Hugo Residency Reading
Join Hugo House’s writers-in-residence and Made at Hugo House fellows as they share work from their residency projects. The reading is free and open to the public.
2015-16 Writers-in-Residence
Joan Leegant is the author of a novel, Wherever You Go, and a story collection, An Hour in Paradise, winner of the PEN/New England Book Award, the Wallant Award, runner-up for the National Jewish Book Award, and selection for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers series. Recent story prizes include Special Mention in the 2014 Pushcart Prize, the Nelligan Prize from Colorado Review, and Moment Magazine Fiction Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and been broadcast on National Public Radio. She is the recipient of an artist grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Formerly a practicing attorney, Joan is a graduate of Harvard College, Boston University Law School, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Program. She has been teaching writing for fifteen years, including at Harvard, Oklahoma State University, and Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv where for five years she was the visiting writer in an international master’s program in creative writing. While in Israel, she also lectured widely on American literature and culture for the U.S. State Department. Formerly a long-time resident of Massachusetts, Joan currently lives in West Seattle with her husband. She has two grown sons, a videographer in Boston and an artisan furniture and staircase designer/builder here in Seattle.
Anastacia-Renee is a queer super-shero of color moonlighting as a writer, performance artist and creative writing workshop facilitator. She has received awards and fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, VONA, Jacks Straw, Ragdale and Artist Trust. Her chapbook, 26 (Dancing Girl Press), is an abbreviated alphabet expression of the lower and uppercase lives of women and girls. A Pushcart nominee (2015), her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have been published widely. Recently Tolbert has been expanding her creative repertoire into the field of visual art, and has exhibited her painting and photography surrounding the body as a polarized place of both the private and political. This year she has begun a yearlong theatrical mixed-media project in collaboration with the Project Room, 9 Ounces: A One Woman Show. Lately she’s been obsessed with the body and the stories—true and not true—it holds.
2015-16 Made at Hugo House Fellows
Quenton Baker is a poet and teacher from Seattle. His work operates from the premise that poetry is a vital art, one that can rewrite narratives by naming the storms inside of us all, and functions as a meditation on the fallout from not having any real dialectical framework applied to the opposing poles of white supremacy and black subhumanity. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in anthologies such as Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip-Hop. His chapbook, Diglossic in the Second America, is forthcoming from Punch Press. He has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Southern Maine, and he writes poetry reviews for Poet by Poet.
John Englehardt has an MFA in fiction from The University of Arkansas. He won the 2014 Wabash Prize in Fiction, and his work has been published in Sycamore Review, The Stranger, The James Franco Review, The Monarch Review, Monkeybicycle, and The Conium Review.
Kathy Harding received an MFA from the University of Arizona and an MA from The Bread Loaf School of English. Her essay “Diving Deep to Reach the Surface” was published in the Modern Love column of the New York Times.
Sierra Golden received her MFA in poetry from NC State University. Winner of the program’s 2012 Academy of American Poets Prize, Golden’s work appears or is forthcoming in journals such as Prairie Schooner, Permafrost, and Ploughshares. She has also been awarded residencies by Hedgebrook, the Island Institute, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology.
Sarah Kathryn Moore has received her MFA in Poetry and PhD in English Literature from the University of Washington. Currently at work on a chapbook, entitled V, Sarah Kate’s work has appeared in journals including Pacifica Literary Review, Poetry Northwest, Cutbank, The Seattle Review, and Filter. She is interested in the ways poetry connects us to our bodies.
Diana Xin was born in China and grew up in Minnesota. She received an MFA in fiction from the University of Montana and a BA in creative writing from Northwestern University. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Masters Review, American Chordata, and Gulf Coast. She was a 2011-2012 fellow in Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series Program.
