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Piper Writers Studio Instructors

Expert writers with a passion for community

Our instructors are at the heart of what we do. 

To meet current instructors for the Piper Writers Studio, select a name from the list below.

For more information, you can meet past instructors or view upcoming classes and workshops. 

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Meet Our Current Instructors


Shannon Watters

Shannon Watters is the co-creator and co-writer of the award-winning hit comic book series LUMBERJANES. She is also the senior editor and head of BOOM! Box line at BOOM! Studios, the imprint behind critically-acclaimed comics and graphic novels like GIANT DAYS, THE BACKSTAGERS, LUMBERJANES, FENCE, GOLDIE VANCE, HEAVY VINYL, THE AVANT-GUARDS, and many, many others. She lives with her partner in Los Angeles, CA.

Learn more about Shannon Watters


Chantelle Aimée Osman

Chantelle Aimée Osman (she/her) is the editor of Agora, an imprint of Polis Books. Agora focuses on crime fic-tion with unique social and cultural themes. Titles from Agora’s debut list have been nominated for Edgar, Anthony, Lefty, Macavity and Strand Critics awards. The former editor in chief of RT Book Reviews Magazine and a freelance editor for over ten years, she is also an instructor at Authors at Large and LitReactor.

Learn more about Chantelle Aimée Osman


Chantelle Aimée Osman

Chantelle Aimée Osman (she/her) is the editor of Agora, an imprint of Polis Books. Agora focuses on crime fic-tion with unique social and cultural themes. Titles from Agora’s debut list have been nominated for Edgar, Anthony, Lefty, Macavity and Strand Critics awards. The former editor in chief of RT Book Reviews Magazine and a freelance editor for over ten years, she is also an instructor at Authors at Large and LitReactor.

Learn more about Chantelle Aimée Osman


Ursula Pike

Ursula Pike (she/her) is the author of An Indian among los Indígenas: A Native Travel Memoir (2021) from Heyday Books. Ursula lives in Austin, Texas, and writes about identity, Native American issues, economics, travel, and powwows. She has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts and a master’s degree in Economics from Western Illinois University. She is a member of the Karuk Tribe. Her work has appeared in LitHub, Yellow Medicine Review, Ligeia Magazine, World Literature Today, and O’Dark 30.

Learn more about Ursula Pike
Photograph of Matt Ferraz


Matt Ferraz

Matt Ferraz is a Brazilian writer with a master's in biography at the University of Buckingham. His work has been published in English, Portuguese and Italian.

Learn more about Matt Ferraz


Tatum Begay

Tatum Begay is a Navajo digital comic artist who has been self-publishing web comics since 2013. She graduated from Northern Arizona University with a master’s in English Literature in 2015.

https://tapas.io/tatumbegay

Learn more about Tatum Begay


Damon Begay

Damon W. Begay (he/him) is a Navajo independent comic book artist. He grew up watching WB kid's cartoons every Saturday morning and was always playing Pokemon and begging for more Yu-Gi-Oh cards. His family did a lot more moving, from Shiprock to Window Rock. They ended up staying in Phoenix. He remembers being mad because he missed his friends and cousins. He found out that Phoenix had great comic book stores and public libraries with computers and comics. The city started to grow on him. In high school, he got into comics like Ultimate Spider-Man and Runaways.

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Susan Nguyen

Susan Nguyen hails from Virginia but currently lives and writes in Arizona. She earned her MFA in Poetry from Arizona State University, where she won the Aleida Rodriguez Memorial Prize and fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. In 2018, PBS NewsHour named her one of "three women poets to watch." Her work appears in diagram, Tin House, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, Dear Diaspora, won the 2020 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and will be published in September 2021.

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Rebecca Fish Ewan

Poet/cartoonist, Rebecca Fish Ewan's (she/her) passion is mingling text with visual art, primarily in ink and watercolor, to tell stories of place and memory. Her hybrid-form work has appeared in After the Art, Brevity, Crab Fat, Survivor Zine, Hip Mama, Mutha, TNB, Punctuate & Under the Gum Tree. Her illustrations and essay, “The Deepest Place on Earth,” were published in the Literary Kitchen anthology, Places Like Home. Rebecca has an MFA in creative writing from ASU, where she has been a landscape design professor for 25+ years.

Learn more about Rebecca Fish Ewan
Photograph of Corinna Cook


Corinna Cook

Corinna Cook is the author of LEAVETAKINGS, a lyric essay collection (University of Alaska Press 2020). She holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri.

Learn more about Corinna Cook


Chantelle Aimée Osman

Chantelle Aimée Osman (she/her) is the editor of Agora, an imprint of Polis Books. Agora focuses on crime fic-tion with unique social and cultural themes. Titles from Agora’s debut list have been nominated for Edgar, Anthony, Lefty, Macavity and Strand Critics awards. The former editor in chief of RT Book Reviews Magazine and a freelance editor for over ten years, she is also an instructor at Authors at Large and LitReactor.

Learn more about Chantelle Aimée Osman