RYW Staff
Bird Cox
Executive Director / Co-Founder
Email: richmondyoungwriters@gmail.com
Bird co-founded the organization in 2010 with Valley Haggard, who now runs the adult writing workshops at LifeIn10Minutes. Bird graduated from the University of Virginia in its first class of creative writing majors. In addition to teaching writing classes at Richmond Young Writers, she has written for Richmond Magazine, C-ville Weekly, and the literary magazine McSweeney’s, and her work with RYW won her the Emyl Jenkins Award in 2021. Bird invites you to donate here to support the next generation of writers.
Elise Steele
Assistant Director / Teacher
Email: esteelewrites@gmail.com
Elise is a creative writer with an honors degree in English from The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. While her work gravitates toward poetry, she loves to experiment with short-stories, often dabbling in horror-fiction.
Elise split her childhood years between midwest Ohio and Appalachian Tennessee. She’s lived in Richmond for the past few years and currently works as a freelance writer and a substitute teacher for local elementary schools.
Dina Weinstein
Teacher
Dina Weinstein is a Richmond, Virginia based award-winning journalist who reports for numerous local and national outlets like Richmond magazine, the Henrico Citizen and Style Weekly. She's a writer for Virginia Commonwealth University News and also manages the website Richmond on the Cheap. Weinstein moved north from Miami, Florida where she worked mentoring young journalists as an advisor at the Miami Dade College student newspaper, The Reporter, and wrote about artists, bicycling, parenting, books, hurricanes, stone crabs and history for many various publications both in the Sunshine State and around the world. Weinstein is a Boston native and a proud graduate of Boston University School for the Arts and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Grace Gentry
Teacher
Grace is a dancer, writer, and teacher from Ohio who landed in Richmond by way of a Oaxacan whirlwind, a Las Vegas gamble, and finally, a Texas thunderstorm. Forever fascinated by words, Grace is currently working towards her Master’s of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from Arizona State University. She speaks English natively, Spanish conversationally, and French occasionally, mainly to her Shih Tzu whose full name is in Mandarin and whose bark is untranslatable to anyone but his mother.
Evan Fleischer
Teacher
Evan Fleischer is a writer, editor, and recent MFA currently graduate living in Richmond, VA. He has regularly run D&D sessions for people of all ages and experience levels over the past two years. He is currently locked in a third-person bio and is trying to find his way out.
Kisha Hughes
Teacher
Kisha Hughes graduated from James Madison University in 2007 with a BA in English/Creative Writing. She has spent her summers teaching children ages 6-15 at the Furious Flower Poetry Camp in Harrisonburg, VA since 2009. During the year she works at the Army Logistics University Library as a library technician, where she gets to share her love for education, research and writing. She lives in Richmond with her artistic spouse and three troublesome felines.
Lila Jones
Teacher
Lila Jones serves as a teacher at Richmond Young Writers. Lila started her journey with the nonprofit as a student, and continued as a volunteer, intern, and eventually even the first alum to return to teach as a creative writing teaching fellow. She’s thrilled to be back as a teacher, helping the next generation of young writers build confidence in their own storytelling skills. Lila graduated from Guilford College with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing and a minor in Visual Arts/Photography.
Megan Spivey
Teacher
Megan Spivey is a graduate of Appomattox Regional Governor’s School, where she majored in Literary Arts. After high school, Megan attended Old Dominion University and earned a B.S. in Criminal Justice and a minor in English. Currently, she teaches English at Prince George High School and sponsors the Young Authors Club. When she isn’t in the classroom, Megan can be found either buried in a book or under her dogs on the couch (usually both!). Megan has a fierce passion for poetry and social justice, especially when they are intertwined.
Merlyn Mayhew
Teacher
Merlyn grew up in Massachusetts but her heart was set on Virginia. She recently made the big move to Richmond and loves it! Her most recent degree is an MFA in Creative Writing with a genre focus on Writing for Young People. In her free time, you can find Merlyn scouting out the Richmond restaurant scene, at the barre studio, taking walks with Bingo, or watching too much reality tv.
Ty Phelps
Teacher
Ty Phelps is a writer, teacher, and musician from Madison, Wisconsin. His work has appeared on Poets.org, in Clackamas Literary Review, Zizzle, and elsewhere. An MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University, he won the 2021 Nancy Ludmerer Fellowship for Flash Fiction, the 2019 Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize, and The Gravity of the Thing’s 2016 Six Word Story Contest. He currently serves as VCU’s Cabell First Novelist Award Fellow. He is a drummer, a canoer, and is teaching himself to play the banjo.
Valley Haggard
Co-founder / Advisor
After traveling through New York, Italy, Colorado, Arkansas and Alaska, Valley returned to live in the house she grew up in, in her hometown of Richmond, Virginia. She is now the director of Life in 10 Minutes, home of Richmond’s most vital creative writing workshops for adults, which shares a home with Richmond Young Writers. She is the author of The Halfway House for Writers and Surrender Your Weapons, and was the winner of the 2018 James River Writers’s Emyl Jenkins Award. Visit her at www.valleyhaggard.com.