Wireside Chat featuring Cynthea Liu

Wireside Chat welcomes Online MFA instructor Cynthea Liu! Cynthea has published with Penguin Random House, Disney/Marvel, S&S, Sterling, and Scholastic in formats including picture books, transitional readers, chapter books, middle grade, and young adult novels. She has also written film adaptations and audiobook scripts for full-cast narration. As a consultant and editor, she takes on publishing projects requiring a story architect, project manager or managing editor for private clients and companies that represent independent authors, musicians, social media influencers and celebrities. In short, she does it all! Tune in to learn her success secrets!

Wireside Chat featuring Holly Cornetto

Wireside Chat welcomes Online MFA instructor Holley Cornetto! Holley is a writer, librarian, professor, book reviewer for Publisher's Weekly, and transplanted Southerner who now calls New Jersey home. She is the author of the novels They Are Cursed Like You (with S. O. Green, 2023) and We Haunt These Woods (2022). Join us as we talk about the horror genre, book reviewing for fun and profit, the joys and challenges of literary collaboration, and more!

Wireside Chat featuring Marianna Boncek

Wireside Chat welcomes MFA instructor Marianna Boncek! Marianna is an author, teacher, performance poet, playwright, researcher, and Egyptologist--yes, that means mummies! She has published poetry, nonfiction about ghost-hunting and missing persons, and works of fiction, both YA and adult. Join us as we talk about her writing journey and her love of mystery and the macabre! And mummies!

Wireside Chat Featuring Amy Bai

Wireside Chat welcomes Online MFA instructor Amy Bai! Amy will discuss her writing journey, including how her career began with a bet, why she loves YA, and how she has persevered through career changes, an MFA, and starting her own editing and writing business! Plus a deep dive into POV!

Wireside Chat Featuring Amber Logan

Join us as Wireside Chat welcomes Online MFA instructor Amber Logan! Amber is a university professor, freelance editor, and author of speculative fiction living in Kansas with her husband and two children. In addition to degrees in Psychology, Liberal Arts, and International Relations, Amber holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. Her debut novel, The Secret Garden of Yanagi Inn (CamCat 2022), is an adult retelling of the children's classic The Secret Garden. Tune in as we talk about retellings, how a creative writing PhD differs from an MFA, and more!

Wireside Chat Featuring Nicole Melleby

Wireside Chat is proud to welcome Online MFA instructor Nicole Melleby! Nicole is an award-winning author with an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. If you have wondered how publishers draw the line between MG and YA fiction, here is your chance to learn from an expert! As a writer whose books feature LGBTQ+ characters, Nicole has also been on the front lines of book bans and challenges. We talk with her about her writer's journey, upcoming projects, and how writers can fight back against censorship.

Word for Word Graduate Spotlight 2025

Word for Word honors five recent graduates of SNHU's online  BA, MA, and  MFA creative writing programs. Recommended by instructors and selected by Associate Deans Jacob Powers and Paul Witcover for their high literary achievement, these five  outstanding writers read from their work, representing all the graduates of their respective programs. 

Word for Word: Agents and Agenting Panel, featuring Joshua Bilmes and Lucienne Diver

Word for Word welcomes two of the top literary agents in the business, Joshua Bilmes and Lucienne Diver, for a discussion of the role agents play in the publishing world and what the career of a literary agent requires in an age of seismic changes to the literary landscape. 

Word for Word featuring Tananarive Due

Word for Word proudly welcomes award-winning author Tananarive Due! A leading voice in Black speculative fiction, Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award and a British Fantasy Award. Join us as she reads from and discusses her latest novel, The Reformatory, a searing work of history, resilience, and the supernatural. 

Wireside Chat featuring Tracy Crow Weidemaier

Wireside Chat proudly welcomes instructor Tracy Crow Weidemaier! Author. Literary Agent. Editor. Publisher. Veteran. Tracy wears many hats! Listen in as we talk about career multitasking, her work with the MilSpeak Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting creative writing in the military community, and her fiction, nonfiction and work-for-hire projects!