Hugo House teachers are at the core of our goal to help writers become better writers. Our teachers are writers; they are selected on the basis of their active engagement in the literary world as well as their love of teaching.
Hugo House teachers are at the core of our goal to help writers become better writers. Our teachers are writers; they are selected on the basis of their active engagement in the literary world as well as their love of teaching.
Steve Almond [www.stevealmondjoy.org] is the author of a dozen books, including the NYT Bestsellers “Candyfreak” and “Against Football.” He’s the recipient of an NEA grant for 2022 and teaches at Harvard and Wesleyan. His work has been published in the Best American Short Stories, the Best American Mysteries, Best American Erotica, and the New York Times Magazine. His first novel, “Which Brings Me to You” was made into a major motion picture starring Lucy Hale. His second novel, “All the Secrets of the World,” is under development by 20th Century Fox. His new book, “Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow” is about craft, where stories come from, and the struggle to write.
Yasmine Ameli is an Iranian American writer. Her work appears in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Sun, BWR, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing and works independently as a holistic writing coach.
Website: yasmineameli.com
Instagram: @yasmineameli
Helen Anderson is a fiction writer and software designer living in Seattle. Originally from Austin, Texas, she holds a B.S. in Science, Technology & Society and an M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction.
Sini Anderson is an award-winning film director, producer, video art maker, and feminist art activist. Her films , The Punk Singer, a documentary about Kathleen Hanna & Catherine Opie b. 1961 have won Anderson several directing awards, for example for The Punk Singer, The Lena Sharpe Persistence of Vision from SIFF, Seattle International Film Festival & ARCA Best Director Award from Distrial Film Festival in Mexico City. Awards for the Opie film include, HBO’s Best Documentary Short at Provincetown International Film Festival, Excellence in American Profiles Award at the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, & the VIMEO Staff Award at OutFest Los Angeles. Andersons current project, So Sick, is a seven part documentary series that she’s been making since 2014.
DuWayne Andrews Jr., a Seattle native, joins the cast of THE KINGS GO SOUTH as Martin Luther King Jr., following extensive work on stage and as a chorus leader – including in the Seattle Opera’s The Elixir of Love, and roles as Neil Armstrong (Moon Landing 'United States premiere'-The Museum of Flight), Pontius Pilate (Jesus Christ Superstar-Tacoma Little Theatre), Bert Healy (Annie-Seattle Musical Theatre), and Eddie Souther (Sister Act-Tacoma Musical Playhouse). He will be next seen in the chorus for Seattle Opera's La Traviata in May. DuWayne would like to thank God and his family for their never-ending support.
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.
Raymond Antrobus (he/him) was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father. He’s a Cave
Canem Fellow and the author of 'To Sweeten Bitter' (UK, Out-Spoken Press), ‘The Perseverance’ (UK, Penned In The Margins / US, Tin House) and ‘All The Names Given’ (US, Tin House / UK, Picador) as well as children’s picture book ‘Can Bears Ski?’ (UK, Walker Books / US, Candlewick). He is the 2019 recipient of the Ted Hughes Award as well as the Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award, and became the first poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize. His first full-length collection, ‘The Perseverance’ was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and The Forward Prize, ‘All The Names Given’ was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize and the Costa Award. Also in 2021 his poems ‘The Perseverance’ and ‘Happy Birthday Moon’ were added to the UK’s Oxford, Cambridge and RSA ‘GCSE’ syllabus. He divides his time between London and New Orleans. Learn more at www.raymondantrobus.com.
Elizabeth (Betsy) Aoki is a poet, short story writer and game producer. Her first poetry collection, Breakpoint, was a 2019 National Poetry Series Finalist and received Tebot Bach’s Patricia Bibby First Book Award. Its signature poem, “Slouching like a velvet rope,” was selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown as the winner of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize.
She has received fellowships/grants from the City of Seattle, Artist Trust, Jackstraw Writers Program and residencies at Hedgebrook and Clarion West Writers Workshop. She currently serves as an assistant poetry editor at terrain.org and on the board of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Learn more at betsyaoki.com or follow her on twitter at @baoki.
Meredith Arena is a queer writer and interdisciplinary teaching artist from New York City with 18 years of teaching experience with youth ages 5-15, both in afterschool and school-day arts integration. She likes to challenge authority, play theater games, garden, draw and wander. Her work can be found in various journals including Longleaf Review, Entropy, Lunch Ticket, and Peatsmoke. She holds an MFA in creative writing and a Certificate in the Teaching of Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She hopes her students tune into their inherent creativity so they can access it when they most need it.
Rob Arnold is a Chamoru poet whose work has appeared in Ploughshares, Hyphen, Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, RED INK, Yes Poetry, The Ocean State Review, Peripheries, and The Volta, among others. His poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and have received support from the Somerville Arts Council, the Jack Straw Cultural Center, and Artist Trust. Rob has two decades of experience in literary publishing and related positions, most recently as the Interim Executive Director for Hugo House. Previously, he co-founded Memorious, and has worked with Ploughshares, Fence Books, Beacon Press, PEN New England, The National Poetry Series, the National Endowment for the Arts, Grid Books, and as a literary agent for Aevitas Creative Management.
Daemond Arrindell is a writer and teaching artist. Adjunct Faculty at Seattle University and Cornish College for the Arts; a 2013 Jack Straw Writer; and a 2014 VONA/Voices Writer’s Workshop fellow.
He has performed across the country and has been repeatedly commissioned by Seattle and Bellevue Arts Museums.
Ari Laurel is a fiction writer in Seattle who writes about decolonial futures, climate, and the Pacific Northwest. She primarily draws from her experience as a racial justice community organizer in Missoula and a labor organizer in Seattle. Her stories are politically motivated, reflecting a strong current of international solidarity, food sovereignty, land return, and ecological restoration. She is a 2022 Hugo House fellow, a 2022 Fernland Studios artist in residence, and a 2023 June Dodge fellow at the Mineral School.
Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Passages North, Blue Mesa Review, The Conium Review, The Toast, Duende, and more. Her short story “Farewell Address to the Last Mango in the Pacific Northwest” won first place in Blue Mesa Review’s 2021 Summer Fiction contest. This story is currently part of a larger project.
Sally Ashton is a poet, writer, teacher, and editor-in-chief of DMQ Review, an online journal featuring poetry and art. Publishing in three genres, she is the author of five books of poems including the just-released Listening to Mars (Cornerstone Press, 2024) and The Behaviour of Clocks (WordFarm, 2019). She lives in California where she taught writing at San José State University for ten years and continues to teach workshops locally, Zoom, and currently online through Hugo House. Her prose poem “4.6 Billion Years” will go to the Moon as part of the Lunar Codex project via the Griffin/VIPER mission in 2024. Learn more at www.sallyashton.com.
Jami Attenberg is the author of seven books of fiction, including: Instant Love, The Kept Man, The Melting Season, The Middlesteins, Saint Mazie, and All Grown Up. Her most recent novel is All This Could Be Yours (2019), which was included on the Best of Fall lists from People, Vogue, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, New York, Observer, Bust, Nylon, New York Post, Pop Sugar, and more.
Attenberg is also the author of the memoir I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home (2022). In this brilliant, fierce, and funny memoir of transformation, Attenberg—described as a “master of modern fiction” by Entertainment Weekly and the “poet laureate of difficult families” by Kirkus Reviews—reveals the defining moments that pushed her to create a life, and voice, she could claim for herself. What does it take to devote oneself to art? What does it mean to own one’s ideas? What does the world look like for a woman moving solo through it? Exploring themes of friendship, independence, class, and drive, I Came All This Way to Meet You is an inspiring story of finding one’s way home—emotionally, artistically, and physically—and an examination of art and individuality that will resonate with anyone determined to listen to their own creative calling.
About All This Could Be Yours, Emma Cline, author of The Girls, says, “Jami Attenberg’s work is so deeply attuned to humans and our imperfect attempts to love each other. All This Could Be Yours is populated by Attenberg’s pitch-perfect characters; flawed, recognizable people dealing with big topics–death, family, sex, love–and Attenberg handles it all with an expert touch and a keen sense of what, despite all the sadness and secrets, keeps people connected, striving for moments of beauty and tenderness in a dark world.”
Attenberg has written about food, travel, books, relationships and urban life for The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times, Slate, and others. Her work has been published in a total of sixteen languages.
She lives in New Orleans, LA.