Meet our hardworking staff and board! We’re passionate about books, writing, and helping anyone who wants to write create their best work.
Meet our hardworking staff and board! We’re passionate about books, writing, and helping anyone who wants to write create their best work.
President
Secretary
Gary Luke held editorial and executive positions in the book publishing industry over four decades. He recently retired as the publisher at Sasquatch Books in Seattle. Gary worked as an editor of fiction and nonfiction books at Dell/Doubleday, Penguin USA, and Simon & Schuster when he lived in New York. Authors he has worked with include Shawn Wong, Brenda Peterson, Bruce Barcott, Nancy Pearl, Kate Lebo, Jonathan Raban, and Eric Liu. A fourth-generation Seattleite, he received a BA in English from Western Washington State College. He is a past board member of Artist Trust.
Greta Hotopp specializes in financial leadership through critical inflection points, including the UW School of Law, a civic software start-up, and a Microsoft-embedded tech group, helping clients with expertise in capital management, technology transformation, operations, accounting, compliance, funding, contract negotiations and more. Her early career was in the capital markets –as a derivatives trader in London, San Francisco, and Kuala Lumpur; on the Board of the Malaysian Monetary Exchange; and broking foreign exchange to global hedge funds from Tokyo. She then became a columnist on the economy for a Japanese think tank, managed litigation support to prosecute trading-related financial fraud in New York, and ran a quarterly creativity and innovation get-together to catalyze interaction around ideas. She loves community spaces such as those Hugo House enables.
Lynn is a developmental editor at Wiley Editorial Service, where she has wielded her red pen since 2002. She has an MA in Literature and an MFA in Writing. In her spare time, Lynn plants giant sequoia and coast redwood saplings with the good folks at PropagationNation. She owns too many books.
Dottie Hall is an aspiring writer who has benefited from multiple Hugo House courses. With her husband JJ Leary, she has co-authored a cookbook, Cooking with Your Snooks, to share the joy and rewards of cooking with your loved one. She is a retired high-tech marketing executive with over thirty years’ experience. The quintessential startup junkie, she led marketing at companies including Symantec, Tesla Motors, and Microsoft. She holds an MS in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a BA in journalism from Georgia State University. She has served on other nonprofit boards including the Alliance for Gun Responsibility Foundation (current), New American Schools, and the Arizona Software Association as well as on various for-profit boards.
Elise Holschuh built her career in general management and marketing, working in product management and marketing strategy for General Mills, US Communications, and Foote, Cone and Belding. Her nonprofit experience has focused on utilizing her professional training on behalf of organizations that matter to her. Most recently she served several years as Board Chair for Path with Art, an organization whose mission is to help transform lives of people in recovery by harnessing the power of creative engagement. Her personal passion in the arts takes the form of writing, a pursuit that brought her to Hugo House for the rich opportunities offered, and then, for the opportunity to serve on the board.
Eric Magnuson moved to Seattle from his native Wisconsin in 1993 for grad school at the University of Washington. Eric previously received a BA in Journalism from the University of Minnesota and went on to live and work in Texas, Vermont, California, and Ethiopia. Eric’s work as a writer, teacher, and advocate for a vibrant local arts scene brought him to Hugo House in 2007. Eric’s current book project (a narrative nonfiction history of the modern global fur trade) contrasts nicely with his work as a nostalgia merchant (running a Seattle music and sports history tour company).
Rebecca was born and raised in Wollongong, Australia by parents who immigrated from Malaysia and the United Kingdom, by way of New Zealand. She started her career as an attorney in the United Kingdom and Belgium working on public law, international trade, and antitrust matters, and moved to Seattle in 2012 to join the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Rebecca is a passionate fan of West Ham United Football Club in the English Premier League, does not ski despite being married to an alpinist, and is a keen distance runner whose lifelong goal is to run a sub-three hour marathon. On weekends, she is usually baking with her toddler and leaving boxes of misshapen cookies on the doorsteps of neighbors. Rebecca holds Bachelors of Economics and Law from the University of Sydney, a Masters of Public Administration from the London School of Economics, and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Oxford.