Staff

Who’s behind WriteByNight? Meet our staff of coaches, consultants and instructors. These professional writers, editors and teachers are available to help you with your writing, either in person or remotely via phone or Skype.

Management Team

WriteByNight owner Justine Tal Goldberg is an award-winning writer and editor of both fiction and nonfiction. Her short stories have appeared in Anomalous Press, Whiskey Island, Fringe Magazine, and other publications. Her journalistic work has appeared in Austin Monthly, the Texas Observer, and The Review Review, among others. She holds an MFA in creative writing and has provided writing instruction at Vassar College and Emerson College.

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WriteByNight co-founder David Duhr is Fiction & Books Editor for the Texas Observer and Managing Editor at Fringe Magazine. He contributes regularly to the Dallas Morning News, Publishing Perspectives, the Observer and others.

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Consultants, Coaches and Instructors

Steve Adams (Austin, Texas) has published short stories in Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, Chicago Review, Quarterly West, and Georgetown Review. His memoir/creative nonfiction has been published in Willow Springs and The Pinch. He’s won Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers and The Bronx Writer’s Center “Chapter One” Contest. His fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and anthologized, and his plays and musicals have been produced in New York City and across the country. He’s judged writing competitions and grant applications, been a guest artist at The University of Texas, and guest lectured at NYU.

Steve studied creative nonfiction as a scholar at the Norman Mailer Writer’s Colony and creative coaching with Dr. Eric Maisel. He received his BA in Theater from The University of Texas and his MFA in Creative Writing from The New School in New York City. His work has been used as a teaching text at major universities as well as in the public high schools.

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Kirstin Chen (San Francisco, California) is a former Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing, and the author of Soy Sauce for Beginners, forthcoming in November 2013. She has won scholarships to the Sewanee and Napa Valley writers conferences, and her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Zyzzyva, Hobart, Pank, and others. She holds a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from Emerson College, where she taught writing for four years. Born and raised in Singapore, she currently resides in San Francisco.

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Nick Courtright (Austin, Texas) is the author of Punchline, a National Poetry Award finalist called “nothing short of a knockout” by Boston Review editor Timothy Donnelly. His writing has appeared in The Southern Review, Massachusetts Review, Kenyon Review Online, and The Iowa Review, among many others, and a chapbook, Elegy for the Builder’s Wife, is available from Blue Hour Press. He’s Interviews Editor of the Austinist, and he teaches English, Humanities, and Philosophy at a number of local colleges and universities. An MFA-recipient at Texas State University, he now lives in East Austin with his wife and son. Find him on the internet at nickcourtright.com.

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Kenneth Hanner (Austin, Texas) works as an editor for The Washington Times website, www.times247.com, and writes a weekly political item for Washington-based Human Events. He is the former national editor of The Washington Times, where he worked for 26 years, and the former managing editor of Human Events, where he also edited weekly newsletters written by Newt Gingrich and Robert Novak.

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Nick Jarvis (Austin, Texas) is a filmmaker who received his BA in Creative Writing from Metropolitan State College of Denver, then attended four years of film school at Colorado Film School, University of Colorado, where he was also a creative writing judge for the Denver School of the Performing Arts. He has sold one screenplay, and wrote and co-directed another feature, Pearman, to hit the film circuit in 2012. His short films have won awards at the Brooklyn International and Estes Park film festivals. He currently is a coverage provider and judge for the Austin Film Festival’s screenwriting competition.

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Daniel Kalder (Leander, Texas) is the author of two books, Lost Cosmonaut (Scribner, 2006) and Strange Telescopes (Overlook, 2009). He is also a freelance journalist who contributes regularly to the Guardian and numerous other publications while also writing a weekly column for RIA- Novosti, the Russian State News Agency. Besides English, his writing has been published in German, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish. Originally from Scotland, he lived in Moscow, Russia for ten years before moving to Austin in 2006. His website is danielkalder.com.

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Brian Nicolet (Austin, Texas) holds an MFA from the University of Houston and has received scholarships to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, New South, and Subtropics, among other places. In addition to WriteByNight, he works for UT and ACC. He writes and sleeps in South Austin.

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Cecily Sailer (Austin, Texas) holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston and has taught creative writing workshops through Writers in the Schools Houston, Badgerdog, The Orange Show Center for Visionary Art, VetsArts Cooperative, and Inprint. Cecily is programs manager for the Austin Public Library Friends Foundation. Her work has appeared in The Texas Observer, The Dallas Morning News, The Austin American-Statesman, Texas Monthly, The Austin Chronicle, and Austin Fit Magazine.

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Giuseppe Taurino (Houston, Texas) holds an MFA from the University of Houston and has over fifteen years experience in the nonprofit sector as a social worker, counselor and executive. Giuseppe has also worked as a writer-in-residence with Writers in the Schools (WITS) Houston, taught undergraduate and postgraduate English and Creative Writing, and served as Fiction Editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. He’s been awarded a Donald Barthelme Fellowship in Fiction and scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His stories have appeared in Epoch, New South, The Potomac Review and elsewhere.

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Emily Gray Tedrowe (Chicago, Illinois) is the author of Commuters: A Novel (Harper Perennial), selected as an IndieBound Next Notable Book, as well as named an Entertainment Weekly “best book of the summer,” and a Target Breakout book.  Her short stories, one of which received an Illinois Arts Council award, have appeared in the Chicago Tribune‘s Printers Row Journal, Fifty-Two Stories, Crab Orchard Review, and Other Voices, among other journals.  Emily has studied creativity coaching with Eric Maisel, and has taught writing at all levels, from high school to graduate students.  She has a particular interest in coaching writers who are parents and/or have busy day jobs, and specializes in how to fit writing into life’s constant demands.  Originally from New York, Emily now lives in Chicago with her husband and two daughters.

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Andrew Tilin (Austin, Texas) has published work in The New York Times, Wired, and Men’s Journal, among others, and he’s a contributing editor for Outside magazine. His most recent book, The Doper Next Door: My Strange and Scandalous Year on Performance Enhancing Drugs (Counterpoint), is now out in paperback.

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Joel Weinbrot (Austin, Texas) earned his PhD in English (with a Creative Writing dissertation) from Florida State University. His work has appeared in Barrelhouse, Golden Handcuffs Review, Caketrain, The Portland Review and elsewhere.

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Browse our services to find out how our staff of professional writers can help you.