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Writing Consultants
Alex Alston is an educator, pursuer of the black outdoors, amateur Begonia connoisseur, and Ph.D. Candidate in English & Comp. Lit. at Columbia where he is completing a dissertation on non-human animals and the discourse of species as they feature in and shape 19th and 20th century Afro-American literature.
After completing her BA in Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University and MFA in Creative Writing at Trinity College, Dublin in Ireland, Shannon Azzato Stephens has taught in writing centers, classrooms, and online at Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, Hunter College, Fordham University, The Fashion Institute of Technology, and Borough of Manhattan Community College. While serving in AmeriCorps, she also taught basic skills writing and literacy in Mississippi public schools. Her essays, fiction, and poetry have been featured in publications including Guernica, BuzzFeed, and The Mighty, and she has recently expanded her purview to include comedy writing while training with the Upright Citizens Brigade. Her consulting specialties include essay structure and organization, brainstorming, and argumentation.
Alyssa Baylor is an MA student in International Education Development at Teachers College, Columbia University. She holds a BA in International Studies from Trinity College. Prior to studying at TC, she developed and taught a writing composition course at a new university in Africa (Rwanda and Mauritius). She has experience working with students from diverse backgrounds and especially enjoys helping students develop their own unique voice in their writing. As a native New Yorker, she loves discovering new places to enjoy a good cup of coffee or to listen to live music. Her research interests include African education, critical pedagogy, culturally relevant curriculum development, and teacher education.
Chong J. Bretillon holds a PhD in French from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she also earned a Film Studies Certificate. She has taught courses in contemporary French cinema, cultural studies of the Francophone world, and French language at Pennsylvania State University-Erie, Hunter College, and Borough of Manhattan Community College. Her areas of consulting expertise include developing thesis statements, close reading, response/reaction writing, and peer review. Chong especially enjoys working with multilingual and international students, and has tutored students in both French and English in the United States and in France.
Victoria Cho is a writer and educator from Virginia. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Offing, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Collagist, Perigee, Quarter After Eight, Word Riot, and Mosaic. She is a Kundiman Fellow, a VONA/Voices alumna, and was Co-Fiction Editor of Apogee Journal. Victoria holds an MFA from University of New Orleans and a Bachelor’s from Boston University. She has received support from Vermont Studio Center and led creative writing workshops for New York Writers Coalition. Victoria’s past work alongside social workers, counselors, and teachers informs her relationship building strategies with students. Her writing consultancy experience includes helping students from middle school to graduate school with all aspects of the writing process.
Sasha Graybosch holds a BA in English from the University of Kansas and an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Her short stories and non-fiction have appeared in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and The Commuter, Hobart, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, Failbetter, Canteen, and elsewhere. In 2008, she helped open the first writing center at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she worked for ten years as a professional writing consultant and taught developmental writing courses. She’s also a writing consultant at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. She has experience supporting students with diverse language backgrounds and learning needs, and she enjoys coaching writers to develop a reflective and confident writing process.
Anu Jindal is a fiction writer and educator. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a BA in English and Film Theory from Dalhousie University. In addition to his work at Baruch, he currently teaches Creative Writing at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Gotham Writer’s Workshop, and has formerly served as a contributing editor at Electric Literature. His writing appears in Electric Literature, Joyland, The New Quarterly, Matrix, and elsewhere.
Leela Khanna is a PhD candidate at New York University in socio-cultural anthropology. She holds an MA degree in South Asian studies from Columbia University and a BA degree in political studies from Bard College. She has previously tutored at writing centers in New York City and in Upstate New York. Her research interests include gender studies, critical theory and politics. She enjoys working with students on argumentation, structuring essays, brainstorming and critical reading.
Sukie Kim is a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center’s English program, where she researches alternative, queer, and more just world-making practices in speculative fiction. Both her research and teaching is informed by Black feminist studies, women of color feminism, and queer-of-color critique. She is a bilingual Korean American who grew up in South Korea and holds a BA in English from Yonsei University (South Korea), and an MA in English Literature from Tufts University. She is open to working with writers at any stage, be it brainstorming, argumentation, organization, research, or more. In her free time she writes poetry and creative nonfiction, and practices yoga.
Dean Kritikos is a writer and educator. He received his MA in English from St. John’s and has taught composition there. He’s also worked in writing support roles there and at Queensborough Community College, Columbia School of Social Work, and the College of New Rochelle. His critical writing appears in The Quint, Talisman, War Literature and the Arts, Lehigh Valley Vanguard, and the collection Oceanic New York; his creative work is in ATOMIC, NYSAI, Walk Write Up, and anthologies from Great Weather for MEDIA and Crack the Spine.
Joss is a fiction writer and educator. He received his MFA in fiction from Columbia University and his B.A. in English Literature from Wesleyan University. He has taught writing across the city at programs and institutions including Columbia University, Catapult, 826 NYC, Behind the Book, and the School of the New York Times. His first novel, Future Feeling, was published by Soft Skull Press. He is particularly interested in working with students on literary analysis, building confidence in writing, personal narratives, research papers, and the brainstorming process.
Daniel Lefferts holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia University and a BA in English and American Literature from New York University. He has taught writing at Columbia University, Rutgers University, and the Sotheby’s Institute of Art. His writing has appeared in BOMB, Guernica, the Millions, and Publishers Weekly, where he is a contributing editor.
Zefyr Lisowski is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, and educator from North Carolina. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Hunter College and has been the recipient of fellowships from Tin House Writers Workshop, the Center for the Humanities’ Adjunct Incubator Grant, and more. Zefyr’s the author of the short poetry collection Blood Box (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and is a poetry co-editor at Apogee Journal. She’s especially excited about trans and queer competency in higher education; de-colonial and anti-oppressive practices; writing across disciplines; and issues of accessibility in writing center spaces, among other topics.
Holly Melgard is a poet, book designer, editor and holds a PhD in English from SUNY Buffalo. She has taught Introduction to Writing Composition, Introduction to Research Writing, Literature, and Creative Writing at the college level for the last 12 years. Her research interests include contemporary poetry, poetics, philosophy, computation and digital textuality. When consulting with students, she especially enjoys working on problems in research writing, integrating sources, brainstorming ideas, thesis development, reframing with topic and transition sentences, as well as spicing up introductions and conclusions.
Jono Mischkot received his MA in English from San Francisco State University and his MFA in Fiction from New York University. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at New York University and the Pedagogical Coordinator for Curriculum and Staff Development at NYU Poly. He has received several awards for teaching, including the Outstanding Teacher Award from NYU in 2008. His areas of expertise include literary interpretation, essay organization, developing an argument, and writing in the sciences.
Poupeh Missaghi is a writer, a translator both into and out of Persian, an editor, and an educator. She holds a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Denver, an MA in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University, and an MA in translation studies. Her debut novel trans(re)lating house one was published by Coffee House Press in February 2020. Her nonfiction, fiction, and translations have appeared in numerous journals, and she has several books of translation published in Iran. I’ll Be Strong for You, her translation of Iranian author Nasim Marashi’s novel, is forthcoming in spring 2021. As an editor, she worked for many years with Asymptote and is co-editor of Matters of Feminist Practice from Belladonna* Collaborative. She is currently a visiting assistant professor at the Department of Writing at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and a faculty mentor at the low-residency MFA of Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland. She has been working as a writing consultant since 2012 and particularly enjoys working with non-native English speakers and in areas of multilingualism, translanguaging, brainstorming, close reading, critical thinking, research strategies, essay structure, and creative writing.
Ricardo Rivera is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned a BA and MA in Linguistics at the University of Chicago. His dissertation, titled In the Aftermath of Empire: Memory, Time, and History in Adjara, Georgia, analyzes the forms that historical memory takes in everyday cultural practices in Adjara, an autonomous region of the Republic of Georgia. His research, funded by the National Science Foundation, focuses in particular on the legacy of this region’s history as a frontier province of the Ottoman Empire. His broader research and teaching interests focus on time and temporality, notions of historical rupture and continuity, and the construction of memory through language and narrative.
Nathaniel Rosenthalis is a poet, critic, and educator. His poems and criticism can be found in Boston Review, Lana Turner, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, Chicago Review and elsewhere. He is the author of several chapbooks, including the forthcoming “24 Hour AIr” (PANK Books.) He holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and Washington University in St. Louis, where he was the Senior Fellow in Poetry. In addition to his work for Baruch College, he has experience teaching and consulting at NYU, Washington University in St. Louis, Columbia University, and the Borough of Manhattan Community College.
Monroe Street is a psychoanalyst in private practice and a writing consultant at the Baruch Writing Center. Beyond the office, Monroe makes music as N0ST0NES and writes on occasion about contemporary art. At Baruch, he is extra glad to work with students on projects relating to music, post-War art, literature, linguistics, and queer & intersectional studies.
Yousef Tehrani is a writer, musician, and teacher with a master’s in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and a bachelor’s in dance. He has been teaching and consulting with writers since 2009 and has presented at national and regional writing center conferences. His specialties are non-native and non-traditional students, blocked or anxious writers, creative process, and grammar. He writes in English and Persian and speaks Spanish and Turkish. His own creative process is an integration of dance, mountaineering, music, and language.
Joshua Weber holds a BA in English Literature from Southern Methodist University, and received an MFA from New York University. He has taught creative writing and is currently a Lecturer in Expository Writing at NYU. His areas of consulting expertise are in literary interpretation, essay structure, brainstorming ideas, and critical reading. Other interests are history, film, and fiction.
Carin Jean White is a theatre director and visual artist. Her work explores the intersections and porous boundaries between the roles of spectator and performer, while emphasizing how space can act both as an intermediary and active participant. Recently, she collaborated with Spanish artists Itsaso Iribarren and Germán de la Riva on a site-specific, physically-distanced theatre piece, The Art of Walking, for Artpark in Western New York. She has worked with Performance Workshop (Taiwan), California Shakespeare Theatre Company, Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, Artpark and Sundance Theatre Lab amongst others. Carin’s large scale paintings and installations have been shown throughout NY and the Bay Area. She is co-artistic director of Excellent Creature Theatre Company (Garrison, NY) and founding director of Kingston STEP, a free theatre-training program for teens. She holds an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University.
Melinda Wilson is Managing Editor of Coldfront Magazine, Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Manhattan College, and adjunct faculty at LIM College. She is currently working on editing a poetry anthology focusing on the new challenges facing feminism in 2020 and beyond. She is author of Amplexus, a chapbook from Dancing Girl Press, published in 2010. A graduate of The New School’s MFA program and the doctoral program at Florida State University, she has published poems in Diner, Burnside Review, Valley Voices, Agriculture Reader, Verse Daily, The Cincinnati Review and The Wisconsin Review among many others. She co-curates the Poor Mouth Reading Series in Riverdale and Razor Blade Readings in Inwood. In her limited spare time, Melinda enjoys reading novels, particularly those with a semi-historical lens, and spending time outdoors with her three dogs, Margie, Claude and Baldwin. Melinda lives in the Bronx.
Joey Yearous-Algozin holds a Ph.D. in English from the University at Buffalo. He has 12 years of experience teaching Composition, Creative Writing and Literature for multiple institutions. He is currently an adjunct professor in the Liberal Studies program at New York University and a member of the Language and Thinking faculty at Bard. Additionally he is a the author of multiple books of poetry, including A Feeling Called Heaven (Nightboat, 2021). He is a founding editor of the publishing collective, TROLL THREAD.
Front desk team
Misheel Bayasgalan is a BBA student majoring in Economics at the Zicklin School of Business, with a double minor in Political Science and Business Law. On-campus, she is the Co-Chair of Marketing at the International Student Organization and a Transfer Peer Mentor at the New Student and Family Programs Office. Misheel is also interested in web design and has participated in programs hosted by the Break Through Tech initiative of Cornell Tech University. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking, reading books, and visiting museums.
Hadiatou Jalloh is a Junior at Baruch College majoring in Political Science with a minor in Black and Latino Studies. On campus, she is the Vice President of the Muslim Student Association and off campus, she is a college coach helping high school seniors matriculate into their post secondary plan. She was also selected for the SEEK awardee for receiving the highest GPA in the entire SEEK sophomore class. Hadiatou enjoys reading, journaling and writing poetry. She is very organized, detail-oriented, and motivated.
Kimberly Tan is a second-year graduate student at Baruch College, pursuing a MS degree in Business Analytics. Combining creative with analytics, she earned a BBA degree in Marketing Management with a focus on advertising from Baruch College in 2019. During her time at CUNY, she has worked at the Baruch College Conversation Partners Program, the BMCC Counseling Center, and now the Writing Center, to assist international and native students with their diverse needs. She believes in giving her best work to achieve an optimal outcome, whether in helping, work, or in academics.
Ariana Warner is a senior at Baruch College, majoring in Computer Information Systems with a double minor in Entrepreneurship and Communication Studies. On campus she is the Vice President of Internal Affairs for the National Association of Black Accountants, a peer mentor for TEAM Baruch, and is a Resident Assistant. Ariana enjoys photography, film, as well as dancing. Ariana always looks for new opportunities in which she can grow as a person and expand her knowledge. She believes that constant learning is key and looks forward to her time at Baruch.
Administrative
Diana Hamilton, Director, received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, where she taught First-Year Writing and served as an Assistant Director of the Writing Walk-in Service. Her research focused on style and subjectivity in “experimental” writing. She has published three books of poetry—most recently, God Was Right Ugly Duckling Presse—and her critical and creative writing appears in Art in America, frieze, Triangle House, Amodern, and BOMB, among others.
Rachel Rys, Assistant Director, received her Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from UC Santa Barbara with an interdisciplinary emphasis in Writing Studies and a Certificate in College and University Teaching. Her doctoral research focuses on visual and multimodal communication, particularly how the comics medium can be used to share academic feminist theory and pedagogy with diverse audiences both within and beyond the university. She has worked in a range of teaching and instructional development positions across high school, community college, and 4-year university contexts.
Hannah Brenner-Leonard, Administrative Coordinator, received her MS in Education and BFA in Art and Design Education from Pratt Institute. Over the past decade she has worked in various capacities throughout the arts education field, as both a teaching artist and administrator, developing an interest in creating opportunities for student-centered growth. Throughout her career in the arts education field she has maintained a robust art practice, which encompasses drawings, paintings and mixed media pieces exploring concepts of home and place. In her spare time she enjoys baking bread, sewing and exploring museums.
