Instructors

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.

Dina Elenbogen is author of the poetry collections, Apples of the Earth, and Shore and the memoir, Drawn from Water. She’s received fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and the Ragdale Foundation. Her work has appeared in anthologies and magazines including Fury: City of the Big shoulders, Beyond Lament, Lit Hub, Bellevue Literary Review, Brevity, Prairie Schooner, december, Woven Tale Press, Patterson Literary Review, Connecticut River Review, New City Chicago other venues.

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.

Douglas Post is a Founding Member of the Victory Gardens Playwrights Ensemble. His plays and musicals have been produced in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Canada, England, Wales, Germany, Austria, Russia, China, and South Africa. 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.

Sarah Terez Rosenblum’s work has appeared in literary magazines such as The Normal School, Prairie Schooner (Shortlisted for Prairie Schooner’s Summer 2020 Creative Nonfiction Prize), Diagram, Brevity, Third Coast, and Carve. In 2022, she was shortlisted for StoryQuarterly’s annual fiction contest. Sarah has written for sites including Salon, The Chicago Sun Times, The Satirist, and Pop Matters. Pushcart Prize nominated, Sarah holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Sarah is a Creative Coach and Developmental Editor, and teaches creative writing at Story Studio where she was voted 2022 Teacher of the Year, and at The University of Chicago Writer’s Studio where she was the 2022 winner of Innovation in Teaching Award. Sarah’s novel, Herself When She's Missing, was called “poetic and heartrending" by Booklist.

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.