YYWW Faculty Bios

Yale Young Writers' Workshop Faculty 2024

Our faculty are accomplished writers and editors.

"Jotham Burrello's workshops were very well-structured, insightful, supportive, and productive, and I enjoyed myself so much. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to be part of the YYWW!"

Fiction

Kristin Bair

Website: http://www.kristinbairokeeffe.com

Kristin Bair’s latest novel, Agatha Arch Is Afraid of Everything, has made a lot of people laugh…and cry. People magazine dubbed it a “Best New Book.” Booklist said, “Hilarious!” As an essayist, Kristin writes about China, a ranch in New Mexico, bears, being a mom, and weird nature things, and her work has been published in a variety of magazines, everything from Scary Mommy to the Gettysburg Review. As a writing instructor, her penchant for travel has landed her in classrooms and conferences around the globe, from Chicago to Boston to Shanghai, and many places in between.

Jotham Burrello

Website: https://jothamburrello.com/

Jotham Burrello is the director of the Yale Writers’ Workshop. His novel, Spindle City, was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway award, and a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award. His writing has appeared in literary journals, the Hartford Courant, the Christian Science Monitor, and he’s a proud winner of The New Yorker caption contest. He’s currently writing a new novel. He teaches writing at Central Connecticut State University, founded the CT Lit Fest, and is the former publisher of the award-winning Elephant Rock Books.

Sarah Darer Littman

Website: https://sarahdarerlittman.com

Sarah Darer Littman is the award-winning author of humorous middle grade novels, and edgy young adult novels exploring the intersection of teens and technology. Her most recent novel, Some Kind of Hate was a Sydney Taylor Honor book and has been chosen as a 2024 High School Read Aloud by the Indiana Library Federation. Sarah teaches in the MFA program at Western CT State University and loves mentoring writers of all ages.

Lara Ehrlich

Website: http://www.laraehrlich.com

Lara Ehrlich is the author of the novel Bind Me Tighter Still (Red Hen Press, 2025) and the story collection Animal Wife (Red Hen Press, 2020), which won Red Hen Press’s Fiction Award judged by Ann Hood. Lara is the host of Writer Mother Monster, a conversation series that dismantles the myth of “having it all” and the founder of Thought Fox Writers Den, which supports writers of all levels.

Anne Thalheimer

Anne Thalheimer is an artist and educator whose work in visual culture, autobio comix, and independent publishing spans three decades. Her work (both academic and graphic) has appeared in numerous collections, including the MLA’s Teaching The Graphic Novel; she is a long-term reviewer for Xerography Debt and a former contributor to both Fleen and PopMatters. Mostly she likes drawing monsters, cats, and cute food. Anne holds a PhD in English from the University of Delaware.

Non-fiction

Catina Bacote

Catina Bacote is a nonfiction writer with an MA from Teachers College, Columbia University, and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She has received fellowships from the Jerome Hill Foundation, the American Association of University Women, MacDowell, and other organizations. She leads workshops for the Flatiron Writers Room and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She has published widely, and her essay The Funk of Defiance, The Freedom of Refusal appears in the anthology Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction. In her workshops, she invites students to use their moral imaginations to engage with the world around them, and she recently moderated the conference panel “Teaching Toward Justice: Student Voice and Power in Creative Writing.”

Poetry

Sean Frederick Forbes

Website: http://www.seanfrederickforbes.com

Sean Frederick Forbes is an Associate Professor-in-Residence of English and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Connecticut. His poems have appeared in Chagrin River Review, Sargasso, A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture, Crab Orchard Review, Long River Review, and other publications. In 2017, he received first place in the Nutmeg Poetry Contest from the Connecticut Poetry Society.

Catherine Pierce

Website: http://www.catherinepiercepoet.com

Catherine Pierce is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi and the author of four books of poems, most recently Danger Days (Saturnalia 2020). Her poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Academy of American Poets, she co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.

Trung Capecchi-Nguyen

Website: https://www.trungles.com/

Trung Le Capecchi-Nguyen (Trung Le Nguyen, professionally) is an award-winning Vietnamese American cartoonist, artist, and writer from Minnesota.  Trung’s first original graphic novel, The Magic Fish, was published in 2020 through Random House Graphic. He has also contributed work for DC Comics, Oni Press, Boom! Studios, Image Comics, and Marvel. He currently lives in Minneapolis and raises a small flock of very spoiled hens. July 11 @ 11 am

Allison Joseph

Website: http://www.allisonjosephpoetry.com

Allison Joseph currently lives, teaches, and writes in Carbondale, Illinois, where she is part of the creative writing faculty at Southern Illinois University. Her most recent collections of poems are Any Proper Weave, Lexicon, Professional Happiness, and Confessions of a Barefaced Woman. Confessions of a Barefaced Woman won the 2019 Feathered Quill Book Award and was a finalist in the poetry category for the 2019 NAACP Image Award. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times and in the Best American Poetry Series. She is the widow of poet and editor Jon Tribble. July 10 @ 11 am

Jennifer McCauley

Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of the poetry collection Scar On/Scar Off which received an IPPY award and When Trying to Return Home, a short story collection, which was an New York Times Editors' Choice, Best Fiction Book of the Year according to Kirkus Reviews and "Best Book to Read in 2023" by Today. She has been granted fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio and CantoMundo. She teaches at the University of Houston-Clear Lake and fiction editor at Pleiades. July 8 @ 11 am

Teddy Wayne

Website: http://teddywayne.com

Teddy Wayne is the author of six novels, most recently The Winner. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship. A former columnist for the New York Times and McSweeney’s and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, he has developed films and series from his novels with HBO, MGM Television, and others. He lives in Brooklyn with his family. July 11 @ 7 pm

Jane Wong

Website: https://janewongwriter.com/

Jane Wong is the author of a memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023), and two books of poetry: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James Books, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University and grew up in a Chinese American take-out restaurant on the Jersey shore. July 9 @ 11 am

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