For several years I was an editor mentor in the low-residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada University. Through the program, I mentored writers one on one as they prepared to revise and defend their thesis works. Past syllabi included the following titles, among many others: 

Creative Nonfiction

  • Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction, by Jack Hart (Univ. of Chicago Press)

  • Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing, by Elissa Altman (Ballantine Books, 2018)

  • Beyond Measure: Essays, by Rachel Z. Arndt (Sarabande Books, 2018)

  • Saturday’s Child: A Daughter’s Memoir, by Deborah Burns (She Writes Press, 2019)

  • This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession by Cameron Dezen Hammon

  • Bettyville: A Memoir, by George Hodgman (Penguin Books, 2016)

  • Interior States: Essays, by Meghan O’Gieblyn (Anchor, 2018)

  • Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life by Amber Scorah

Fiction 

  • Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Renni Browne and Dave King

  • The Perfect Assassin, by K. A. Doore (Tor Books, 2019)

  • We Hunt the Flame, by Hafsah Faizal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019)

  • Another Place You’ve Never Been, by Rebecca Kaufman (Counterpoint, 2017)

  • The Merciful Crow, by Margaret Owen (Henry Holt and Co., 2019)

  • The Wise Man’s Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss (Hachette, 2015)

  • I Want to Show You More, by Jaime Quatro (Henry Holt and Co., 2014)

  • 26 Knots, by Bindu Suresh (Invisible Publishing, 2019)

  • The Afflictions, by C. Dale Young (Four Way Books, 2018)

I taught a course on literary publishing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota for several years (read more about the class in the Macalester News). For Fall 2018, I used the following reading list: 

Gathering materials for the annual English 208 zine.

Gathering materials for the annual English 208 zine.