AWP | Rewind/Unwind Hugo Fellows Reading

Laura Da’

Laura Da’ is a poet and teacher. A lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest, Da’ studied creative writing at the University of Washington and The Institute of American Indian Arts. Da’ is Eastern Shawnee. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, Artist Trust, Hugo House, and the Jack Straw Writers Program. Her first book, Tributaries, won the 2016 American Book Award. Her newest book is Instruments of the True Measure (University of Arizona Press, 2018). Go to www.laurada.com for more information.

Instagram: @lauralouiseda

Twitter @Laura_L_Da

Facebook: www.facebook.com/lauralda

Ruth Joffre

Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast, which was longlisted for The Story Prize. Her fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Lightspeed, Pleiades, khōréō, The Florida Review Online, Reckoning, Wigleaf, Baffling Magazine, and the anthologies Best Microfiction 2021 & 2022, Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness, and Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest. A graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Ruth served as the 2020-2022 Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House and co-organized the Fight for Our Lives performance series. In 2023, she will be a visiting writer at University of Washington Bothell. 

Describe your teaching style.

In generative classes, I like to give students a lot of opportunities to try things out and experiment with unfamiliar styles with the help of gentle guidance and examples. Students may be introduced to new concepts but will have lots of time to ask questions and experiment during class time.

Jessica (Tyner) Mehta

Jessica Mehta, PhD is an Aniyunwiya (citizen of the Cherokee Nation) multi-disciplinary poet and artist. She recently returned from a Fulbright Senior Scholar post in Bengaluru, India where she instituted the first credit-based generative workshop for MFA students at Christ University and curated an anthology of contemporary Indian poetry written in the colonizer’s tongue. Jessica’s installation “The Red C[h]airn Project” is currently one of four pieces on exhibit at the Ucross Gallery in Wyoming. Her 16th book, “sp[RED]” is under contract with the Indigenous-owned Red Planet Books for a 2024 release. Learn more at www.thischerokeerose.com.

Stephanie Segura

Stephanie Segura is a poet from Fontana, CA (Tongva Land) and daughter of Central American immigrants. Her poetry explores a lineage of displacement through speculative testimony, audio transcriptions, and written recollections. Stephanie has been working on her first multimedia poetry manuscript, Open Door Behind You, a genealogy of generational trauma, memory, and dysfunctionality. She is a former Hugo House Fellow and LitFuse Scholar. Stephanie holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from the University of Washington, Bothell. 

Clare Johnson

Clare Johnson is a dyke-identified writer + visual artist, with honors including fellowships from Jack Straw and Mineral School; residencies at Surel’s Place, Crosstown Arts and Vashon Artist Residency; and publications including Poetry Northwest, Raven Chronicles and Shake The Tree. Recent multidisciplinary public art projects include banners decorating fencing around a Tiny House Village; window art in Cal Anderson Park about HIV and family; a banner series based on local seniors’ memories around water; and a scavenger hunt of art on the backs of traffic signs (currently viewable along the Delridge-Highland Park Neighborhood Greenway in West Seattle). For 15 years Clare has also drawn/written on a post-it every night to hold onto something from each ending day, making over 5,000 pieces so far, which were excerpted for years in a monthly Seattle Review of Books lyric essay column. 

Cassidy Dyce

Cassidy Dyce is a writer currently living in Seattle, Washington. After graduating from Christopher Newport University with a BA degree in English, she worked as the writer's assistant for Kwame Alexander, Author, and Recipient of the Newbery Medal. Her work is featured in NPR's Morning Edition and ABC's miniseries, WordPlay. In her first year of moving to Seattle, Cassidy was accepted into the Hugo House Fellowship Program, where she completed the first draft of her WIP Caricatures. Recently, she joined Seattle Arts and Lecture's Writers-in-Schools (WITS) residency, where she has the privilege to venture into Public Schools and partner with Teachers to reintroduce the love of literature and creative writing to students. Her graphic novel series, Brainstormers, Co-authored with Kwame Alexander, will hit shelves in 2025.

Marguerite Harrold

Marguerite Harrold has a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Columbia College Chicago. She is a member of the Community of Writers and an alum of the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writer’s Conference. She is the assistant editor of American Life in Poetry. 

Describe your teaching style.

I try to create an open environments, through balancing discussions, activities, writing time and time for students to share.

Respect and kindness are my most valuable guidelines.

My aim is to form community within the learning environment and to help students build confidence and excitement about their writing practice.

s.c. bostwick

s.c.bostwick (they/them) is a nonbinary trans poet born and raised on the traditional lands of the Puyallup people (Tacoma, WA). They received their BA in English from Western Washington University and their MFA in Poetry from the University of Notre Dame. s.c.bostwick was a recipient of the Hugo Fellowship in 2021-22 and their work can be found in Homology Lit, Dream Pop Journal, and DELUGE. They are currently working on projects that are concerned with family, transness, migration, power, and the construction industry. Find them on socials: @s.c.bostwick  

CR Glasgow

c.r. glasgow (doc/she/we) is a non-binary, queer, first-generation Afro-Caribbean-American healing artist, writer, and educator. c’s work has been supported by fellowships and craft shops through Hugo House, VONA, The Watering Hole, Hurston/Wright, and Anaphora. We have also been the recipient of the Haitian Heritage Scholarship through VONA in 2021. Their chapbook the Devils that raised Us was longlisted at Frontier Poetry. c’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Killens Review, Black Lawrence Press, Breathe, Moko: Caribbean Arts & Letters, and Rigorous Magazine; and performances with Butch Is Not a Dirty Word, Leaf Lit Live!, Brooklyn Yawp, LitCrawl Seattle, and the Seattle Public Library, Hugo House, and Elliott Bay Book Company. With nearly 20 years as a healing artist, doc supports the global majority in addressing grief, liminal space, and intergenerational and ancestral traumas towards a path of embodied liberation.  

Troy Osaki

The grandson of Filipino immigrants and the great-grandson of Japanese immigrants, Troy Osaki is a poet, organizer, and attorney. Osaki is a three-time grand slam poetry champion and has earned fellowships from Kundiman, Hugo House, and Jack Straw Cultural Center. He was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation in 2022. A 2022-2023 Critic-at-Large for Poetry Northwest, his poetry has appeared in Crazyhorse, the Margins, Muzzle Magazine, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. He holds a Juris Doctor degree from the Seattle University School of Law where he interned at Creative Justice, an arts-based alternative to incarceration for youth in King County. He lives in Seattle, WA. 

Brian Dang

Brian Dang (they/them) is a Vietnamese/Chinese playwright/poet/teaching artist based in Duwamish Territory (Seattle). For Brian, writing is an act of envisioning an eventual communing, an opportunity to freeze time as we know it, and a reaching for joy. They really like bread. Website: brianeatswords.com.