• Founding Director & Instructor

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Lisa Friedman

“I grew up in and around Manhattan—a wonderful island for gathering material and starting to write. In New York, there are so many places to study writing; I received my education from Columbia University, Poets and Writers, New Dramatists, as well as countless writing workshops.

“By working in book publishing—as a manuscript reader, editor, and ‘book doctor’—I learned more about the trade. The problem was, my sympathies were with the invisible senders of manuscripts. Writing rejection letters to would-be authors felt almost impossible. Read more...

• Guest Speaker

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Cora Frazier

Cora Frazier is a writer of fiction and humor. Her flash fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. She also writes fiction podcasts, the first season of which is forthcoming. Her humor has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, n+1 and Saturday Night Live, and she is the co-author of The Harvard Lampoon’s best selling parody, Nightlight. She has taught first-year writing at the City University of New York and creative writing at Rutgers University.

For the Amsterdam Writing Workshops, Cora will appear as guest speaker at How to Write Funny.

• Guest Instructor

Harry Segal

Harry Segal earned a PhD in English Literature from Yale University and a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Michigan. He is a Senior Lecturer at Cornell University and a Stephen H. Weiss Provost’s Teaching Fellow. Harry is also a Senior Lecturer at Weill Cornell Medical College’s Department of Psychiatry.

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Andrew Porter

Andrew Porter is the author of the story collections The Disappeared (forthcoming from Knopf in April 2023)  and The Theory of Light and Matter (Vintage/Penguin Random House) and the novel In Between Days (Knopf). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received a Pushcart Prize, a James Michener/Copernicus Fellowship, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His work has appeared in One Story, The Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, Narrative, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, and on Public Radio’s Selected Shorts. Currently, he teaches fiction writing and directs the creative writing program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

• Guest Instructor

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Ann van Buren

“My master’s degree in English and Creative Writing is from New York University, where Sharon Olds was my mentor; Allen Ginsberg and Galway Kinnell were other valued teachers. My poetry and reviews have been published in the Columbia Review and Prospice, and Library Journal, among others. Writing is one of the subjects I’ve taught at many colleges and universities, including New York University, the Rhode Island School of Design, and China’s Ningbo University. In New York, I regularly teach writing workshops. And, when the stars line up, I teach for the Amsterdam Writing Workshops." Read more...

• Guest Instructor

Marissa Higgins

Marissa Higgins is a journalist living in the United States. She is a D.C. Arts & Humanities fellow, a Tin House scholar in nonfiction, and a Provincetown Fine Arts Center Workshop summer fellow in memoir. Her nonfiction has appeared in the Best American Food Writing 2018 (originally in Captault), Glamour, Salon, NPR, the Washington Post, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her fiction appears, or is forthcoming, in The Florida Review, LEON, Lost Balloon, and elsewhere. She is working on a novel.

• Guest Speaker

Rishi Dastidar

Rishi Dastidar’s second collection of poetry, Saffron Jack, is published in the UK by Nine Arches Press. He is also editor of The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century (Nine Arches Press), and co-editor of Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (Corsair).

• Alumnus & Guest Speaker

Pete Jordan

Pete Jordan’s work has appeared on the American Public Radio program This American Life as well as in the New York Times. Pete wrote the memoirs Dishwasher: One Man’s Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States (Harper Perennial, 2007) and In the City of Bikes: The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist (Harper Perennial, 2013), which was translated into Dutch as De Fietsrepubliek (Podium, 2013).

• Alumna & Bestselling Author

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Jean Kwok

Jean Kwok holds a BA in English and American Literature from Harvard University and an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. She taught at the University of Leiden and is an alumna of the Amsterdam Writing Workshops. Jean’s debut novel, Girl in Translation, was published in 2010 by Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Random House. The novel became a New York Times and international bestseller; Read more...

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  & Photography

Elena Pasca

Elena graduated with a degree in Language and Literature from Transilvania University (Romania). She has studied photography, design, digital marketing—and now works for organizations and retail brands in the Netherlands.

• Assistant Director

Ron de Klerk

Ron has been in the book business since the late 1980s. He graduated with a degree in Bookselling and Publishing from the Frederik Muller Academy (now part of the Hogeschool van Amsterdam—a college for media studies). For 16 years he worked as a bookseller and book buyer for Waterstone’s Booksellers. Read more...