Course Instructor: Tina Tocco

Tina Tocco is a Pushcart Prize nominee. As a writer for both children and adults, her work has appeared in kiddie magazines, such as Highlights, Cricket, Humpty Dumpty, AppleSeeds, and Odyssey, and in literary journals, including New Ohio Review, River Styx, Crab Creek Review, Passages North, Potomac Review, Portland Review, Sou’wester, and Italian Americana. Tina’s writing has also been featured in Wild Things: The Best of Italian Americana (Fordham University Press, 2008), The Best Small Fictions 2019 (Sonder Press, 2019), Best Nonfiction Food (Woodhall Press, 2020), and other anthologies. A runner-up for the SCBWI’s Work-in-Progress Grant, Tina was also an honorable mention in the River Styx Schlafly Beer Micro-Brew Micro-Fiction Contest and a finalist in CALYX’s Flash Fiction Contest. Her interview on flash and the craft of writing, “No Wasted Words,” appears in Roanoke Review. In 2021, she was a reader-in-residence for flash fiction journal SmokeLong Quarterly. Tina earned her MFA in creative writing from Manhattanville College, where she was editor-in-chief of Inkwell. She has taught adults and kids for Hugo House, GrubStreet, Hudson Valley Writers Center, Arts Escape, Kids Short Story Connection, the SCBWI, and other organizations.