About

Welcome to the teaching website of Professor Amy Monticello at Suffolk University!

If you are a current or former student, please use these pages to find supplemental resources for creative writing, literary publishing, and other courses. I hope this compilation is a fairly unique one, offering you what has guided me as a writer, much of which was given to me by my own teachers and mentors.

If you are an educator, materials from this site are open for use in your own teaching.

A little bit about me:

I grew up in Endicott, New York, a small manufacturing town in the Southern Tier bordering Pennsylvania. I received my B.A. in Writing from Ithaca College in 2005, and my MFA in Creative Writing (creative nonfiction) from The Ohio State University in 2008. Since then, I have lived and taught at universities in Ohio, Alabama, New York, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts. I’m now an associate professor of English and director of the First-Year Seminar Program at Suffolk University. I also serve as the faculty adviser for Suffolk’s literary journal, Venture.

As a writing teacher, I love turning the introspective work of imagination, analysis, and reflection outward in both traditional and multimodal writing projects. I want students to experience how our intellectual and creative offerings thrive not only in our minds and in the classroom, but most of all in public spaces, drawing those outside the university to engage with our art and ideas.

What you’ll find on my teaching website are craft articles, writing prompts, writer resources & databases, and perspectives on literary publishing, organized by course. I plan to add pages for my courses in first-year writing, writing for digital media, and true crime literature, and I update existing course pages often. Please check back!

You can learn about my own writing at my author website. I have written two chapbooks of creative nonfiction: Close Quarters, a memoir-in-essays (Sweet Publications), and How to Euthanize a Horse, which won the 2016 Arcadia Press Chapbook Prize in nonfiction. A scholarly edition on the history and impact of life writing in American literature is forthcoming from Routledge. Other creative and scholarly work has appeared in journals such as Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Iron Horse Literary Review, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Hotel Amerika, The Rumpus, and Salon, and has been anthologized in Going Om: Real-Life Stories from On and Off the Yoga Mat. For three years, I was also a regular contributor at the online magazine Role/Reboot.

To learn more about the Suffolk University English Department and our creative writing program, click here.