Bright Writing Instructors

Our instructors are professional writers with a broad range of writing and teaching experiences.

Lajla Cline

Writer, Teacher, Bright Writing Founder

Lajla Cline is a Houston native and attended St. John's School from kindergarten through 12th grade. She completed a B.A. in English literature at Rice University and then completed an M.A. in English at the University of Houston and an M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Arizona. She has taught writing at the college level for seven years, at the University of Houston, San Jacinto College, and, most recently, as a lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of Arizona. After moving back to Houston, she began teaching for Writers in the Schools (WITS), a nonprofit that places writers in under-resourced public schools around Houston. She has led the WITS / Rice University summer creative writing camps at Duchesne, St. Marks, and Annunciation Orthodox School.

Claire Anderson

Writer, Teacher

Claire Fuqua Anderson is an award-winning writer, teacher, and editor based in Houston, Texas. She received her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Houston and a BA in English and Linguistics at Rice University. She is currently a Lecturer and Teaching Supervisor at the University of Houston, where she teaches First-Year Writing. In 2017, she received an Individual Artist Grant from the Houston Arts Alliance. Her novel manuscript Dust Country was a 2022 finalist in both the Landmark Prize by Homebound Publications and The Big Moose Prize by Black Lawrence Press. She has taught creative writing for Inprint, Grackle & Grackle, and the Boldface Conference. Her website is www.clairefanderson.com.

Rosa Boshier

Writer, Teacher

Rosa Boshier is a writer and editor from Los Angeles. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Artforum, Hyperallergic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, Catapult, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Joyland Magazine, and Necessary Fiction, among others. She has taught writing, Latinx cultural studies, and art history at The California Institute of the Arts, Otis College of Art and Design, and Pacific Northwest College of Art. She is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Gulf Coast.

Iris Cronin

Writer, Teacher

Iris Cronin is a native Houstonian and an alumna of St. John’s School. She attended Brown University, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude, receiving B.A.s in Dramatic Writing and Comparative Literature. Her literature degree contains a sub-specialty in literary translation from between English and French, and her senior translation thesis, a play by an acclaimed Quebecoise playwright, was staged by Montreal’s renowned Talisman Theater Company in December 2021. She is currently a fiction MFA candidate at the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, where she is the Inprint/UH Creative Writing Program Fellow. She is also a Cynthia Woods Mitchell Interdisciplinary Scholar at UH’s Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts. Iris has taught English, French, and creative writing in many venues, including the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, the Brown Francophone Studies Department, and the Young Writer’s Workshop at the University of Virginia, as well as substitute teaching in the St. John’s English and World Languages departments.

Willow Curry

Writer, Teacher

Willow Naomi Curry is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and critic born and based in Houston, Texas. A graduate of Houston's High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Curry has received a number of grants, fellowships, and awards for her work, most notably the Center for Cultural Power's Cultural Disruptor Award and a Support for Artists and Creative Individuals Grant from the City of Houston. She serves on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle judging for the Criticism committee; contributes arts and literary criticism to Southwest Contemporary Magazine; and is at work on her first novel, Arcadia, to be published by YA publisher Levine Querido. Curry is also a regular artist collaborator with the Houston Climate Justice Museum and West Street Recovery/Northeast Action Collective.

Katherine Elliott

Writer, Teacher

Katherine Elliott received her B.A. in literature and art history from the University of Virginia. She attended the University of Houston’s M.F.A. program in creative writing, and also taught composition and creative writing in the English department at the University of Houston for three years. Katherine has taught for Writers in the Schools (WITS) for twelve years, working as a visiting writer in classrooms during the school year and leading the WITS / Rice University creative writing camps in the summers. She has taught summer writing programs at Duchesne, Annunciation Orthodox School, and St. Mark’s Episcopal, among other schools around the city.

Leah Fretwell

Writer, Teacher

Leah Fretwell is from Salt Lake City, Utah. She is an Inprint Mary Gibbs and Jesse H. Jones Fellow and a fiction Ph.D. candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston. Her work has appeared in Cream City Review, the Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She has taught freshman composition and creative writing at Brigham Young University and is currently a teaching assistant at the University of Houston.

Justin Jannise

Writer, Teacher

Justin Jannise is the author of How to Be Better by Being Worse (BOA Editions, Ltd.). They grew up in rural southeast Texas. As a first-generation college student, they attended Yale University, where they won the 2009 Albert Stanburrough Cook Prize for Poetry. They worked as a freelance pop culture writer in New York City before moving to Iowa to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The University of Iowa awarded them a Teaching-Writing Fellowship in 2013 and named them the Provost’s Visiting Writer in Poetry in 2014. While earning a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston, Justin served as Editor-in-Chief of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. They frequently teach workshops for Inprint, Grackle & Grackle, and Writespace. As part of Writers in the Schools, they have led classrooms at Field Elementary School, White Elementary School, Garden Oaks Montessori, the High School for Law and Justice, and M.D. Anderson Cancer Hospital. They are the recipient of both the Inprint Marion Barthelme Prize and the Inprint Verlaine Prize in Poetry.

Andrew Kozma

Writer, Teacher

Andrew Kozma received his PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. His poems have appeared in Blackbird, The Believer, Redactions, Bennington Review, and Best American Poetry. His nonfiction has appeared in The Iowa Review. His book of poems, City of Regret, won the Zone 3 First Book Award. Andrew has been the recipient of a Jentel Residency, a Houston Arts Alliance Fellowship, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship, and a D. H. Lawrence Fellowship. A former editor for Gulf Coast and a current editor for Reckoning, he currently lives in Houston where, for the last eight years, he has taught English composition and technical writing at the University of Houston.

Meggie Monahan

Writer, Teacher

Meggie Monahan is a writer, educator, and certified yoga teacher whose greatest joy comes from living at the intersection of connection and learning. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston, and her poems have been featured in publications including Best New Poets, The Cortland Review, and The American Journal of Poetry. Meggie lives with her husband in Houston and is currently at work on her first play.

Paige Quiñones

Writer, Teacher

Paige Quiñones is the author of The Best Prey, which received the 2020 Pleiades Press Lena Miles-Wever Todd Prize for Poetry. She has received awards and fellowships from the Center for Mexican-American Studies, the Academy of American Poets, and Inprint Houston. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Juked, Lambda Literary, Orion Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from the Ohio State University and a PhD from the University of Houston.

Dillon Scalzo

Writer, Teacher

Dillon Scalzo is a poet and translator with a passion for working back and forth between the mediums of Spanish and English. He spent thirteen years based in the U.S./Mexico border in San Diego, CA/Tijuana y Tecate, Baja California. He has also worked in other parts of México and Spain. In 2016, he completed a U.S. Fulbright grant to teach creative writing in Uruguay and pursue his work in translation. His work centers on the movement of poetry and art across physical and imaginary borderlands. Dillon currently teaches creative writing to K-12 students for Writers in the Schools (WITS) Houston. In the summers, he leads the WITS / Rice University creative writing camps. Dillon also teaches ESL for adults at AEC Texas, and is a translator and museum educator at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.