Teachers

Sheleen McElhinney is the author of Every Little Vanishing, a Write Bloody book. Her poems have also appeared or are forthcoming in Abandon Journal, Lily Poetry Review, Bayou Magazine, Slant, Laurel Review, and elsewhere. She is from Bucks County, Pa where she currently lives with her three children.

Jennifer McGaha is the author of Flat Broke with Two Goats, Bushwhacking: How to Get Lost in the Woods and Write Your Way Out, and The Joy Document (Broadleaf Books, 2024). She currently coordinates UNC-Asheville's Great Smokies Writing Program.

Describe your teaching style.

My teaching practice is deeply rooted in this belief in the power of writing to be both radical and revelatory. I encourage my students to approach memoir writing with more questions than answers, more curiosity than certitude, and I invite them to appreciate and even enjoy writing as a process that involves multiple drafts, multiple attempts at reaching for the truth. For me, this hope of gaining new insights into the experiences that have shaped me brings me to the page time and time again, and I encourage my students to approach their craft with an openness to what might be versus what is. My teaching, like my writing, is accessible, joyful, celebratory, and I value the unique insights each writer brings to the classroom with the ultimate goal of helping students discover the stories they most want to tell.

Elise M. McHugh is a writer, teacher, and editor based in Washington State. Originally from New Mexico, she is a senior acquisitions editor for the University of New Mexico Press. McHugh has published poetry and nonfiction in numerous venues, including New Mexico Magazine and ABQ InPrint and has taught poetry and publishing classes and workshops in a variety of settings. She holds an MA in creative writing from the University of New Mexico.

Describe your teaching style.

I’m a lifelong learner, and I learn all the time in workshops and on panels. It’s one of the many reasons I enjoy teaching. The energy generated by people as they share experiences and questions and ideas feeds part of me that always needs replenishing. My approach as an instructor is to use examples and humor to demystify the process as much as possible in a supportive environment where everyone takes away something that will replenish them and get them once step closer to their goals as writers and as human beings.

Robin McLean was a lawyer and then a potter in the woods of Alaska before turning to writing. Her first short fiction collection Reptile House won the BOA Fiction Prize, was twice a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Prize, and was named a best book of 2015 in Paris Review. Her debut novel Pity the Beast, published in November of 2022, was noted as "a work of crazy brilliance" and a best book of fiction in 2021 in The Guardian, "stunning debut novel" in New York Review of Books, as well as a best book of the year in the Wall Street Journal. Her second collection of short fiction Get' em Young, Treat' em Tough, Tell 'em Nothing is forthcoming from And Other Stories on October 18, 2022. She lives in the high plains desert of central Nevada.

Kelly McWilliams is the author of the YA novels Agnes at the End of the World (2020), Mirror Girls (2022), and the forthcoming Your Plantation Prom Is Not Okay (Spring 2023, Little, Brown Young Readers). She lives in Seattle. 

Jessica Mehta, PhD is an Aniyunwiya (citizen of the Cherokee Nation) multi-disciplinary poet and artist. She recently returned from a Fulbright Senior Scholar post in Bengaluru, India where she instituted the first credit-based generative workshop for MFA students at Christ University and curated an anthology of contemporary Indian poetry written in the colonizer’s tongue. Jessica’s installation “The Red C[h]airn Project” is currently one of four pieces on exhibit at the Ucross Gallery in Wyoming. Her 16th book, “sp[RED]” is under contract with the Indigenous-owned Red Planet Books for a 2024 release. Learn more at www.thischerokeerose.com.

“Erika Meitner is the quintessential 21st century storyteller bearing witness from the vantage point of a social critic with heart, humor, and an incomparable voice.” ―Carmen Giménez Smith

“Erika Meitner is known for what’s called ‘documentary poetry,’ which combines some of the journalistic work of the reporter with the subjective renderings of the poet.” —NPR Books

“Erika Meitner…taps into national conversations on topics including motherhood, infertility, terrorism, Judaism, school shootings, the 2016 election, and race. The poems feel straightforward in a way that adds to their urgency. ” —Jewish Book Council

Poet and writer Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems and winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry. Born and raised in Queens and Long Island, NY, Meitner is a first-generation American: her father is from Haifa, Israel; her mother was born in a refugee camp in Stuttgart, Germany, which is where her maternal grandparents settled after surviving Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, and Mauthausen concentration camps. In a conversation with Rachel Zucker in Commonplace, Meitner explains that much of her work arises from a commitment to writing accurately and respectfully about the small town in which she lives, and the challenges of writing as an engaged member of her community while being an othered outsider, a poet, a Jew, and the white mother of a black son.

Her newest collection, Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA, 2018) transports readers into the heart of southern Appalachia—its highways and strip malls, its fragility and danger—as the speaker wrestles with racial tensions, religious identity, gun violence, raising children, and the anxieties of life in the 21st century. With a refusal to settle for easy answers, Meitner’s poems embrace life in an increasingly fractured society, and they never stop asking what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves. “In her graceful fifth collection, Meitner displays a sense of urgency informed by parenthood in this strange and particularly turbulent American moment. Hyper-aware of both suburban and rural landscapes, Meitner uncannily describes their features,” praises Publishers Weekly. While poet sam sax says, simply: “Holy Moly Carry Me is a triumph!”

Meitner’s first book, Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore (Anhinga Press, 2003), won the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her second book, Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), was selected as a winner of the 2009 National Poetry Series competition. Her third collection, Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls (2011) is “a sexy, funny, smart book full of crack-the-whip language’’, in the words of Beth Ann Fennelly. Meitner’s fourth collection of poems, Copia (2014), was published as part of BOA Editions’ American Poets Continuum Series. In a review of this collection, The Rumpus wrote: “When is it plenty? When is it enough? In Copia, Meitner gathers material from disparate places―big box stores, her grandmother, Yiddish speakers, her life in Blacksburg, VA, travel to Detroit―to consider these questions. The parts that she gathers, the fragments of language, the physical pieces of life, the things left behind, lost, abandoned are greater as a collection than any object individually. Things are more whole together, contained, bound. Meitner assembles plenitude only to ask, is plenty enough? That is the richness, the abundance of Copia.” Her sixth book of poems, Useful Junk, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in April 2022.

Her poetry and prose have been included in the anthologies Best American Poetry (2011), Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days (2010), and Best African American Essays (2010), The Way We Work: Contemporary Writings from the American Workplace (2008), and Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (2008), as well as many journals, including The New York Times Magazine, The Southern Review, Slate, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and APR.

Meitner also creates larger-scale documentary photo/text projects on urban environments, including “This is Not a Requiem for Detroit” and “RNC CLE,” both commissioned by and published in Virginia Quarterly Review. She is currently working on a project on Miami and sea-level rise.

Meitner attended Dartmouth College, Hebrew University, and the University of Virginia, where she received her MFA in Creative Writing as a Henry Hoyns Fellow, and her MA in Religious Studies as a Morgenstern Fellow in Jewish Studies. Meitner was a US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing and the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She was also the recipient of the 2021 Poetry Society of America’s Cecil Hemley Memorial Award.

In addition to having taught creative writing at UVA, UW-Madison, and UC-Santa Cruz, Meitner has worked as a dating columnist, an office temp, a Hebrew school instructor, a computer programmer, a systems consultant, a lifeguard, a documentary film production assistant, and a middle school teacher in the New York City public school system.

Meitner is currently a Professor of English at Virginia Tech. She lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Rhea Melina (she/her) is a multi-ethnic poet, birth-worker, parent, herbalist, educator, and hopeful romantic. Her chapbooks include a place to put things (Bottlecap Press, 2023), Not My Wasteland (Bone Machine, 2024), and Ballard Coyote(Scumbag Press, 2025). Her poems have been published by Elizabeth Ellen’s Hobart, Gnashing Teeth, Literary Underground, Hare’s Paw Journal, Fiilthy Glo, Blood+Honey, Text Power Telling, and Papers Pub, among others, and her poem "Faith," calling for a free Palestine, was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She believes that all illegal occupations and wars should cease and refuses to settle for less. found confetti is her first full-length collection and is available now from Carbonation Press and www.antiquatedfuture.com.

Breona Mendoza (she/her) is an activist, sex therapist, and avid supporter of self-love in all respects of the word. She received her BA in Psychology and Gender Studies, her MA in community counseling, and has a certificate in sex therapy. She is currently working on completing a certificate in sex education and writing educational cliterature. She believes that everyone deserves accurate information about the bodies and experiences. Much of her work centers the experiences of the LGBTQ community. Now a days she spends her time providing counseling to teens, living in a community of quirky queers and contemplating ingenious ways to empower people to become more comfortable and loving with their parts.

Maggie Mertens is a writer, journalist, and editor in Seattle. Her essays and reporting have appeared in numerous national publications. Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (Algonquin Books, June 2024) is her first book.

With 25+ years of experience coaching authors and teaching at four top-ranked universities, Susan V. Meyers currently directs the Creative Writing Program at Seattle University. She holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota and a PhD from the University of Arizona, and has been a writer in residence at more than a dozen different arts centers nationally and internationally. Both her nonfiction book on immigration and her circus-centered historical novel, Failing the Trapeze, have won major awards, including the Nilsen Award and grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, 4Culture, Artist Trust, and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her essays and stories have likewise been nominated for The Best American Series and several Pushcart Prizes and have recently appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The Rumpus, Calyx, Hippocampus, and The Minnesota Review. You can find her at susanvmeyers.com