Creative Writing

Learn more about Writopia's Creative Writing program.

Reuben Sack

Instructor

Reuben is ridiculously excited to join the Writopia Lab team! Reuben is a children’s author and the ghostwriter of ten books in the iconic Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mystery series for Simon & Schuster. While Reuben loves writing for kids and young adults, his storytelling experience spans a variety of genres and media. He is an award-winning independent filmmaker and screenwriter whose work has appeared in film festivals around the world. Reuben graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he majored in Media Production and minored in Journalism and Mass Communication. When he’s not writing, you can often find him helping other writers as a university guest lecturer and freelance editor—and now as a Writopia Lab instructor.
Zakiya Harris

Instructor

Zakiya Harris is thrilled to be an instructor at Writopia Lab, NYC! Zakiya joins us from Penguin Random House, where she worked as an assistant editor on both nonfiction and fiction books. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from The New School in 2016, where she focused on nonfiction writing and crafted personal essays revolving around topics such as identity and her childhood growing up in Connecticut, and she received her BA in English literature from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2014. Zakiya was first published in 2006 by American Girl Magazine after winning a contest whose prompt was to write a short story based on a simple illustration, and she’s excited to encourage a love of creativity and storytelling within other young individuals. When she isn’t working on her workplace-sci-fi novel, she’s writing book reviews for The Rumpus or falling down the deep, irresistible rabbit hole that is Spotify.
Celine Aenlle-Rocha

Instructor

Celine Aenlle-Rocha is thrilled to be a creative, essay, and college essay writing instructor at Writopia Lab NYC. She is a writer from Miami and Los Angeles, residing in Washington Heights, New York City. She has contributed to literary magazines HIKA, Luna de la cosecha, Broad! Magazine, The Suburban Review, Pen + Brush, and Salt + Pepper, among others. Celine is pursuing an MFA in Fiction at Columbia University, where she is a volunteer instructor with Columbia Artists as Teachers, the Online Editor for the Columbia Journal, and Co-President of Our Word, the School of the Arts' student organization committed to championing inclusiveness in literature. She previously attended Kenyon College and the Columbia Publishing Course. Before Writopia, she marketed academic books at Oxford University Press for several years. Her writing is inspired by her family history from Havana to New Orleans to Los Angeles, and she loves helping emerging writers discover their own voices at Writopia.
Ally Glass-Katz

Instructor

Ally Glass-Katz is thrilled to join the Writopia Lab team! She graduated from Bowdoin College and received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, where she served as Fiction Editor of Bat City Review and taught fiction through Badgerdog Creative Writing Camp. Her stories have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. She is so excited to share her love of storytelling with this community of young writers!
Jordana Frankel

Instructor

After eight years at Writopia Lab's Upper West Side location, Jordana Frankel drove across the country in her green, tiny house on wheels to be a part of the Bay Area family! She is the author of two young adult dystopian novels (The Ward, 2013 and The Isle, 2016) and is currently at work on a fantasy novel for adults. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Hollins University and a B.A. in Creative Writing and Literature from Goucher College, where she taught as the Kratz Writer-in-Residence in 2015. Jordana also has experience in the publishing world; while living in New York City she worked as a literary assistant, scavenging the slush pile for manuscripts to pass along to the Lead Agent. At The Book Report Network she worked on marketing strategies for NYT Bestsellers like Suzanne Collins' Mockingjay and Lauren Kate's Fallen. Jordana can be found at various coffee shops around Oakland, writing by hand and dreaming up the impossible-made-possible.