I teach creative writing.
I offer personalized writing lessons and coaching.
All genres welcome.
I work with tweens, teens, and adults.
I also offer occasional poetry writing sessions and workshops.
Meet online or in person. My office is in San Francisco’s Mission District.
Click below to see my current offerings…
I have taught writing for nearly two decades.
I’ve taught undergrads at the University of Iowa, middle and high school students at Castilleja School, and kids of all ages via Stanford Pre-Collegiate Studies. My work for Stanford took me around the globe; I’ve taught poetry, fiction, and essay writing workshops in South Korea, Chile, Singapore, India, Thailand, and Kazakhstan.
I enjoyed eight immaculate summers working for Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, where I mentored young writers and helped to create a number of camp traditions that continue to this day. (I’m very proud of Question Hole.) I went on to design IYWS’s first online poetry course, Sensory Overload: Poetic Perception and Poetic Technique.
I love teaching because I love to play. I believe in the seriousness of my students, even while we’re playing.
Above: Teaching in Astana, Kazakhstan in 2019; IYWS group photo; Question Hole; my likeness, as rendered by students; and a little COVID flashback to that time I made the Castilleja yearbook.
Classes and private lessons
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One-on-one lessons in any genre. I tailor readings, assignments, and goals to your own strengths and needs. This is a fantastic option for students who are looking for personal guidance and a level of attention that simply isn’t possible in a group class.
Email me for rates.
“I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer…
The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences. Unspeakable torture where he needs all his faith, all his super‐human strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the one accursed – and the supreme Scholar! Because he reaches the unknown! Since he cultivated his soul, rich already, more than any man! He reaches the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has seen them…
So, I work to make myself into a seer.” - Arthur Rimbaud