Teachers

Laura Da’ is a poet and teacher who studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is the author of Tributaries, American Book Award winner, Instruments of the True Measure, Washington State Book Award winner, and Severalty. Da’ is Eastern Shawnee and she lives in Washington with her family.

Sarah Dalton is a Latina writer, editor, and teacher. She is an alumna of VONA, Macondo, and San Jose State. Her nonfiction has appeared in [pank], MUTHA Magazine, Reed, River Teeth's Beautiful Things, and The Sun's Readers Write.

Molly Damm is a Writing lecturer at Montana State University, as well as a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor in private practice in Bozeman, Montana. Her work has appeared in the Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, Terrain.org, and Western Humanities Review, among other publications. She is the author of the poetry collection Ground-truth (Finishing Line Press, 2018), and was a Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia, where she earned her MFA.

Lilly Dancyger is the author of Negative Space (2021), a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards; and the editor of Burn It Down (2019), a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women's anger from Seal Press. She is currently at work on an essay collection about the power and complexity of female friendship. Lilly's writing has been published by Guernica, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Longreads, The Washington Post, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. She lives in New York City, and you can find her on Twitter at @lillydancyger.

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. 

With songs that sound like Top 40 hits but read like tarot cards, Brittany Danielle, who has been playing piano since 8-years-old and boasts a graduate degree in music, creates compositions that touch opposite sides of the spectrum. On Danielle’s debut LP, which she will unveil in 2022, many of the tracks were born from the pandemic and the song exercises that kept her sane throughout. Woven together with truths about her mental health (and its own unraveling), the songs represent growth, new connections.  

Danielle, who has played in popular bands in Seattle like Purr Gato, graced stages like The Tractor Tavern and those abroad in cities as far away as Germany, has worked in children’s theater and performed in musicals, too. She’s a quilt of experience held with uneasy stitching. At times her songs sound like a stroll down a city street, others like the corners of your consciousness. Standouts include the unburdening, “Hindsight,” and sauntering, “Nothing.” But don’t fret. In the end, of course, she’s got the world dancing on a line. 

Makayla Danielle Gay hails from Southeastern Kentucky. Her work has appeared in Adroit, Prairie Schooner, and American Literary Review, among others. Her debut collection, Hackles (Girl Noise Press 2025) is available now.

Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, Claire of the Sea Light, and The Dew Breaker. She is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow and a 2020 winner of the Vilceck Prize. Her most recent work, the story collection Everything Inside, is a 2020 winner of the Bocas Fiction Prize, the Story Prize, and the National Books Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

Kimberly Dark is the author of Fat, Pretty, and Soon to be Old, The Daddies, Love and Errors, and Damaged Like Me. Her essays, stories, and poetry are widely published in academic and popular online publications alike. Visit www.kimberlydark.com for more information.

April Dávila is an award-winning author and certified mindfulness instructor. Writer's Digest listed her blog (at aprildavila.com) as one of their Best 101 Websites for Writers. She is the creator of Sit Write Here, a mindset-first coaching program for writers. She is a practicing Buddhist, half-hearted gardener, and occasional runner.

Lauren Davis is the author of The Milk of Dead Mothers (YesYes Books, forthcoming), and the poetry collections Home Beneath the Church (Fernwood Press) and When I Drowned (Aldrich Press). She holds an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars.

Holly Day has worked as a freelance writer for over 30 years, with over 7,000 articles, poems, and short stories published internationally, including in Analog SF, Harvard Review, and Maintenant. She has had several dozen books and chapbooks published by both major and independent publishers, most recently, the nonfiction books, Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, Tattoo FAQ, and History Lover’s Guide to Minneapolis; and the poetry books, A Book of Beasts, The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body, Bound in Ice, and Cross-Referencing a Book of Summer. Her writing has been nominated for a National Magazine Award, a 49th Parallel Prize, an Isaac Asimov Award, multiple Pushcart awards, and a Rhysling Award, and she has received two Midwest Writer’s Grants, a Plainsongs Award, the Sam Ragan Prize for Poetry, and the Dwarf Star Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association.

Describe your teaching style.

My goal is for students to feel comfortable exploring the process of writing and making themselves happy with their writing, and not worry about making _me_ or anyone else happy with their writing. I try to help students find their own voice during the writing process.

Tamara Dean is passionate about helping writers tell their stories. Her work has appeared in The American Scholar, Creative Nonfiction, The Guardian, Orion, Seneca Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She's also the author of The Human-Powered Home. More at www.tamaradean.media

Kendra DeColo is the author of I am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World (BOA Editions, 2021), My Dinner with Ron Jeremy (Third Man Books, 2016) and Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia Books, 2014), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of a 2019 Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and has received awards and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Millay Colony, Split this Rock, and the Tennessee Arts Commission. Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Tin House Magazine, Waxwing, Los Angeles Review, Bitch Magazine, VIDA, and elsewhere. She is co-host of the podcast RE/VERB: A Third Man Books Production and she lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Claire Dederer is the bestselling author of two critically acclaimed memoirs: Love and Trouble and Poser. Her new nonfiction book, Monsters, is based on her viral Paris Review essay "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?" Monsters will be published by Knopf in April 2023. Claire's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Nation, Vogue, Slate, and many other publications. She is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency and is currently on the faculty of the Creative Writing MFA at Pacific University.

Rebecca Delacruz-Gunderson is a mixed Filipina & White Washingtonian. Since graduating from Williams College in 2018, she has served as Field Director for State Senator T’wina Nobles’ campaign, worked at The Bush School, lived in Singapore, and taught writing classes. Currently working toward a Masters in English at UBC, she will be returning to Bush as an English teacher & college counselor this fall. Her work has been published in Entropy.

Before joining Hugo House as Executive Director, Diana Delgado was most recently Literary Director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center in Tucson. Diana is a bilingual Spanish-speaking poet and arts administrator committed to diversifying the literary ecosystem. A first-generation Latinx college graduate, she earned a BFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia. She is a Hedgebrook alum, and her volume of poetry, Tracing the Horse, was a New York Times New & Noteworthy pick. Diana has worked for nonprofit organizations including the Coalition for Hispanic Family Services in Brooklyn, NY, and the William J. Clinton Non-Profit Foundation.