Teachers

Andrea Dunlop is an author and consultant based out of Seattle, WA with over a decade of experience in book publishing.

She began her career as an in-house publicist for Doubleday (Random House) where she worked with bestselling authors such as Tina Brown, Jonathan Lethem, Linda Fairstein, and many others.

After moving back to Seattle in 2009, she took over as publicity manager for Kim Ricketts Book Events promoting a wide range of cookbook and literary events with authors such as Laurie David, Rene Redzepi, and Steven Johnson. Next, she spent five years with an editorial and book production firm as their executive director of social media and marketing, working with both traditionally and self-published clients and spearheading the company’s marketing efforts.

Andrea is the author of three novels including Losing the Light (February 2016), She Regrets Nothing (February 2018), and the forthcoming We Came Here to Forget (July 2019) all from Atria/Simon&Schuster. Her books have been featured in Town & Country, Bustle, InStyle, US Weekly, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere. In addition to her writing and social media work, Andrea is an accomplished speaker and has presented at book and publishing conferences nationwide including The San Francisco Writers Conference, The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Conference, The Pacific Northwest Writers Association Conference, and many others.

She lives in Seattle, WA with her husband and daughter.Andrea is the author of three novels including Losing the Light (February 2016), She Regrets Nothing (February 2018), and the forthcoming We Came Here to Forget (July 2019) all from Atria/Simon&Schuster. Her books have been featured in Town & Country, Bustle, InStyle, US Weekly, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere. In addition to her writing and social media work, Andrea is an accomplished speaker and has presented at book and publishing conferences nationwide including The San Francisco Writers Conference, The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Conference, The Pacific Northwest Writers Association Conference, and many others.

She lives in Seattle, WA with her husband and daughter.

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.

Teresa Dzieglewicz is a Pushcart Prize-winning poet, educator, and lover of rivers and prairies. She is a fellow with Black Earth Institute, a Poet-in-Residence at the Chicago Poetry Center, and part of the founding team of Mni Wichoni Nakicizin Wounspe (Defenders of the Water School). With Natasha Mijares, she organizes "Watershed: Ways of Seeing the Chicago River". Her first book of poetry, Something Small of How to See a River was selected by Tyehimba Jess for the Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press). Her first children's book, Belonging, co-written with Kimimila Locke, is forthcoming from Chronicle Books. She has won a Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, the Gingko Prize, the Auburn Witness Prize, and the Palette Poetry Prize and has received fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Community of Writers at Tahoe, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, and Brooklyn Poets. Teresa lives with her family in Chicago, on Potawatomi land. 

Howie Echo-Hawk is a Queer, nonbinary “comedian” and all around Native person. All writing is FOR INDIGENOUS PEOPLE. insta/twitter: @howieechohawk.

Originally from Seattle, Washington, Spoken Word Poet/ Emcee and Teaching Artist Rajnii Eddins has been engaging diverse community audiences for over 27 years. He was the youngest member of the Afrikan American Writers Alliance at age 11 and has been actively sharing with youth and community in Vermont since 2010. His latest work Their Names Are Mine aims to confront white supremacy while emphasizing the need to affirm our mutual humanity.

Suzanne Edison, MA, MFA is a poet, educator and former therapist. She has led workshops for parents and medical professionals on the effects of chronic illness on families at Seattle Children’s Hospital (SCH), NIH, and at national conferences for the Cure JM Foundation. She created a writing group for parents of kids with chronic illness at SCH, and the workshop “Teens Writing from the Heart of Illness & Healing” at Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. Her recent chapbook, The Body Lives Its Undoing, was published in 2018 by The Benaroya Research Institute. It is an exploration in poetry and visual art about autoimmune diseases based on interviews with researchers, doctors, patients and caregivers.

Suzanne is the recipient of grants from Artist Trust, 4Culture of King County, Seattle Office of Arts and Culture and will be a Hedgebrook fellow in Fall of 2019.

Some of Suzanne’s work can be found in her first chapbook, The Moth Eaten World, and in the following journals and anthologies: Michigan Quarterly Review; Naugatuck River Review; JAMA; CMAJ; The Healing Art of Writing, Vol. I; The Examined Life Journal; Face to Face: Women Writers on Faith, Mysticism and Awakening. Her work can be read online in various other journals and on her website. www.seedison.com

Writers I Return To: Louise Gluck, Wislawa Szymborska, Rachel Zucker, Seamus Heaney, Galway Kinnell

Favorite Writing Advice: Read, write, read, write

Jennifer Egan is the author of six previous books of fiction: Manhattan Beach, winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Keep; the story collection Emerald City; Look at Me, a National Book Award Finalist; and The Invisible Circus. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, McSweeney’s, and The New York Times Magazine. Her website is JenniferEgan.com.

Amanda Eke is a Nigerian American Broadcast Journalist/Anchor, Artist, Spoken Word Poet, Film-Maker, and Educator. She has won numerous awards including a Fulbright Fellowship and a UN (United Nations) Award for her work. Her touring workshop series, "The Poet Speaks" is an engaging experience into the culture of Spoken Word, rhyme, and tradition, held for all ages. Amanda has performed, taught and toured as a Spoken Word Poet and Educator globally in countries like Trinidad and Tobago, Nepal, and the USA, just to name a few. Amanda is also the host and creator of the popular podcast show of the same name, The Poet Speaks Podcast, named as one of Strategic Media Inc's "Top 5 Podcasts by Black Creators”, which has her speaking to Spoken Word Artists and Poet Laureates from all over the world.

Abie Ekenezar (Va/Them) is an actress, singer, screenwriter and director living in Seattle, WA with an extensive background resume and has been in the entertainment industry professionally with IMDB credits since September 2013. Abie came on board with the agency Big Fish Northwest to work with the next generation of professional TV and Film professionals on the show Strowlers which is a fantasy film project released by Zombie Orpheus Entertainment. 

They have been involved with such other projects as Grimm, Man In The High Castle, Librarians, Portlandia, JourneyQuest and even Z-Nation, filmed in Spokane, Wa along with having a multiple of undisclosed future projects filmed now and the rest of 2022. They directed Prefer-Racial Treatment in 2020 and produced in December 2020 the film short, Outlawz and in 2023, the multiple award winning documentary Bad Ass Women Doing Kick Ass Shit with more projects in the 2024.

Omar El Akkad is an award-winning journalist and author whose debut novel, American War, was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, NPR, Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of a hundred novels that changed our world. His second novel, What Strange Paradise, won the Giller Prize and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award.

Jasminé Elizabeth Smith is an Oklahoma poet, educator, and facilitator now residing in Seattle, Washington. She is a Cave Canem and Black Earth Institute fellow and a recipient of the 2025 National Endowment of the Arts in Poetry. Her poetic work interrogates the archives of the African Diaspora in various historical contexts and eras and finds the critical linkages between the past and present. Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been featured in publications such as Poetry, World Literature Today, and This is the Honey: A Contemporary Poetry Anthology of Black Poetry, among others. Her debut collection, South Flight (University of Georgia Press, 2020), was the winner of the Georgia Poetry Prize. 

Mary Ellen's poems have been published in over 100 journals and anthologies. Her poems have received three Pushcart nominations and her chapbook, Postcards from the Lilac City, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020. After earning both her BA and MSPA at the University of Washington, she spent four decades serving students with communication disabilities in Federal Way and Seattle public schools as a speech-language pathologist (SLP). Her reviews of poetry collections appear widely.

Allison Ellis’ writing has been published in The New York Times, The Ploughshares blog, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Amazon Original Stories, SELF, Marie Claire, Redbook, and The Washington Post. In 2016, her essay, “Hold On” won the Pacific Northwest Writers Association Literary Award in the short nonfiction category, and her forthcoming memoir, Ready About is the 2021 recipient of the First Pages Prize/Sandra Carpenter Prize for Creative Nonfiction. She holds an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars (2021) and a BA from Smith College in American Studies. Read more of her work at allisonellis.com

DEREK ENGEN is a first-year MFA student at UW-Seattle. He is an amateur poet and an amateurer fly fisher. His poetry manuscript, Thus We Bow, was a finalist for the 2022 Emelia Ferrara Honors Thesis Award at Georgetown University. He was published in Young Writers of America in 2011, although it was likely not his best work.