Teachers

Intisaar is a Seattle-based Palestinian-American singer/songwriter/guitarist. She is most known for her emotive and unique melody lines, powerful vocal range, and interesting chord progressions. When playing live, she is an acoustic/electric powerhouse that commands the room with the vulnerability and charm of a 90s female icon, and can still lighten the mood with humor and grace between songs. She has played famed Seattle venues like The Crocodile, The Moore, Neumos, The Sunset, and The Nectar Lounge, and toured across the US with her 2015 debut album, Borrowed Ground.

Ramón Isao is a recipient of the Tim McGinness Award for Fiction, as well as fellowships from Artist Trust and Jack Straw Cultural Center. His stories appear in such journals as The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, Moss, and Hobart, and his screen credits include ZMD and Dead Body. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and serves as Fiction Editor at New Orleans Review.

The Go Janes feature ukulele, guitar, and generous doses of delicious harmony vocals. 

We have decades of experience as creative artists, community organizers, educators and inquisitive consumers of life. Arni and Patrice are members of the satirical trio Uncle Bonsai; Kathleen Tracy is an accomplished solo artist and community chorus director. Patrice has produced the Wintergrass Festival almost from its inception. Arni and Patrice are also visual artists. and Arni and Kathleen are both sought after educators and coaches working with children, adults and the differently-abled. 

Our writing ranges from tender and sweet love tributes to the simple act of being human with each other, to how weird it is that magicians used to (pretend to) saw women in half for entertainment. From monkey-infested golf courses in India, and what that teaches us about how to greet life’s challenges, to letting go of our independent children, and losing those we love in more lasting ways. Along the way we pay homage to our ancestors and to each others’ most idiosyncratic selves. And there are knife-throwers, and howling dogs, and how the pandemic made us fight with each other (and ourselves). 

Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of the interdisciplinary collaboration (with visual artist Carrie DeBacker) Alchemy For Cells & Other Beasts, the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees, and the poetry collection Rust Fish; her prose appears in such places as Brevity and Gettysburg Review. Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation as well as a Residency in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Maya is Associate Professor of English for Central Washington University, and Affiliate Poetry Faculty for Western Colorado University's low-res MFA. Find Maya on Twitter @MayaJZeller.

Sonora Jha is the author of four books, including the novel The Laughter, winner of the 2024 Washington State Book Award. Her previous books are the novel Foreign (2013) and the memoir How To Raise A Feminist Son (2021). After a career as a journalist covering crime, politics, and culture in India and Singapore, she moved to the United States to earn a Ph.D. in media and public affairs. Sonora’s work has been featured in The New York Times, on the BBC, in literary anthologies, and elsewhere. She is a Loyola Endowed Professor at Seattle University and lives in Seattle. Her new novel, Intemperance, will be out from Harper Via in October 2025.

Nanya Jhingran is a poet, scholar and teacher from Lucknow, India currently living by the coastal margin of the Salish Sea, on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish People (upon which the city of Seattle was built). She is an Associate Editor at Poetry Northwest, where she edits the book reviews section. Her recent work can be found or is forthcoming in Seventh Wave, Poetry Northwest, and Honey Literary, among others. You can find her online at nanyajhingran.com

Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast, which was longlisted for The Story Prize. Her fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Lightspeed, Pleiades, khōréō, The Florida Review Online, Reckoning, Wigleaf, Baffling Magazine, and the anthologies Best Microfiction 2021 & 2022, Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness, and Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest. A graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Ruth served as the 2020-2022 Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House and co-organized the Fight for Our Lives performance series. In 2023, she will be a visiting writer at University of Washington Bothell. 

Describe your teaching style.

In generative classes, I like to give students a lot of opportunities to try things out and experiment with unfamiliar styles with the help of gentle guidance and examples. Students may be introduced to new concepts but will have lots of time to ask questions and experiment during class time.