Stanford Continuing Studies Online Writing Certificate:
Novel Writing Core Instructors
Samina Ali
Author
Samina Ali's novel Madras on Rainy Days received France's Prix du Premier Roman Etranger award, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award in Fiction, and was named a best debut novel by Poets & Writers. Among other places, her work has been featured in The Economist, The Guardian, and Vogue, and on NPR. Ali was also a featured presenter at the Nobel Women's Initiative 2017 International Conference.
Martha Conway
Author
Martha Conway’s most recent novel, The Underground River, was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and has been translated into six languages. She is also the author of Thieving Forest, Sugarland, and 12 Bliss Street. Her short fiction has been published in The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, The Quarterly, The Carolina Quarterly, Folio, and other journals. She received her master's degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University.
Rachel Howard
Author
Rachel Howard is the author of a memoir about her father’s unsolved murder, The Lost Night, and her first novel, The Risk of Us, was published in April 2019. Her personal essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, Waxwing, The Arroyo Literary Review, O, The Oprah Magazine, Berfrois, Canteen, The New York Times “Draft” series, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College, and later served there as interim director of undergraduate creative writing. She has also taught in the MFA program of Saint Mary’s College.
Deborah Johnson
Author
Deborah Johnson's latest novel is The Secret Magic, which 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 has been a translator and an editor, a broadcaster at Vatican Radio, and director of the Colom Foundation in Columbus, Mississippi.
Lauren Kate
Author
Lauren Kate is the author of nine novels, including the Fallen series, the Teardrop series, and The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove. Her books have sold over 10 million copies worldwide and have been translated into over thirty languages. The feature film of Fallen was released by Sony Pictures in 2017. She received an MA in creative writing from UC Davis and is a former acquiring editor at HarperCollins.
Ammi Keller
Former Stegner Fellow, Stanford
Ammi Keller’s work appears in American Short Fiction, Joyland, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015. She has edited fiction, nonfiction, and poetry at Soft Skull Press and St. Martin’s Press, and has received residencies from the Norton Island Colony and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Jack Livings
Former Stegner Fellow, Stanford
Jack Livings is the author of the novel The Blizzard Party, and the story collection The Dog, which was awarded the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome. His short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. A former contributing editor at The Paris Review, he received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Thomas McNeely
Former Jones Lecturer and Stegner Fellow, Stanford
Thomas McNeely’s stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and a variety of other magazines and anthologies. His work has been short-listed for the Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and the Pushcart Prize. In 2008, he received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose. His first novel, Ghost Horse, was published in 2014. McNeely received an MFA from Emerson College.
Joshua Mohr
Author
Joshua Mohr’s most recent book, Model Citizen, was published in March 2021. He is also the author of We Are All Together, Termite Parade (a New York Times Editors’ Choice), and the novels All This Life, Fight Song, Damascus, and Some Things That Meant the World to Me (an O, The Oprah Magazine Terrific Read of 2009 and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller). His short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, 7x7, The Bay Guardian, ZYZZYVA, BuzzFeed, Literary Hub,The Rumpus, and The Nervous Breakdown, among other publications. Mohr received an MFA from the University of San Francisco.
Ron Nyren
Former Stegner Fellow, Stanford
Ron Nyren’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, The Missouri Review, North American Review, Glimmer Train Stories, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of the novel The Book of Lost Light (which received Black Lawrence Press's 2019 Big Moose Prize), co-author of Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers, and a former editor of Furious Fictions: The Magazine of Short-Short Stories.
Elizabeth Percer
Author
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
Former Stegner Fellow, Stanford
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.
Stephanie Reents
Former Stegner Fellow, Stanford
Stephanie Reents received a BA from Amherst College, a second BA from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and an MFA from the University of Arizona. Her short stories have appeared in Epoch, StoryQuarterly, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, New South, O. Henry Prize Stories 2006, and Best of the West, among other publications. Her collection of stories, The Kissing List, was published in 2012.
Dominic Russ-Combs
Former Stegner Fellow, Stanford
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.
Rachel Smith
Author
Rachel Smith’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Seattle Times, The Rumpus, and The Coachella Review. She has received residencies and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Marquette Residency, 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.
Sarah Stone
Faculty, Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers
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.
Wendy Nelson Tokunaga
Author
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. Her latest book is a collection of short stories, Postcards From Tokyo. Tokunaga received an MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco.
Malena Watrous
Former Stegner Fellow, Stanford; Online Certificate in Novel Writing Program Lead, Stanford Continuing Studies
Malena Watrous is the author of the novel If You Follow Me, which received a Michener-Copernicus Award. She frequently reviews books for such publications as The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. She received an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow.