Scott Driscoll, M.F.A., teaches the fiction writing sequence for The Writer's Workshop. He has won numerous Society of Professional Journalists awards, including first place for best education reporting, 2004, and second place for general reporting, 2004. He was cited in the Best American Essays, 1998, won the University of Washington Milliman Award for Fiction, 1989, and first prize in the Literary Lights Fiction Contest, 1987. Recent creative non-fiction essays have appeared in Image Journal and the anthology, Far From Home. His short stories have been published in a number of anthologies and literary magazines, including The Ex-Files, Crosscurrents, Cimarron Review and Gulfstream. He is currently finishing a novel. Driscoll completed his M.F.A. at the University of Washington, and has been teaching literary fiction for UW Extension since 1993. He was awarded the 2006 UW Extension Teaching Excellence Award for Arts and Humanities. Driscoll also teaches creative writing at Western Washington University and for Seattle's Writers in the Schools (WITS) program.

 

Douglas Gantenbein teaches the creative nonfiction sequence for The Writer’s Workshop. He's the Seattle correspondent for The Economist, the influential London-based newsweekly, and has contributed articles to Outside, Scientific American, Popular Science, Architectural Digest, Smithsonian Air & Space, Travel + Leisure, The Atlantic, Discover, and many other publications. In addition, Douglas writes a regular column for Outside's web site, where as the "Gear Guy" he answers readers' questions about outdoor equipment and safety. He also is a book author whose book A Season of Fire: Four Months on the Firelines in America's West, detailed the growing problem of wildfires in American's forests. Described by Publishers Weekly as "thoroughly engaging and thought-provoking." A Season of Fire not only took readers right up the fireline, it also offered an unsparing look at whether we're wasting time, money and lives fighting fires that often have wide ecological benefits. An experienced writing instructor, he has taught nonfiction for the University of Washington Extension Writing program, and several of his former students now are active freelancers. He's adept at giving students real nuts-and-bolts tools for solving common problems such as generating story ideas, conducting interviews that get results, and organizing short- and long-form articles.

 

Jana Harris teaches the novel writing sequence for The Writer's Workshop. She is a novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. Her award-winning books include the novel Alaska, a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection. Born in San Francisco and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she worked for six years as director of Writers in Performance at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York.  She now lives with her husband in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, where they raise horses.  Ms. Harris teaches the novel writing sequence for The Writer's Workshop and at the University of Washington where she is editor and founder of Switched-on Gutenberg (http://www.switched-ongutenberg.org), one of the first electronic poetry journals of the English-speaking world. Her second novel, The Pearl of Ruby City was released from St. Martin’s Press. In 2001 she won a Pushcart Prize for poetry.  Jana is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, PEN, Poetry Society of America, and AWP. Recently she has been writer-in-residence at the University of Wyoming, St. Catherine’s College (St. Paul, MN), and Washington State University. 

 

Jessica Murphy, M.F.A., teaches the online Introduction to Nonfiction class, Nonfiction Book classes and Individual Tutorials for The Writer's Workshop. A former staff editor at The Atlantic Monthly, she has taught creative writing since 1996. Her teaching positions have taken her far and wide—from Micronesia, where she taught literature and calculus; to Cambridge, MA, where she was a teaching fellow under Dr. Robert Coles at Harvard University; to Boston, where she taught writing and rhetoric at Emerson College and Boston University; and to Oxford and Tuscany, where she taught creative writing to high school students. She most recently taught creative writing and advanced fiction at Seattle Pacific University. Jessica holds an MFA in fiction from Emerson College. Her fiction has been published in Memorious and her nonfiction has appeared in Poets & Writers Magazine and The New York Sun. As a regular writer for The Atlantic Online, she has interviewed authors Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Hempel, and Zadie Smith. In 2006 she was the recipient of the Milton Center Postgraduate Writing Fellowship. She is currently writing her first novel.

                                                                                               

 

Nicholas O’Connell, M.F.A., Ph.D., is the founder of The Writer's Workshop and teaches travel writing classes, Seattle writing classes and other courses. He's the author of On Sacred Ground: The Spirit of Place in Pacific Northwest Literature (U.W. Press, 2003), At the Field’s End: Interviews with 22 Pacific Northwest Writers (U.W. Press, 1998), Contemporary Ecofiction (Charles Scribner’s, 1996) and Beyond Risk: Conversations with Climbers (Mountaineers, 1993). He contributes to Newsweek, Gourmet, Saveur, Outside, National Geographic Adventure, Condé Nast Traveler, Food & Wine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sierra, The Wine Spectator, Commonweal, Image and many other places. He designed and taught in the University of Washington Extension’s Narrative Nonfiction Program and has been a visiting instructor at the North Cascades Institute, Seattle University and Seattle Pacific University’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program.