John "Jake" Young

Biography

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Jake Young has been teaching now at LMU for over a decade.
As co-founder of the Rhetorical Arts Festival, his work on campus has been committed to highimpact
learning practices and student-centered learning. He has presented at an international
conference on the pedagogical rationales for the Festival and at RSA on his particular Rhetorical
Arts course’s thematic (the use of affect and the appeal to empathy in narrative nonfiction). He
has been teaching composition, creative writing, English literature and literary nonfiction since
2004. He has taught widely, including creative writing instruction at Sichuan University in
Chengdu, China, as well as initiating, developing the curriculum for, and teaching the first course
module of the new creative writing track at the National University of Singapore in 2008. He
earned his A.B. in English-Creative Writing from Princeton University, where he was awarded
the Emily Ebert Junior Prize, Honorable Mention, and graduated cum laude. He earned his
M.F.A. in Creative Writing-Fiction from Arizona State University, where he was a University
and Virginia G. Piper Scholar. He is an active fiction and nonfiction writer, with his work
appearing in Creative Nonfiction, among other places, and meriting praise in various publications
such as The New York Times.

Education (2)

Arizona State University: MFA, English/ Creative Writing 2007

Thesis: Alive and Ticking: A Novel

Princeton University: BA, English/ Creative Writing 2002

Cum Laude Distinction in the Department of English Thesis: The East is Gray: A Novella and Stories