Instructors

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 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 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 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 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.

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 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.

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, 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 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 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’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.

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 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 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.

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.