Pulitzer Prize Author's Researcher | Columbia Writer & Tutor

Nina M.

Creative Writing

My writing education spans fiction and nonfiction at two of the most rigorous programs in the country — a BA in Fiction from Columbia University, where I worked closely with Phillip Lopate, Margo Jefferson, and Sam Lipsyte, and an MFA in Nonfiction at Hunter College under Saïd Sayrafiezadeh. I currently serve as a literary researcher for a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, contributing editorial perspective and engaging directly with questions of narrative structure, voice, and form at a professional level. At Hunter College Campus School I work as a Writing and Literacy Specialist, providing one-on-one instruction in essay and narrative nonfiction writing across K–6, with feedback tailored to each student's developmental stage and attention to clarity, structure, and the cultivation of an individual voice. I also teach 7–12 English classes at Hunter, leading seminars in close reading and literary analysis of canonical texts.

Essay Writing

The essay is my primary literary form. I studied it at Columbia under Phillip Lopate, one of the foremost essayists and essay scholars in America, and I am completing an MFA in Nonfiction at Hunter College where the essay is the central object of craft inquiry. As a Writing and Literacy Specialist at Hunter College Campus School, I teach essay writing one-on-one across K–6, working on structure, argument, and voice at every developmental stage, and I lead seminar discussions of complex texts with 7–12 students at the same institution. My editorial work has sharpened my understanding of what makes prose work at the level of the sentence. I bring that eye to every session, whether a student is writing a five-paragraph assignment or a college application essay.

Fiction Writing

I earned my Bachelor of Arts in Fiction from Columbia University, where I studied craft directly under Sam Lipsyte and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, two of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American fiction, developing a rigorous grounding in character, structure, point of view, and prose style. My fiction training runs alongside my nonfiction MFA at Hunter College, giving me an unusually broad command of how narrative works across forms — what fiction and the personal essay share, and where they diverge. As a researcher for a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, I engage daily with the decisions that shape long-form narrative at the highest level, from how research becomes scene to how voice sustains itself across a book. In tutoring I work with fiction writers at all stages, from students encountering the short story for the first time to writers developing their own voice and learning to read their own drafts with critical distance.