In part because of Alexandra Shelley's encouragement (and her letter of recommendation) I am currently an MFA student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks…. In the summer of 2006, I enrolled in the New School's Advanced Short Story workshop with Alexandra. Having been out of school for three years, I was nervous about how my stories would be received.  But Alexandra was always direct and thorough; she was able to see my stories not as they were, but as they were trying to be.

But perhaps Professor Shelley's greatest strength is her ability to get her students thinking beyond the classroom.  What were we going to do with these stories? She provided literary journals, writing spaces throughout the city, authors we should be reading (always specific to what she intuited we were attempting to do in our own writing). 

 In this way, Alexandra gave us the most important encouragement a writing professor can give: she made us look at ourselves as writers.

-Kyle Mellen