From Page to Voice: Jack Straw Writers Reading
Jack Straw writing fellows Mateo Bracken, Bill Hollands, Jenny Harrington Lill, Nhatt Nichols, and Monique Ouk read some of the poetry and creative non-fiction they’ve been working on this year.
Jack Straw Cultural Center’s Writers Program was founded in 1997 to introduce writers to the medium of recorded audio; to develop their presentation skills for both live and recorded readings; to encourage the creation of new literary work; to present the writers and their work to the public; and to build community among writers.
Participating writers are presented in live readings, in the printed Jack Straw Writers Anthology; and on the web and radio. Writers receive training in vocal presentation, performance, and microphone technique to prepare them for public readings, interviews, and studio recording. Their recorded readings and interviews with the curator are then used to produce programs for SoundPages, our literary podcast, and for selected radio broadcast.
The House bar will be open to serve alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages.Monique Ouk
Monique Ouk is a Cambodian-American writer. Her poetry appears in Diode Poetry Journal, The Margins, and The Seventh Wave.
Bill Hollands
Bill Hollands was born and raised in Miami, Florida, graduated from Williams College, and received his MA in English as a Dr. Herchel Smith Fellow at Cambridge University. He worked for the New York Public Library and Microsoft before becoming a high school English teacher. He lives in Seattle with his husband and their son. He has returned to poetry after a long hiatus, and his recent poems have appeared in such journals as The Adroit Journal, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, Rattle, The Florida Review, DIAGRAM, Boulevard, and Plume, as well as on The Slowdown podcast. A multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee, he has been a finalist for North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize, Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize in Poetry, Smartish Pace’s Erskine J. Poetry Prize, and New Ohio Review’s NORward Prize. He reads submissions for Poetry Northwest. His debut poetry collection Mangrove (ELJ Editions) will be published in 2025.
Jenny Harrington Lill
Jenny Harrington Lill is a writer, researcher, and advocate living on Mercer Island. She is an MFA candidate in nonfiction and literature at the Bennington Writing Seminars. Jenny is currently working on her debut collection of essays on love, loss, and mothering.
Mateo Bracken
Mateo Bracken is a poet, librettist, and actor who splits his time between Auburn and Seattle, Washington. He was the 2023-2024 Seattle Youth Poet Laureate and currently serves as the 2024-2026 Auburn Poet Laureate. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in the Gay & Lesbian Review, EchoX, The Washington State Queer Poetry Anthology, Abya Yala: Indigenous Connections in Latin America, Creative Colloquy, Bird Brains: A Lyrical Guide to the Birds of Washington State, and more. As a librettist in the Seattle Opera Creation Lab, he developed the twenty-minute chamber opera Blood Dawn of the Inti Sun in collaboration with composer Mina Pariseau. His first chapbook, Dear Spanish, was published in 2024 through Poetry Northwest and explores the languages of identity, heritage, and belonging. He is currently working on a manuscript about the settler colonial history of Auburn in verse.
Nhatt Nichols
Nhatt Nichols (she/her)Â is a multidisciplinary journalist, poet, and artist whose work focuses on the intersections of humans, animals, and their environment.
A graduate of The Royal Drawing School in London, she uses words and images to cover food and environmental issues using solutions journalism practices for High Country News, Edible Magazine, Civil Eats, Modern Farmer, and The Daily Yonder. She is the founder and editor of The Jefferson County Beacon, a rural weekly news outlet.
Nhatt is a 2024 Blue Sky Community Action Fellow and a 2023 Artist Trust Literary Gap grant recipient for her project documenting the history of human/animal dependency and the current refugee crisis in Białowieża, Europe’s oldest forest. Her first museum show, Nhatt Nichols: The Willapa Oyster and its Environs, was on display at The Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum in 2025.
Her first book, This Party of the Soft Things (Bored Wolves 2022), a heavily researched graphic poem, is now awaiting its third printing. Her first novella, Burn Morels, is forthcoming from Bored Wolves this summer.
