Workshop Advisors

They are the product of combined decades of writing and teaching experience and represent the finest, most comprehensive online writing instruction available. The Curriculum Board is responsible for the overall program design, the development of individual workshops and the ultimate success of our mission to our students, which is to make them better writers.

Will Allison

Will Allison is the former executive editor of the award-winning literary magazine Story and former editor of Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market. He has taught fiction workshops in both the undergraduate and continuing education programs at The Ohio State University, where he earned his MA in English and his MFA in creative writing. His short stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, The Florida Review and Kansas Quarterly/Arkansas Review.

James Scott Bell

James Scott Bell attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he studied writing with Raymond Carver. He graduated with honors from the University of Southern California Law Center, and has written over 300 articles and numerous books for the legal profession. A former trial lawyer, he is the author of the legal thrillers Circumstantial Evidence, Final Witness and Blind Justice, from Broadman & Holman. Jim teaches screenwriting and novel writing in Los Angeles, and the art and craft of fiction at various writers conferences.

Bill Brohaugh

Bill Brohaugh is the former New Media Director of F+W Publications, parent company of Writer’s Digest magazine and the Writers Online Workshops. He was the co-designer of the original WritersDigest.com, and previously served as editor of Writer’s Market, editor of Writer’s Digest, and editorial director of Writer’s Digest Books. He is the author of Professional Etiquette for Writers, Write Tight and English Through the Ages, and has written more than 750 published or produced articles, plays, books, short stories and radio scripts.

Michael J. Bugeja

Michael Bugeja is a nationally known, award-winning writer and poet whose work has appeared in hundreds of literary and trade magazines, including Harper’s, Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Antioch Review, The Formalist, and many others. His writing has been anthologized in Contemporary Literary Criticism and Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry, among others. He has authored many books on writing, including Guide to Writing Magazine Nonfiction (Allyn & Bacon); Poet’s Guide (Story Line Press), and The Art and Craft of Poetry (Writer’s Digest Books), which has been used in more than three dozen MFA programs and is the textbook for this workshop. In addition he has published two books of social criticism and seven book-length collections of poems, most recently Millennium’s End (Archer Books). He has also published a collection of award-winning short stories, Little Dragons, and a novel, Family Values.

Katherine Scott Sturdevant

Katherine Scott Sturdevant is a history professor (B.A., M.A., and Ph. D. candidate) who has taught college-level American history for more than 16 years. Her graduate training was as much in literature as history. As a social historian, she specializes in the history of women, family and childhood; immigrant and ethnic history; local and regional history; and family history. Since 1990 she has taught college classes in how to write family history in historical context. She has also been a professional editor since 1981, editing books, articles and book reviews for historical presses and publications.
Kathy wrote Bringing Your Family History to Life Through Social History (Betterway Books, 2000), the only comprehensive book on researching and writing your family history in historical context. Her second book was Organizing, Editing and Preserving Your Family Heirloom Documents (Betterway Books, 2002), which teaches editing methods for publishing a family’s diaries, memoirs, letters and albums. Among Kathy’s current and future projects are editing her grandmother’s Kansas homesteading memoirs, her father’s World War II memoirs, family letters from both world wars, and writing biographies of her immigrant-miner great-grandfather and frontier-attorney grandfather.

Megan Fitzpatrick

Megan Fitzpatrick earned her master’s degree in English from the University of Cincinnati where she has served as an adjunct instructor in Freshman English since 1996. She developed a professional writing course in advertising copy writing, which she has taught for UC since 2000. In addition to her teaching duties, Megan is a promotion manager for F+W Publications.

David A. Fryxell

David Fryxell is the former magazine editorial director for F+W Publications, including Writer’s Digest magazine. He writes the Freelancer’s Workshop column for Writer’s Digest and is the author of two books of writing instruction, How to Write Fast (While Writing Well) and Elements of Article Writing: Structure and Flow, both published by Writer’s Digest Books. He has been an editor for TWA Ambassador, Horizon, Milwaukee and Pitt magazines and was the founder of Microsoft’s Twin Cities Sidewalk online city guide. As a writer, he spent three years as a roving newspaper columnist and has written hundreds of freelance articles, including work for Travel & Leisure, Playboy, Readers Digest, American Way, Kiwanis and AAA World. His work as an editor and writer has won more than 80 awards and earned him recognition in Who’s Who in America.

Susan Carol Hauser

Susan Carol Hauser is a freelance writer, poet and essayist. Her books include Sugartime, a narrative on making maple syrup, and Nature’s Revenge, a natural history of poison ivy, oak and sumac. Her book, You Can Write a Memoir, was published by Writer’s Digest Books in 2000. She is a commentator on National Public Radio, and teaches writing in the English Department at Bemidji State University in northern Minnesota. Her awards include a Minnesota Book Award and a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant.

Debbie Warne-Jacobsen

Debbie Warne-Jacobsen is an internet publisher and web site designer. Authoring, designing and administering sites online since 1995, she and her husband Andrew are the owners and operators of Anybook.com, one of the first book store sites on the web. While managing Lioness Books in Sacramento, CA she was the editor and designer of Lioness Pride, a quarterly newsletter and book review circulating throughout the northern California area. An avid animal rights supporter, vegetarian and environmentalist, she is currently working on a memoir that chronicles her family’s experience of moving from California to rural northern Minnesota with their 11 animals to build and live in a Yurt.

Nancy Lamb

Nancy Lamb is the author of over forty books for children and adults, including The World’s Greatest Toe Show, The Vampires Went Thataway!, The Mosquito, Bull and Coffin Capter, Vampires and Other Creatures of the Night, and One April Morning. She also wrote the book that serves as the basis for the Fundamentals of Writing for Children Workshop, The Writer’s Guide to Crafting Stories for Children. She can be reached at her Web site, www.NancyLamb.com.

Donna Levin

Donna Levin has published two mainstream novels, Extraordinary Means (Arbor House, 1987) and California Street (Simon & Schuster, 1990) and two books on writing, Get That Novel Started! and Get That Novel Written! , both published by Writer’s Digest Books. She has also written a number of feature articles and was a regular book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle for several years. Donna has been a writing teacher since 1987 at the University of California at Berkley extension and many other places in the Bay Area.

Raymond Obstfeld

Raymond Obstfeld teaches English literature, film and creative writing at Orange Coast College and is the author of more than thirty novels. Writing under his own name, Obstfeld received an Edgar nomination from the Mystery Writer of America for his caper novel, Dead Heat. Three other Harry Gould novels followed. His most recent novel is Earth Angel (Warner Books). He has written several mainstream novels under the pseudonym Laramie Dunaway. The first, Hungry Women (Warner) was an international bestseller. Borrowed Lives, also published by Warner, was optioned as a film for Winona Ryder. His young-adult adventure novel The Joker and the Thief (Delacorte) won second prize in the annual Delacorte Young Adult Fiction contest. Obstfeld has also written espionage novels, a western series, futuristic adventure stories, an occult thriller and a book of poetry. His short stories are widely published and anthologized, his instructional articles on writing have appeared in Writer’s Digest magazine and his interviews with Elmore Leonard and Ross Thomas were featured in The Armchair Detective where Obstfeld was a book reviewer for several years.

Don Prues

Don Prues is a former editor of Guide to Literary Agents and assistant editor of Writer’s Market. He is co-author of Formatting and Submitting Your Manuscripts (Writer’s Digest Books). Don taught “Studies in Fiction” at Xavier University in the mid-1990s and is now managing editor of Critics Inc., an online publisher with three movie-related websites.

Stephenie Steele

Stephenie Steele is the former Director of Writer’s Digest School and Writers Online Workshops. She has a language degree from Wittenberg University and has been working with beginning writers for more than fifteen years. As WDS Director, she oversaw the editorial development of all writing course materials, developing the print versions of EEW I: Grammar & Mechanics and Getting Started in Writing. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in Writer’s Digest and Cincinnati Magazine.