Author

Simone Pilon serves as Dean of Academic Affairs for Berklee College of Music’s campus in Valencia in Spain, where she oversees four master’s programs as well as undergraduate programs. She is the former chair of the Liberal Arts department at Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory at Berklee, a position she held for seven years. Prior to her position at Berklee, she worked for more than a decade at a private liberal arts college where she taught French language and literature and built international partnerships and programs. She has been a Fulbright-Hays scholar to Morocco and Tunisia, has published in international journals, and has presented at national and international conferences. She has served as technical reviewer for Cliffs, Dummies, and Everything books, and has published a student edition of Louis Hémon’s canonical novel Maria Chapdelaine, with Molière and Company. Simone holds a PhD in Québécois Literature from Université Laval and an M.A. in French Literature from McGill University.

Instructor

Beth Woodcome Platow is a poet, essayist, editor, and educator. She has published poems in Ploughshares, AGNI, Harvard Review, and Gulf Coast among other journals. She received the Grolier Prize, the PEN/New England Discovery Award, the Beyond Baroque Poetry Prize, and the Rousseau Poetry Prize. Her book of poems, Little Myths, will be published in 2015 by the National Poetry Review. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and is an Associate Professor at Berklee College of Music where she teaches courses on writing, literature, poetry, and artistry.

Instructor

Mark Polanzak is the author of POP! (Stillhouse Press), a hybrid work of memoir and fiction. His short stories have appeared in The Southern Review, The American Scholar, and elsewhere. His story “Giant” will be included in the anthology Best American Nonrequired Reading, 2017. A runner-up for the Italo Calvino Prize for Fabulist Fiction, Mark is a founding editor for draft: the journal of process, and a producer for The Fail Safe podcast. He received an MFA from the University of Arizona. Mark teaches Literature, Composition, and Creative Writing at Berklee in Boston. He lives in Salem, MA.

Instructor

Rob Hochschild has written about music and other subjects for a range of publications, including The Boston Globe. He has worked as a print and broadcast journalist, web editor/writer, and radio host. He has launched three podcasts, including, most recently, The Media Narrative. Hochschild has taught in Massachusetts prisons through the PEN New England Writing Program. On the Berklee campus, Hochschild teaches writing, LENS, and, soon, podcasting. He earned a B.S. In Psychology from the University of Massachusetts and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Emerson College.