Coaching — For Students · For Writers · For Classrooms
I've spent twenty-five years around words and the people who make them — as a poet, an editor, a publisher, and a coach. This is the coaching room: for high schoolers with a college essay to write, and for adults with something to say. In both chairs the work is the same. Learning to hear yourself think, and getting it on the page.
§ 01 · For Students
Admissions readers have changed how they read. Duke reworked its essay review because of AI. Caltech has said plainly it doesn't want essays that sound like a chatbot. In a recent Kaplan survey, half of admissions officers called AI help on application essays unethical. The polished-but-empty essay is now a liability, and what gets a reader's attention is rarer than good grammar: a seventeen-year-old who knows their own mind.
That's what we build. Four working sessions, seventy-five minutes each, with my written feedback on every draft in between:
You leave with a finished personal statement, two supplemental essays, and something no shortcut can produce: a dated trail of notes and drafts showing exactly how the essay became yours. If a reader ever wonders who wrote it, you have the receipts.
$1,495 · four sessions · founding rate $1,195 for the first three students
Ask about a spot →Early-decision deadlines arrive November 1, so fall spots are few and go in order. If the fit isn't right, I'll say so and point you somewhere good. And if you know a junior or senior wrestling one of these essays into shape, this page is made to be forwarded.
Counselors and teachers: here's a printable one-pager for your office.
§ 02 · For Writers
Nobody needs "a writing coach." What a writer needs is the thing finished. The memoir that has been three chapters long for two years. The Substack you keep meaning to launch. The essay collection scattered across four notebooks and a desktop folder named NEW. The poetry manuscript that exists everywhere except in order.
So that's the engagement: one project, ninety days, a finished working draft. We meet twice a month to make real decisions about the work; between sessions you send pages and get an editor's response while the writing is still warm enough to change. You leave with the draft in hand and the practice that produced it, which turns out to be the more valuable half.
One promise I don't make: publication. If what emerges is a book that belongs in the world, that becomes a separate conversation at Crossroads, held to the same standard as any manuscript that arrives at the press. Keeping those rooms separate is what lets me be fully honest in this one.
A small-group version of this will exist in the season enough writers ask for it. If that's you, say so when you write.
$1,500 / month · three months · one project, finished
Bring me the stalled thing →§ 03 · For Classrooms
This August I stood in front of more than a hundred communications students at Chattanooga's Center for Creative Arts while they voted a live interactive story toward one of its endings — out loud, in half an hour, with strong opinions. Rooms like that are why I teach.
What I bring to a classroom or a catalog: a six-week Write Your Own Interactive Story course for teenagers, where every student leaves with a playable branching story of their own; a college-essay workshop for junior and senior classes; and writing-craft sessions for adults. If you run a school, a homeschool co-op, a library program, or a community center, I'd be glad to build the version that fits your room.
Bring a workshop →§ 04 · Everything Else
Looking for something else?
For publishing a serious book, begin at Crossroads Publishing Group. For the inner-work conversation, The Sounding Line. For speaking and commissioned poems, Offerings.