Teachers

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

Kevin Emerson is the author of twenty-two novels for middle grade and YA readers. His novel LAST DAY ON MARS was listed by the American Library Association as one of the Top 50 Middle Grade Novels of the 21st Century and made the LITA List for Excellence in Science Fiction, as well as numerous State award lists. Kevin has taught for Hugo House and Seattle Arts and Lectures' Writers in the Schools program. He is also a singer-songwriter, playing around town with pop projects Model Shop and Particular Ferns. 

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. 

Alayna Erhart is a biracial Chinese American artist based in Seattle, Washington. Her mediums of filmmaking, photography, music, and writing are guided by her conviction to celebrate the bold, brave, and tender truths that make us human. She is currently developing the manuscript for her memoir.

Jonathan Escoffery is the author of If I Survive You, a debut collection of linked stories forthcoming in September 2022 from MCDxFSG, as well as the forthcoming novel, Play Stone Kill Bird. Both books will be published in the UK and Commonwealth by 4th Estate Books, in Canada by McClelland and Stewart, and will be published in translation in France by Albin Michel and in Germany by Piper Verlag.

Escoffery is the winner of The Paris Review’s 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and is the recipient of a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts (Prose) Literature Fellowship. His story “Under the Ackee Tree” was among the trio that won the Paris Review the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction from the American Society of Magazine Editors, and was subsequently included in The Best American Magazine Writing 2020. His most recent stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Zyzzyva and American Short Fiction.

 Escoffery has taught creative writing and seminars on the writer’s life at Stanford University, the University of Minnesota, the Center for Fiction, Tin House, Writers in Progress, and at GrubStreet in Boston, where, as former staff, he founded the Boston Writers of Color Group, which currently has more than 2,000 members. He has received support and honors from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, Aspen Words, Kimbilio Fiction, the Anderson Center, and elsewhere. 

 For Writers of the World, Jonathan reflected on his love of the short story form: “I first fell in love with story’s ability to transport, to expand the borders of my reality. I recall crouching beneath my parents’ kitchen counter as a child, losing Sunday afternoons reading. That words printed between book covers could take me to far off worlds, on journeys that left me forever changed, was, to me, nothing short of magic. I also sensed perfection in the economy of these world-altering journeys; their being beautifully bound to fit in my palms. Later, I came to understand that great literature does not simply transport, but that it also helps me understand myself, and that—at its best—it helps me to better articulate my experiences and helps me further understand those of others.”

 He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s Creative Writing MFA Program (Fiction) and attends the University of Southern California’s Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature Program as a Provost Fellow. He is a 2021-2023 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Tasha Essen is a multiracial Asian with family roots in Korea, Russia, and China. Tasha was born in Seattle to an immigrant/refugee family. She’s been on a journey of healing from intergenerational trauma arising from war, occupation, and displacement. Her therapy includes writing, chanting, meditating, and doting on her small dogs.

ANDREW FELD is the author of two books of poetry, most recently Raptor (University of Chicago Press, 2012). His work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Yale Review and many other journals, and has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry series and several editions of the Pushcart: Best of the Small Presses. His other honors include a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and the “Discovery” / The Nation Award. The former Editor-in-Chief of the Seattle Review, he is an Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing at the University of Washington. He is currently working on a prose work, an as-yet-untitled auto/biography of his mother.

Dedi Felman is a writer/director born and raised in the wilds of NJ. A member of the inaugural class of the HBO Access Writing Fellowship, she attended the UCLA Professional Program in Screenwriting and teaches TV writing for Script Anatomy. Previously, Dedi worked in publishing as a senior editor at Simon & Schuster and an executive editor at Oxford University Press. Titles she’s developed have been The New York Times and The Washington Post bestsellers and have won the Bancroft Prize, the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, and the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism prize, and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She continues to freelance consult on book projects at Book Doctor West. Her espionage drama short, "Allegiance", was a finalist at the USA Film Festival and voted a Kickstarter "Project We Love." She is currently working on two features, American Holler, a heist movie, and a contained sci-fi drama, The Immortalists.

Julie Feng is a poet, communications strategist, and scholar of stories. She holds a M.A. in Cultural Studies and is an incoming Ph.D. student in Communication at the University of Washington. Julie currently serves as the Director of Communications for Scholar Fund, supporting resources for communities of color and immigrant communities. Her work has appeared in Winter Tangerine, Pacifica Literary Review, Wildness, Quaint Magazine, and more.