publishers Weekly dubbed Alex a “Flying Start.” And the American Library Association honored the novel as a “Best Book for Young Adults.”
With the success of Rainbow Boys, Simon & Schuster published two sequels, Rainbow High and Rainbow Road. Both books were honored as Lambda Literary Award finalists.
Alex’s middle-grade novel for younger readers, So Hard to Say, about the friendship between a gay boy and straight girl, won the prestigious Lambda Literary Award.
His novel Getting It, a sort-of “Queer Eye for the straight teenage boy,” won the Myers Outstanding Book Award and was a runner-up for the International Latino Book Award.
The God Box, about Christian teens struggling to bring together sexuality and spirituality was honored by the New York Public Library as a “Book for the Teen Age.”
Alex’s novel Bait, tackling hard-hitting themes of male sexual abuse, won the Florida Book Award Gold Medal for Young Adult fiction and the Tomas Rivera Mexican-American Children’s Book Award.
His novel, Boyfriends with Girlfriends, explores the lives of bisexual teens. It was chosen as an ALA “Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers” and a Lambda Literary Award Finalist.
Alex's graphic novel about the teen superhero Aqualad coming of age, coming out, and discovering his superpowers, was published by DC Comics with illustrations by Julie Maroh.
The Greatest Superpower, released in 2021, focuses on twin thirteen-year-old boys whose dad comes out as transgender.
Alex’s anthologized short stories include "If You Kiss a Boy" in the collection 13: Thirteen Stories About the Agony and Ecstasy of Being Thirteen, selected by the Junior Library Guild. His story “The Secret Life of a Teenage Boy,” appeared in the anthology All Out: The No-Longer Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout the Ages.
In 2011 The Lambda Literary Foundation awarded Alex the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists’ Prize to honor his body of work.
He received an attribution in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language for the word “majorly.”
In 2017 Alex served as a judge for the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature.
Alex received his master’s in guidance and counseling from Old Dominion University and worked for many years as a youth and family counselor.
He was born in Mexico City to parents of German-Mexican and Cuban heritage and now lives in Rochester, New York.

Natalie Tilghman
Writer's Studio Instructor
Natalie was a recipient of a 2015 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award for her novel-in-progress Home Remedies. She co-authored A 52-Hertz Whale, a young adult novel recently released by Carolrhoda Lab (Lerner). Additionally, her work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Santa Clara Review, Cicada magazine, and Sudden Flash Youth, a fiction anthology by Persea Books. Other honors include first prize for fiction in The Atlantic's Student Writing Contest and a Magazine Merit Award from The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. She received a MFA from Rainier Writing Workshop. She lives in Glenview with her husband and two children.

Sandi Wisenberg
Writer's Studio Instructor
Ms. Wisenberg is the author of two prose collections, The Sweetheart Is In, and Holocaust Girls: History, Memory, & Other Obsessions, and the nonfiction chronicle The Adventures of Cancer Bitch. She was a feature writer for the Miami Herald and has published prose and poetry in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Tikkun, New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review and many other places. Her nonfiction has appeared in Lilith, River Teeth, Fourth Genre, the Pinch,Crab Orchard Review and Colorado Review, Common Review and The Progressive. Her fiction (excerpts from her novel manuscript, In the House of the World) can be found in Prairie Schooner, Seattle Review and a few other literary magazines. She has been the literary editor of TriQuarterly, and the creative nonfiction editor of Another Chicago Magazine. She's received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the National Endowment for the Humanities.