Zeynep is an award-winning writer, literary editor, and creative writing instructor with fourteen years of experience in writing and teaching in both English and Turkish. Her writing has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, where she won the Fiction Open Contest, in Black Warrior Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Gulf Coast Online. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, where she received the Shirley Jackson Prize in Fiction, The Leonard Brown Prize in Poetry, and a Graduate Dean's Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Work. She was also a 2021–2022 Writing Fellow at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She currently lives in Istanbul, where she teaches Creative Writing at Boğaziçi University. 

She also teaches students from grades 5 through 12 remotely through Minerva Prep in Taiwan and Opus Educational Consultancy in Korea, with a focus on English Writing and Composition, Academic Writing, Creative Writing, Competition Writing, College Essay Writing, Screenwriting, Playwriting, and more. Through her learning-first approach to writing preparation, her students consistently go on to win or receive honorable mentions in the writing competitions they enter. Her students have won Gold Key Awards and multiple Honorable Mentions with the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, have placed in the John Locke Essay Writing Contest, have received the Grand Jury Award for a Screenplay at the Oniros Film Festival and recognition from the Blue Bird Film Festival, and have been selected as semifinalists by the Cannes World Film Festival.

She also runs workshops for adults through The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn and through her own freelance practice. Previous workshops include "The Science of Writing a Short Story," "Hauntings: On Ghosts & Obsessions," and "Imagination & Fiction: Between the Magical and the Real," among others. Beyond workshops, Zeynep is available for personally tailored one-on-one sessions geared toward your writing goals, manuscript consultations, and writing coaching. Her clients have gone on to publish in U.S. literary journals and receive national and international book deals. To work with Zeynep, reach out at zeynep.ozakat@gmail.com.