Creative Writing Instructors
Juniper's Creative Writing Instructors are professional teachers, published authors, and graduate students pursuing their PhD or Masters of Fine Arts degrees in creative writing at UMass Amherst. Below are the fantastic and brilliant Instructors for the Juniper Institute for Young Writers and Juniper Young Writers Online summer programs.
Ekaterina Agniatsvet (she/they)
Ekaterina Agniatsvet is a writer born in Minsk, Belarus and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. She holds a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, an M.S. from the Columbia School of Journalism, and is presently a Prose Candidate at the UMass Amherst MFA for Poets & Writers. Her work has been supported by the Juniper Summer Writing Institute & the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. She lives in Worcester, MA, where she is currently at work on her novel, Zaraza, a book about how members of a family infect each other with their psychological conditions.
Ekaterina will be teaching for the Juniper Institute for Young Writers residential program this summer!
Bec Bell-Gurwitz (they/them)
Bec Bell-Gurwitz (they/them) is a writer and teacher living in Northampton, MA, on unceded Pocumtuck and Nipmuc land with their beloved white wolf/dog, Milou. Their work appears in the anthology Strange Attractors: Lives Changed by Chance, The West Trade Review, The Citron Review, Khôra, and others. Bec is a 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee, won 2nd place in Pithead Chapel's 2023 Larry Brown Short Story Prize, and has received support from Writing by Writers, Corporeal Writing, and Bread Loaf. Their work primarily concerns bodies, care economies, and climate change and are currently working on a novel about generational trauma and ritual. Bec is an MFA candidate and teaching associate at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. You can learn more at www.becbellgurwitz.com.
Bec will be teaching for the Juniper Institute for Young Writers residential program this summer!
Larry Flynn (he/him)
Larry Flynn is a teaching associate and MFA candidate at UMass Amherst. He has received scholarships or fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conferences, Juniper Summer Writing Institute, Columbia University’s Klingenstein Institute, Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and UMass Amherst’s School of Earth and Sustainability, and has attended workshops at Tin House and The Kenyon Review Writers Workshops. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, selected as Honorable Mention for the Cara Paravanni Memorial Award, and published in Michigan Quarterly Review, West Branch, New Letters, Greensboro Review, StoryQuarterly, Normal School, and others. He has taught English, creative writing, humanities, and journalism in various school year and summer programming at UMass Amherst, Culver Academies, Northfield Mount Hermon School, and Phillips Academy Andover.
As a teacher, Larry enjoys cultivating generative and generous classroom spaces. As a writer, he often situates nature, education, history, and family dynamics at the heart of his work. Read his work at LawrenceFlynn.com.
Larry will be teaching for the Juniper Institute for Young Writers residential program this summer!
Phoebe Glick (she/her)
Phoebe Glick is a poet and educator from Massachusetts. After getting an MFA in Poetry at Pratt Institute, Phoebe taught freshman-year writing at the City University of New York for 5 years. She is now a first year PhD student at UMass researching poetics and revolutionary theory. Her poetry chapbook The Afters (2022) is about the afterlives of neoliberal austerity. Alongside teaching and writing, she organizes with her labor union and works to build collective power, believing that we have nothing to lose but our chains.
Phoebe will be teaching for Juniper Young Writers Online this summer!
Riley Jones (she/her)
Riley Jones is a poet and teacher from Massachusetts.
Riley will be teaching for the Juniper Institute for Young Writers residential program this summer!
Zahra Lahiji (she/her)
Zahra is an Iranian-American writer in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her work focuses on desire, forms of imprisonment outside of incarceration, experiences of women struggling against systems of oppression, and the paradoxes that arise with moral ambiguity. She has previously taught in K-12 schools and is currently an Instructor of College Writing at the University alongside her academic pursuits.
Zahra will be teaching for Juniper Young Writers Online this summer!
Nathaniel Pinkham (he/him)
Nathaniel Pinkham is a current prose candidate in the UMass Amherst MFA for poets and writers. He grew up in Eastern Massachusetts and now enjoys living in Western Massachusetts. He worked for the Juniper Institute for Young Writers previously as an undergraduate and is excited to return as a Creative Writing Instructor. He is currently working on a Novel.
Nathaniel will be teaching for Juniper Young Writers Online this summer!
Joan Tate (she/her)
Joan Tate is a transexual woman, mystic, and MFA candidate from Virginia whose often maximalist work deals with the grappling of the spirit with and against its own impermanence, growth, and embodiment. She holds a B.A. from Columbia University in Creative Writing Poetry and is currently studying at UMass Amherst’s MFA Program for Poets and Writers. When she’s not too busy watching horror movies and yearning for a good New York bagel with lox she can be found walking the graveyards of Western Massachusetts, reading to whatever entities reside therein.
Joan will be teaching for Juniper Young Writers Online this summer!
Nasira Watts (they/them)
Nasira Watts is a Black, queer, nonbinary multi-disciplenary artist from Chicago, They are a part of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst Masters of Fine Arts in Writing Program where they are pursuing a degree in Prose supplemented by their roots in African American Studies. They are a scholar deeply engaged with AfroPessimism, AfroFuturism, Womanism, and Queer Indigenous theory. They prioritize play on the page by crafting speculative stories where Black queer folks live to see the joyous end of their own stories. They are interested in writing as an art form and further pushing the limits for how it appears outside of the page, for instance, in an art gallery, in a DJ set, etc! They embrace a fluidity in everything they do, and hope to inspire others to do the same!
Nasira will be teaching for the Juniper Institute for Young Writers residential program this summer!
Richie Wills (he/him)
Richie Wills, a Nigerian-American writer, performer, and Teaching Associate, holds a B.A. from Buffalo State University. Currently studying at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, he is an MFA candidate with a certificate in Film Studies. As a Karen Lee Spaulding Oishei Fellow for Leaders of Color and REAL Fellow, Richie passionately delves into the intersectional realms of storytelling through various mediums. Beyond academia, he is a teaching artist, bringing his love for storytelling to the community and other educational spaces.
Beyond the world of literature, Richie finds solace and joy in cultivating plant life during his leisure hours.
Richie will be teaching for Juniper Young Writers Online this summer!