Samina Ali
Novel and Memoir Writing Certificate Instructor
Samina Ali's 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 TEDx Talk, "What Does the Quran Really Say About a Muslim Woman's Hijab," has over 8 million views. Her writing has been featured in various outlets, from NPR to The Economist. Her most recent book, Pieces You'll Never Get Back, was one of the most anticipated memoirs of 2025.
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. He was a Jones Lecturer and Stegner Fellow at Stanford.
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 a New York Times bestselling author whose novels include the Fallen series, which was made into a major motion picture and an Emmy-nominated TV series. Her books have been featured on Jeopardy, parodied by The Simpsons, translated into more than 30 languages, and sold over 11 million copies. Her forthcoming series, White Lights, will be published in June 2026. 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.
Jack Livings
Novel Writing Certificate Instructor
Jack Livings is the author of the novel The Blizzard Party and the story collection The Dog, which received the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the Rome Prize in Literature. His short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He teaches in the Program of Creative Writing at Princeton. Livings is a former contributing editor at The Paris Review. He received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and 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.
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 has taught creative writing at Stanford, Indiana University, SUNY Albany, and in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of Lay It on My Heart and Home Remedies, and her fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, Glimmer Train, The Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares. She contributes to Salon, The Believer, and The Rumpus. Pneuman directs the Napa Valley Writers' Conference. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and received a PhD in English from SUNY Albany.
Stephanie Reents
Novel Writing Certificate Instructor
Stephanie Reents is the author of the recently published novel We Loved to Run; 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. 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, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and elsewhere. His long-form story "Faith" is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner. He received an Emerging Artist Award from the Kentucky Arts Council and is a former Stegner Fellow. He teaches full-time at Auburn University.
Mike Scalise
Memoir Writing Certificate Instructor
Mike Scalise is the author of the memoir, The Brand New Catastrophe, received the Christopher Doheny Award from the Center for Fiction and praise from The New York Times, Buzzfeed, and The Baltimore Sun. He's written for The New York Times, Bon Appétit, The Paris Review Daily, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He received and MFA in creative writing from George Mason University and 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 is the author of In This Ravishing World, which won the W.S. Porter Prize and was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award. Her novel Afterword won the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Literary and Science Fiction, and The Translator received the Next Generation Indie Book Award for General Fiction. She is also the author of Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal. She was an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco.
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 and three story collections, most recently Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos, Direct Sunlight: Stories, and The Virginity of Famous Men. She is also the editor of the short fiction anthology Love in the Time of Time’s Up, and has received the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, an O. Henry Prize, and the Chicago Public Library Foundation's 21st Century Award, among other honors. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, New England Review, Story, Ploughshares, The New York Times, and elsewhere.
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.