Teachers

Alma Garcia is the author of All That Rises (University of Arizona Press, 2023). Her short fiction has appeared as an award-winner in Narrative Magazine, Enizagam, Passages North, and Boulevard; has most recently appeared in phoebe, Kweli Journal, Duende, and Bluestem; and appears in anthologies including Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century (Cutthroat Journal of the Arts). She is a past recipient of a fellowship from the Rona Jaffe Foundation. She is a fiction instructor and manuscript consultant at Hugo House.

Describe your teaching style.

My teaching style is energetic, enthusiastic, encouraging, supportive, and (hopefully!) fun.

Diego, known as @Agitprop_poet, crafts verse that agitates, illuminates, and refuses to look away. His poetry blends political urgency with lyrical precision, drawing from lived experience, collective memory, and radical imagination. Whether on stage or the page, Diego’s work challenges silence and celebrates resistance. He’s performed across the Pacific Northwest and beyond, building community through word and witness. Expect poems that provoke, mourn, and mobilize. 

Cass Garison is a poet & artist. Their chapbook, Beauty Exasperated, was recently published through Common Meter Press. They have an MFA from University of Washington, Seattle, and host an annual retreat for poets & artists in Darrington, Washington. Find more about them, their paintings, & their poems at CassGarison.com

Reggie Garrett has been performing throughout the U.S. and Canada for a number of years. Based in Seattle, Washington he performs mostly original songs mixed with pop covers and more traditional style folk ballads. He is the purveyor of a unique urban strain of (mostly) acoustic music incorporating a number of diverse influences, including: Folk, Latin rhythms, Blues, Gospel, Celtic, Rock, Jazz and more. The result is a musical blend that has excited and touched audiences throughout the U.S. and Canada. 

He is the founder of Reggie Garrett & the SnakeOil Peddlers (his performing ensemble). The band travel and perform regularly as an acoustic trio (including Richard Middleton on lead guitar and Will Dowd on percussion) and as an acoustic/electric quartet with the addition of bassist Keith Lowe. From Pistol River, OR to Rock Island, IL; from Duncan, BC Canada to San Luis Obispo, CA the group has delighted audiences of all ages. 

Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His new poem, Be Holding, was released from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September of 2020. His collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019.

Ross is also the co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook "Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens," in addition to being co-author, with Rosechard Wehrenberg, of the chapbook, "River." He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin', in addition to being an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press. Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. He also works on The Tenderness Project with Shayla Lawson and Essence London. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ross teaches at Indiana University.

Darien Hsu Gee is the author of five novels published by Penguin Random House, translated into eleven languages, and is currently in contract for an Object Lessons book, Fortune Cookie (Bloomsbury). In 2022, she served as executive editor for Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World. Her work has earned a Bronze IPPY award for her micro essay collection Allegiance (2021), a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Other Small Histories (2019), and a Hawaiʻi Book Publishers’ Ka Palapala Poʻokela Award for Writing the Hawaiʻi Memoir (2015). She teaches the art of micro on her Substack, Writer-ish, and lives with her family on the island of Hawaiʻi.

Websites: dariengee.com and writerish.substack.com

Nicole J. Georges is a writer, illustrator, podcaster, and professor. Her Lambda Award-winning graphic memoir, Calling Dr. Laura, was called “engrossing, lovable, smart and ultimately poignant” by Rachel Maddow. Nicole’s second graphic memoir, Fetch :How a Bad Dog Brought Me Home, is currently being developed for television. Nicole is the creator of the podcast Relative Fiction with Oregon Public Broadcasting, and hosts a weekly queer feminist art podcast, Sagittarian Matters. This is her third Sister Spit tour.

EMILY GIANGIULIO is a writer from Philadelphia currently working toward an MFA in prose at the University of Washington. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Bennington Review and Hayden’s Ferry Review, and has recently been nominated for the 2023 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and the Pushcart Prize. When not writing, she frequents the tide pools along the Washington coast and tends to her growing family of plants. You can find her at https://emilygiangiulio.com. 

Kaelie Giffel, Ph.D., is the author of the academic memoir, University for a Good Woman. She writes about feminism, literature, and travel. You can find her writing published and forthcoming in Public Books, Full Stop, Oh Reader, SOLO Travel, and other places. She currently lives in Helena, MT where you can find her lifting weights and visiting hot springs.

Describe your teaching style.

My classes revolve around discussion: while I prepare mini-lectures, discussion questions, and have destinations in mind, classes are at their best when everyone comes with thoughts about the reading and about their own writing. In that way, what you get out of the class is commensurate with what you put in. We also move between discussing craft and having broader conversations about the content of a work because you cannot separate the two. Finally, I always end class with writing prompts to help generate material related to our discussions that students can work up into more polished pieces.

Jessica Gigot is a poet, farmer, and coach. She lives on a little sheep farm in the Skagit Valley. Her second book of poems, Feeding Hour (Wandering Aengus Press, 2020), won a Nautilus Award and was a finalist for the 2021 Washington State Book Award. Jessica’s writing and reviews appear in several publications, such as Orion, The New York Times, The Seattle Times, Ecotone, Terrain.org, Gastronomica, Crab Creek Review, and Poetry Northwest. She is currently a poetry editor for The Hopper and a 2022 Jack Straw Writer. Her latest work is A Little Bit of Land, published by Oregon State University Press.

Marianne is a musician and mixed-media experimenter from Hermosillo, MX. Their work serves as a vessel of self-discovery that explores regret, change, nostalgia, and liberation. Marianne finds the challenge of expression across mediums exciting; It is discomfort met with reassurance and the attraction of learning something new. They are currently based out of Seattle as co-founder of indie multimedia collective HYPERboy.  

Anis is your hot gay dad. According to their titas, they are and always have been masyadong suplada, masungit, walang hiya. They write about surviving sexual violence, which is to say, they write about returning to trust. They are disliked, disbelieved, and less and less afraid. Follow their instagram attempts @artista_anisgisele.

c.r. glasgow (doc/she/we) is a non-binary, queer, first-generation Afro-Caribbean-American healing artist, writer, and educator. c’s work has been supported by fellowships and craft shops through Hugo House, VONA, The Watering Hole, Hurston/Wright, and Anaphora. We have also been the recipient of the Haitian Heritage Scholarship through VONA in 2021. Their chapbook the Devils that raised Us was longlisted at Frontier Poetry. c’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Killens Review, Black Lawrence Press, Breathe, Moko: Caribbean Arts & Letters, and Rigorous Magazine; and performances with Butch Is Not a Dirty Word, Leaf Lit Live!, Brooklyn Yawp, LitCrawl Seattle, and the Seattle Public Library, Hugo House, and Elliott Bay Book Company. With nearly 20 years as a healing artist, doc supports the global majority in addressing grief, liminal space, and intergenerational and ancestral traumas towards a path of embodied liberation.  

Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet is the author of The Greenhouse (Frost Place Chapbook Prize) and Tulips, Water, Ash (Morse Poetry Prize). Her poems have appeared in journals including Plume, Zyzzyva, and Kenyon Review and anthologies including Nasty Women Poets and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. She holds a BA in contemporary American literature from Yale University and an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, where she was a Javits Fellow. Lisa lives in Portland, OR, where she reads, writes, edits, parents, and cohosts the literary reading series Lilla Lit. (lisagluskinstonestreet.com)