Department: Creative Writing
Lee Edwards
Avery Ferin
Avery Ferin is a creative writing teacher and fiction writer from Grand Rapids, Michigan. She attended Depaul University where she graduated with her BA in English and MFA in Writing & Publishing and served as the Editor in Chief of its art & literature magazine Crook & Folly from 2018-2021. Her work has been featured in numerous publications including Kitchen Table Quarterly, Motley Magazine, and The Grand Rapids Press. She is the recipient of the 2022 Story Studio Master’s Award and the 2024 AWP Scholarship. Her short story “Summer on Lloyd’s Bayou” was nominated for a 2023 Pushcart prize.
Emoonah McClerklin
Jenna Reasner
Jenna Reasner holds a BS in Secondary Education and English from Vanderbilt University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, where she served as Fiction Editor of Indiana Review. Her fiction has appeared in Lunch Ticket, So to Speak, and Hunger Mountain, where it won the Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adult Literature. She’s currently at work on a young adult novel.
David Mathews
David Mathews earned his MA in Writing & Publishing at DePaul University. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net, a Pushcart, and he was a finalist in the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards. His recent publications include Midwestern Gothic, Eclectica Magazine, Belt Magazine’s Rust Belt Chicago: An Anthology, and Open Heart Chicago: An Anthology of Chicago Writing.
Jeremy T. Wilson
Jeremy T. Wilson is the author of the short story collection Adult Teeth. He is a former winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award for short fiction and was recently named one of “30 Writers to Watch” by Chicago’s Guild Literary Complex. His stories have appeared in literary magazines such as The Carolina Quarterly, The Florida Review, Hobart, The Masters Review, Sonora Review, Third Coast and other publications. He holds an MFA from Northwestern University.
Kenyatta Rogers
Kenyatta Rogers is a Cave Canem Fellow and has been awarded scholarships from the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference. His work has been previously published in Poetry Magazine, Jubilat, Vinyl, Bat City Review, The Volta, PANK, MAKE Magazine among others. Kenyatta is a Lead Teacher for the Poetry Foundations Teacher Institute and Chautauqua Institution’s Young Writer Institute. He is as a co-host of the Sunday Reading Series with Simone Muench and is the Creative Writing Department Head at The Chicago High School for the Arts.
Cecilia Pinto
Cecilia Pinto has been a teaching artist in the city of Chicago for over twenty years and has worked in a variety of settings and with all age groups. Her novella, Imagine the Dog, winner of the Clay Reynolds Prize, was published in 2021. Her writing has appeared in publications including Esquire, Fence, Diagram, TriQuarterly and elsewhere. In addition to her creative writing classes at ChiArts it has been her pleasure to serve as coach for the competitive spoken word team and as dramaturg for the school’s theater productions. She received her undergraduate degree from Knox College and an M.F.A. in writing from The School of the Art Institute.