Consultant Bios

Keri Bertino (Director of the Writing Center) received her BA from Vassar College and holds an MFA in Writing from Columbia University. She has taught college writing in classrooms and writing centers at Columbia University and The Cooper Union, and high school English through Teach For America in Baltimore. She is the co-coordinator of the Writing Across the Curriculum program at Baruch and co-teaches the Honors Thesis Workshops. She is at work on a novel about a rest stop waitress, a mission in an 18-wheeler, and funerals on YouTube.

Roya Biggie holds a BA from St. Mary's College of Maryland and an MA in English from Georgetown University. She is currently a PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center and an instructor at Hunter College. Her research interests include early modern drama and medicine.

Rachel Carter graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in nonfiction creative writing. She received her BA in English and Women's Studies from the University of Vermont, where she was a Green & Gold Scholar and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She has previously taught University Writing at Columbia University and creative writing through their Summer High School Program. Her nonfiction has appeared in Verbicide Magazine and The Faster Times. HarperCollins published her first young adult novel, So Close to You, in July, 2012.

Keridiana Chez holds a doctorate in English from CUNY's Graduate Center and a JD from NYU School of Law. Her dissertation, The Affective Uses of Dogs: Pet-Keeping in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America, won a Most Distinguished Dissertation of the Year Award from her program. She has taught English at Queens College and the NYC College of Technology, Women's Studies at Brooklyn College, and writing at the Cooper Union Center for Writing. Areas of expertise include critical and close reading, brainstorming and outlining, crafting flow between ideas, and organizing essays.

Karen Fielder recently earned a Master of Arts in English from the University of Wyoming with a minor in Gender and Women’s Studies. As a PhD student in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, her interest areas include the 19th, 20th, and 21st century American novel and memoir, postcolonial, race, and disability theory. Her work explores the relationship between the constructs of gender and sex, nationhood, and citizenship in cultural production. She brings seven years of experience in college teaching as well as a background working with English language learners and students with disabilities. In addition to offering support and encouragement, she believes that the most important quality of an effective writing teacher is the ability to meet students where they are in the writing process.

Garth Risk Hallberg holds a B.A. in English literature from Washington
University in St. Louis and an MFA in fiction writing from NYU. His
areas of interest include literature, history, philosophy, politics,
and rhetoric. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine,
Prairie Schooner, New York Magazine, Slate, Glimmer Train, and the
Best New American Voices anthology. He teaches at Fordham University.

Dawn Jordan received her MA in TESOL from Hunter College and her MA in Media Studies from The New School. Besides her experience as a Consultant at Baruch's Writing Center since 2005, Dawn brings an extensive background of teaching and tutoring multilingual students, in particular, from her work in academic programs at LaGuardia and Hunter College. Currently, she teaches English as a Second Language (ESL) reading and writing courses at LaGuardia and business writing courses at the United Nations. 

Rachel Kravetz received a BA in History from Columbia and an MFA in Painting from Yale, and is now a PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has taught composition at Brooklyn College, where she also worked as a writing tutor. She welcomes appointments with students in every discipline.

Jason Leahey holds a BA in English and American Studies from Goucher College and an MFA from NYU. He has taught English at the Wat Bo Buddhist monastery in Siem Reap, Cambodia, where he was also a reporter for The Phnom Penh Post, and is currently a teaching artist working in NYC public schools with Teachers & Writers Collaborative, as well as a writing instructor at the College of New Rochelle. He writes fiction as well as nonfiction about music and food, and is co-founder of the food blog PitchKnives & Butterforks. His work has appeared in The Antioch Review, Gastronomica, Paste, popMatters, Fah Thai, and the National Geographic site Brave New Traveler.

Matt Lombardi holds a BFA in English from Emerson College and an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. He currently teaches English at Baruch College and has taught as a visiting lecturer from Baruch at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu, China. His nonfiction and prose have appeared in Details, The Bellevue Literary Review, Nerve, Forklift Ohio, The Millions, and Court Green.

Jono Mischkot received his MA in English from San Francisco State University and his MFA from the New York University Writing Program.  He is currently a fulltime Lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at NYU, but has taught a variety of subjects: Literature, Creative Writing, Grammar, and Basic Composition.  His areas of expertise are literary interpretation, essay organization, brainstorming ideas, and creative writing.

Carrie Myers has a PhD in English and American Literature from New York University. She has taught Literature and Composition courses at NYU, Hunter College, and Barnard College, and has worked at the NYU Writing Center, as well as directed the writing center at City Seminary of New York. Her interests are 19th and 20th Century American and British Literature, children's and young adult literature, feminist and psychoanalytic theory, the intersection of faith and culture, and creative writing. She is currently teaching Lucy Calkins' Writers Workshop to a group of 4th - 6th grade girls.

Kalpana Narayanan holds a BA from Georgetown University and an MFA from Columbia University, where she taught writing. She is a 2010 Fellow in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and currently teaches at Parsons The New School for Design. Her areas of interest include the intersection between academic and creative writing, film theory, and fiction.

Jaime Osnato holds a BA in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania and an MSW from NYU School of Social Work. Before tutoring and teaching writing, she worked as a therapist, counseling adolescents and young adults. At present, she's pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing and Literature at Stony Brook University, and is in the process of completing her thesis, a young adult novel. She teaches writing at the Professional Business College and the College of New Rochelle's School of New Resources.

Adam Pellegrini holds a BA from Binghamton University and an MFA from the University of Maryland, where he served as Assistant Director of the Writing Center and taught academic and creative writing. He currently teaches in Lehman's College Now program and Columbia's Writing Center and is Poetry Editor for Sakura Review. Areas of expertise include literary interpretation, argument development and structure, concision/precision, and incorporating research.

Rachel Riederer is the editor of the Daily section of Guernica Magazine. She holds a BA from Harvard and an MFA from Columbia, where she teaches in the undergraduate writing program. Her essays and journalism have appeared in the 2011 Best American Essays collection, The Nation, Tin House, Mother Jones, and others. She is especially interested in helping students achieve clarity in their writing.

Heather Samples (Assistant Director of the Writing Center) received her BA from Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from Columbia University. She has taught writing and writing pedagogy at Columbia and the Cooper Union, in both traditional classrooms and writing centers. At work on a collection of essays about motherhood, she is currently most interested in gender and health policy, the history of fashion and design, and Appalachian folkways.

Kathleen Savino holds a BA in English from Montclair State University and an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University. She also works for Columbia's Writing Center and as a writing instructor for LEDA (Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America), a non-profit program that helps underprivileged high school students apply for college. Her specialties include: brainstorming, literary analysis, application writing, creative writing, gender studies, and ESL. She has published work in the Columbia Poetry Review and Venus Magazine.

Joshua Weber holds a BA in English Literature from Southern Methodist University, and received an MFA from New York University. He has taught creative writing and is currently a Lecturer in Expository Writing at NYU. His areas of expertise are in literary interpretation, essay structure, brainstorming ideas, and critical reading. Other interests are history, film, and fiction.

Carin Jean White is a theatre- and visual artist. She completed her MFA in Directing at Columbia University. Much of Carin's work investigates memory: the relationship of the individual to their memory as well as a community's to a collective memory. While at Columbia, Carin taught undergraduate writing and worked as a writing consultant. She currently teaches writing at Yeshiva University.

Brook Wilensky-Lanford received her MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University, and her BA with High Honors in Theater and Religious Studies from Wesleyan University, and has studied Arabic language at NYU. The author of Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden (Grove Press, 2011), her essays and reviews have appeared in the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and Lapham's Quarterly. For the past ten years, she has worked as an editor for New York City book and magazine publishers. She enjoys incorporating facts into well-structured narratives, especially in history, drama, and cultural criticism. An editor of the online literary magazine Killing the Buddha, she lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, with her fiance and two cats.

Christopher John Williams received his BA from Yale University and is a fifth-year MFA candidate in fiction at Columbia University School of the Arts. His short fiction is featured in Of a Monstrous Child: An Anthology of Creative Writing Relationships. He has taught creative writing, essay writing, mathematics, and science at the middle, high school, and university levels for more than seven years. Currently, he teaches at Columbia University, Yeshiva University, and LEDA (Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America). His specialties include: critical reading, brainstorming, thesis formulation and revision, argumentation, essay structuring, paragraph and essay coherence, and working constructively with sources.

Meaghan Winter holds a BA from Kenyon College and an MFA from Columbia
University. She has taught in Columbia’s Undergraduate Writing Program
and Writing Center. Her work has appeared in several publications, and
she especially enjoys learning more about psychology, history and
places she’s never been.

Chong Wojtkowski holds a PhD in French from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she also earned a Film Studies Certificate. She has taught courses in contemporary French cinema, cultural studies of the Francophone world, and French language at Pennsylvania State University-Erie, Hunter College, and Borough of Manhattan Community College. Her areas of expertise include developing thesis statements, close reading, response/reaction writing, and peer review. Chong especially enjoys working with multilingual and international students, and has tutored students in both French and in English in the United States and in France.