Isabelle Appleton is an academic tutor, editor, and writer with experience in education, literary publishing, and test preparation. She is currently an Adjunct Professor at NYU, where she teaches Introduction to Prose and Poetry, a hybrid craft class/workshop that emphasizes the fundamentals of writing including close reading, composition, grammar, and revision. She has taught creative writing to a wide range of students including first-generation precollege learners, aspiring novelists, and ESL learners. She’s also taught creative writing to residential hospital communities and incarcerated New Yorkers through correspondence programs.
Beyond the classroom, she has built a career in literary and academic publishing. For the past few years, she has worked in Editorial at The Princeton Review, where she assists in developing a wide range of test prep materials, including detailed study guides, strategic instructional videos, and comprehensive review books that cater to various learning styles and test formats. She has considerable experience with college essay writing and editing, most notably as one of the editors of a widely recognized collection of college application essays. She has also worked in editorial for various literary and academic publications and publishers including The Washington Square Review and The Bias Magazine. Prior to graduate school, she worked in the Literary Department at WME, where she supported award-winning authors.
Isabelle draws on these professional experiences in her teaching, giving students a window into the real-world contexts of writing, editing, and readership. Whether guiding a student through close reading an essay or story, brainstorming a supplemental college application essay, refining grammar and revision skills, or mentoring advanced creative writing projects, she encourages students to see writing as a mode of inquiry that fosters curiosity, critical thinking, and confidence in high school, college, and beyond.
Her own fiction has appeared in journals including Conjunctions, Joyland, The New England Review, Protean Magazine, Civilization, and more. Her short story “Tank” is being adapted into a single-story print edition with Loose Tooth Press. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the PEN/Dau Prize, received NYU’s 2024 Thesis Research Award, and was recently awarded the Alpine Fellowship. In 2025, she will be a resident at the UCross Foundation. She holds an MFA in Fiction from NYU, where she was awarded the Goldwater Fellowship, a full-tuition and stipend award. She earned her BA in Religion from Vassar College, where she was Phi Beta Kappa and received the J. Howard Howson Prize for Excellence in the Study of Religion. Outside of her professional work, Isabelle loves reading, travel, her friends, and her cat, Missouri.
With over a decade of teaching experience, Emily Hughart combines a deep passion for education with a commitment to fostering sincere connections with her students and their families. Equipped with a Master’s degree in English literature from King’s College London, Emily taught English composition courses at the college level before moving to New York City and finding her life’s work in teaching adolescent students.
Cara Hill is a seasoned educator, with over twenty years of classroom experience in public and private schools in New York City. She has taught at the Packer Collegiate Institute, the Berkeley Carroll School, School of the Future, M.S. 51, and the high school academic outreach program Upward Bound at Columbia University. Throughout her teaching career, Cara has tutored, relishing the chance to work on a one-to-one basis with students across age groups and disciplines. In addition, she has mentored and trained many teachers at the middle and high school level, giving her a strong understanding of a wide array of teachers, students, and schools.
Alyssa Loh is a writer, filmmaker, and educator. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with Honors from Princeton with a degree in English, and holds a dual MBA (business) / MFA (film) from NYU, where she graduated with Distinction (top 10%). Due to her excellent academic record at the business school, she was consistently hired as a Teaching Fellow across the undergraduate, MBA, and executive MBA programs for core quantitative classes like statistics. In that role, she held office hours on behalf of professors, graded exams, ran in-class exercises, and helped business students with problem sets. She has years of experience 