Meet the 2025 Writers’ Workshop Leadership Team
Mercy Carbonell, Director
Phillips Exeter Academy
Mercy grew up in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and earned her B.A. in English from Brown University. She holds an M.A. in Education from Stanford University, where she specialized in teaching writing using the Harkness pedagogy developed at Phillips Exeter Academy and studied alternative forms of assessment for student writing workshops and curricular design.
As an educator, writer, and mentor, Mercy values collaborating with and empowering others. She hopes to mobilize unheard voices and uncover buried truths. The workshop methodologies she cultivates are rooted in equity, anti-oppression, deep listening and vulnerable sharing.
During her 26 years at Phillips Exeter Academy, Mercy has been an English teacher, athletics coach and club advisor. She serves on the annual MLK Day planning committee, has co-authored the 25th anniversary of Title IX assembly, directed a student poetry reading addressing gun violence, and commemorated the 50th year of coeducation at Exeter with a student gallery exhibit, “Feminist Bookmaking & Curatorial Activism.” Mercy has taught and delivered meditations at Exeter –a written reflection and weekly community gathering in Phillips Church. She has taught the Advanced Senior Creative Writing Workshop as well as workshops for parents of the Academy, alumni and community members. Mercy’s courses have included The Harlem Renaissance, Spring in Love, Queer Literature, and explored Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Infinite Jest and Ulysses.
Tim Horvath, Leader
Phillips Exeter Academy
Tim Horvath is the author of Understories, and the novella Circulation. He is a New Hampshire Literary Award winner and his stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Conjunctions, AGNI, Harvard Review, Passages North, and Best Small Fictions 2021. His reviews have appeared in Georgia Review, Brooklyn Rail, and American Book Review. His most recent project is Un-bow, a collaboration with composer, cellist, and instrument inventor Rafaele Andrade. He is currently at work on a novel called The Spinal Descent, which explores the world of contemporary classical composers and musicians, as well as a second short story collection. He teaches English at Phillips Exeter Academy and creative writing in a Stony Brook MFA program. He has also been a Yaddo resident and is a co-founder of a city-wide reading program in Manchester, NH.