Teachers

Rasheena Fountain is an essayist and poet from Chicago's west side communities Austin and K-Town. She has been published in Hobart, Crazyhorse, Penumbra Online, Jelly Bucket, The Roadrunner Review, and more. She currently studies and teaches at the University of Washington Seattle and is working on a multi-genre memoir about nature, environmental justice, decolonization, land, and Blackness.

Teré Fowler-Chapman (he/they) is a poet, cultural worker, and youth advocate whose work focuses on mental health and their experience as a black, transgendered man. He is a Marsha P. Johnson Fellow, National Arts Strategies’ Creative Community Fellow, and Rocky Mountain Regional Emmy Award nominee. His first full-length poetry book, "M O O N S H i N E," was released by R&R Press in October. You can find Teré’s work in the Huffington Post, the University of Arizona’s VOCA, TEDxTucson, Tucson Weekly, Arizona Public Media’s PBS & NPR, AutoStraddle, and more. Website: terethepoet.com | Photo Credit: Zach Oren.

Describe your teaching style.

Relaxed and approachable.

Gabriela Denise Frank is a Pacific Northwest writer, editor, and creative writing instructor. Her essays, interviews, and fiction, explore identity, feminism, aging, belonging, creative practice, and ancestors. Her work appears in True Story, HAD, Poetry Northwest, Pembroke, DIAGRAM, Hunger Mountain, Bayou, Baltimore Review, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her essay “BAD DATE” was named a Notable Essay of 2020 by Best American Essays. Gabriela’s work is supported by grants, fellowships, and residencies from 4Culture, Artist Trust, The Civita Institute, Centrum, Invoking the Pause, Jack Straw Cultural Center, Marble House, Mineral School, Vermont Studio Center, and Willapa Bay. In 2009, she enrolled in her first Hugo House class, which reignited her writing life. Off the page, her literary art installations and performances transform stories into multisensory experiences. Her writing is rooted in place and landscape, a result of her career in architecture and urban design in the western United States. An advocate for public arts and artists, she serves as an arts commissioner for the City of Burien, on the arts advisory committee of 4Culture, and as creative nonfiction editor for Crab Creek Review. For more information go to gabrieladenisefrank.com.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/civitaveritas/  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CivitaVeritas

Describe your teaching style.

I center each class meeting on a theme matched with a constraint, a prompt, or a form. (Oftentimes, we'll do two or three writes per session.) As a prose writer of essays and creative nonfiction, I often draw poetry and poetic approaches into my classes because I believe the granular focus on language and form helps us craft stronger prose.

Melissa Freeman is a writer, lawyer, mindfulness teacher, and entrepreneur. She is the founder of The Container Community, a guided journaling community based in Seattle, Washington. She is known for her ability to facilitate grounding spaces for reflection and connection, her unique approach to mindful growth, and her warm, belly laugh.

Melissa founded The Container Community in 2020 as an antidote to the isolation of lockdown and to respond to the eternal need to find authentic and meaningful connection, both with ourselves and others. She had previously left her career in law after her own self-discovery journey left her wanting something more.

Over the past two years, Melissa has guided dozens of groups and teams through her unique self-reflection process. She’s a big believer in the wisdom and insight contained within each individual, and the power of growing together in community.

Melissa graduated with highest honors from the University of California, Davis with a B.A. in English, and holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Camellia Han Freeman is a Seattle-based writer and community educator. Past honors include notable mention in Best American Essays, Image’s Milton Postgraduate Fellowship, Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and a summer residency in Provincetown.

Leora Fridman is author of My Fault, in addition to other books of prose, poetry, and translation. Work appears in the New York Times, the Rumpus, and the Believer, among others. She is currently faculty associate in the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University, and Curator in Residence at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. For more information check out Leora's website: www.leorafridman.com

Kim Fu is the author of, most recently, the story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, which received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Foreword, Booklist, and Quill and Quire. Her first novel, For Today I Am a Boy, won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, as well as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her second novel, The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the OLA Evergreen Award. Fu’s writing has appeared in Granta, the Atlantic, the New York Times, BOMB, Hazlitt, and the TLS. She lives in Seattle.

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Learn more on Levi Fuller's website!

Jeannine Hall Gailey is a poet with multiple sclerosis who served as the 2nd Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She's the author of six books of poetry: Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, Field Guide to the End of the World, winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and the Elgin Award, and the upcoming Flare, Corona from BOA Editions. She has a B.S. in Biology and M.A. in English from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA from Pacific University. Her work appeared in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Her web site is www.webbish6.com. Twitter and Instagram: @webbish6.