Creative Writing Instructors

Assemay is a prose writer from Kazakhstan, Astana. She writes about family, memory and adolescence. 

Assemay will offer the writing lab "Writing Clichés and Writing Against Clichés" and the craft session "The Interview" during session one at Juniper this summer.

Sam Beal (he/they) is a trans poet and community organizer born and raised in the Florida panhandle. He is currently an educator and MFA candidate at UMass Amherst. Interested in finding the connection between art and revolutionary care, his poetics explore the body as a sight for vulnerable sincerity, as well as the inherent Queerness of Florida’s landscapes. Their work has appeared in journals such as FOLIO, RFD, Fruitslice, and t’ART. 

Sam will offer the writing lab "Formal Playgrounds: Bending, Breaking, & Inventing Form" and the craft session "Linguistic Cartography: The Poetic Potential of Lexical Association" during session one at Juniper this summer.

Amelia Sage Van Donsel is a poet and educator from Waltham, Massachusetts. She is passionate about equitable access to adult education, generally being outside, and telling her cats secrets. Her most recent work is forthcoming in Little Mirror, Afternoon Visitor, and The Thimble.

Amelia will offer the writing lab "Seriously Unserious: Play and Humor in Our Work" and the craft session "DIY Mad-Libs" during session one at Juniper this summer.

Haley Joy Harris is a poet from Los Angeles, living and teaching in western Massachusetts.

Haley will offer the writing lab "Sensational Writing / Writing Reality" and the craft session "Fallen Fruits, Semicolon Trees: Accumulation & Pruning as Craft" during session one at Juniper this summer. 

Clara Mundy is a writer from rural Texas, and most of her work grapples with that fact. She has received the Roy Crane Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Literary Arts and the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her work is published or forthcoming in Mississippi Review, Kestrel, Apricity, and Best Debut Short Stories 2023. She is currently enrolled in the MFA for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Clara will offer the writing lab "Making Things Weird: Blending the Fantastic into the Everyday" and the craft session "Moving Images: Generating Ideas through Paintings" during session one at Juniper this summer. 

Edward Clifford is a writer from Massachusetts with work in Paperbark, Many Nice Donkeys, Press Pause Press, and elsewhere. He is a prose student in the UMass MFA for Poets & Writers and the managing editor of the Massachusetts Review.

Edward will offer the writing lab "On the Origins of Our Writing" and the craft session "By Its Cover" during session two at Juniper this summer.

Nick Hedtke is a poet from Minnesota living in Western Massachusetts. He currently teaches Creative Writing at UMass Amherst, and serves as an editor for the poetry press b l u s h lit. Last summer, he published two chapbooks: The Years, published by b l u s h lit (part of the Illicit Zines series), along with Je Suis Américain, published by Press Brake.  

Nickolas will offer the writing lab "Always Writing" and the craft session "Parataxis: Train of Thought" during session two at Juniper this summer.

Maya Kuchiyak is a Turkic-British writer of fiction and essays. Born to a family of refugees from the Kavkaz, she grew up between the anarchic suburbs of 90-00s Moscow and pastoral West Country England. She currently resides in Amherst, MA with her two cats. She is sometimes sighted prowling the streets of New York City.

Maya will offer the writing lab "Fatally flawed: Make your characters do the wrong thing" and the craft session "Haunted Hotel, Group Novel & Mystery" during session two at Juniper this summer.

Vika Mujumdar is a writer and critic based in Western Massachusetts. She was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India, and holds an MA in Comparative Literature from UMass Amherst where she is currently an MFA student in Fiction. A 2025-2026 NBCC Emerging Critics Fellow, her work has appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, Public Books, the Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She works for the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and edits Liminal Transit Review.

Vika will offer the writing lab "Writing Into Place" and the craft session "First Impressions: Writing a Compelling Opening" during session two at Juniper this summer.

Sarah Ahmad was born in Delhi and grew up across the Indian subcontinent. She is a PhD candidate in literature at the UMass–Amherst where she works on the ways anticolonial, feminist-queer, and Third World intellectuals and writers imagine housing against empire. Her creative work also circles around space, architecture, homes, and a poetics of the domestic. She teaches courses on gender, space, and power in the English and WGSS departments at UMass, and has edited and worked for Guernica, Poetry, and Conjunctions. Her work can be found in Latin American Literature Today, The Margins, Gulf Coast, and MUSE India amongst other places. 

Sarah will offer the writing lab "'A Foreign Anguish' | sounding out the writer's voice" and the craft session "A List of Possibilities" during session two at Juniper this summer. 

Dylan Friedman (they/them) is a poet from North Carolina. Their literary interests as of late include Robert Gluck, Marguerite Duras, Mina Loy, Lyn Hejinian. Rae Armantrout, and Robert Duncan. Beyond reading and writing, they enjoy spending time with friends, playing games, and swimming in any & all bodies of water.