Teachers

Kelly McWilliams is the author of the YA novels Agnes at the End of the World (2020), Mirror Girls (2022), and the forthcoming Your Plantation Prom Is Not Okay (Spring 2023, Little, Brown Young Readers). She lives in Seattle. 

Jessica Mehta, PhD is an Aniyunwiya (citizen of the Cherokee Nation) multi-disciplinary poet and artist. She recently returned from a Fulbright Senior Scholar post in Bengaluru, India where she instituted the first credit-based generative workshop for MFA students at Christ University and curated an anthology of contemporary Indian poetry written in the colonizer’s tongue. Jessica’s installation “The Red C[h]airn Project” is currently one of four pieces on exhibit at the Ucross Gallery in Wyoming. Her 16th book, “sp[RED]” is under contract with the Indigenous-owned Red Planet Books for a 2024 release. Learn more at www.thischerokeerose.com.

“Erika Meitner is the quintessential 21st century storyteller bearing witness from the vantage point of a social critic with heart, humor, and an incomparable voice.” ―Carmen Giménez Smith

“Erika Meitner is known for what’s called ‘documentary poetry,’ which combines some of the journalistic work of the reporter with the subjective renderings of the poet.” —NPR Books

“Erika Meitner…taps into national conversations on topics including motherhood, infertility, terrorism, Judaism, school shootings, the 2016 election, and race. The poems feel straightforward in a way that adds to their urgency. ” —Jewish Book Council

Poet and writer Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems and winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry. Born and raised in Queens and Long Island, NY, Meitner is a first-generation American: her father is from Haifa, Israel; her mother was born in a refugee camp in Stuttgart, Germany, which is where her maternal grandparents settled after surviving Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, and Mauthausen concentration camps. In a conversation with Rachel Zucker in Commonplace, Meitner explains that much of her work arises from a commitment to writing accurately and respectfully about the small town in which she lives, and the challenges of writing as an engaged member of her community while being an othered outsider, a poet, a Jew, and the white mother of a black son.

Her newest collection, Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA, 2018) transports readers into the heart of southern Appalachia—its highways and strip malls, its fragility and danger—as the speaker wrestles with racial tensions, religious identity, gun violence, raising children, and the anxieties of life in the 21st century. With a refusal to settle for easy answers, Meitner’s poems embrace life in an increasingly fractured society, and they never stop asking what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves. “In her graceful fifth collection, Meitner displays a sense of urgency informed by parenthood in this strange and particularly turbulent American moment. Hyper-aware of both suburban and rural landscapes, Meitner uncannily describes their features,” praises Publishers Weekly. While poet sam sax says, simply: “Holy Moly Carry Me is a triumph!”

Meitner’s first book, Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore (Anhinga Press, 2003), won the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her second book, Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), was selected as a winner of the 2009 National Poetry Series competition. Her third collection, Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls (2011) is “a sexy, funny, smart book full of crack-the-whip language’’, in the words of Beth Ann Fennelly. Meitner’s fourth collection of poems, Copia (2014), was published as part of BOA Editions’ American Poets Continuum Series. In a review of this collection, The Rumpus wrote: “When is it plenty? When is it enough? In Copia, Meitner gathers material from disparate places―big box stores, her grandmother, Yiddish speakers, her life in Blacksburg, VA, travel to Detroit―to consider these questions. The parts that she gathers, the fragments of language, the physical pieces of life, the things left behind, lost, abandoned are greater as a collection than any object individually. Things are more whole together, contained, bound. Meitner assembles plenitude only to ask, is plenty enough? That is the richness, the abundance of Copia.” Her sixth book of poems, Useful Junk, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in April 2022.

Her poetry and prose have been included in the anthologies Best American Poetry (2011), Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days (2010), and Best African American Essays (2010), The Way We Work: Contemporary Writings from the American Workplace (2008), and Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (2008), as well as many journals, including The New York Times Magazine, The Southern Review, Slate, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and APR.

Meitner also creates larger-scale documentary photo/text projects on urban environments, including “This is Not a Requiem for Detroit” and “RNC CLE,” both commissioned by and published in Virginia Quarterly Review. She is currently working on a project on Miami and sea-level rise.

Meitner attended Dartmouth College, Hebrew University, and the University of Virginia, where she received her MFA in Creative Writing as a Henry Hoyns Fellow, and her MA in Religious Studies as a Morgenstern Fellow in Jewish Studies. Meitner was a US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing and the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She was also the recipient of the 2021 Poetry Society of America’s Cecil Hemley Memorial Award.

In addition to having taught creative writing at UVA, UW-Madison, and UC-Santa Cruz, Meitner has worked as a dating columnist, an office temp, a Hebrew school instructor, a computer programmer, a systems consultant, a lifeguard, a documentary film production assistant, and a middle school teacher in the New York City public school system.

Meitner is currently a Professor of English at Virginia Tech. She lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Breona Mendoza (she/her) is an activist, sex therapist, and avid supporter of self-love in all respects of the word. She received her BA in Psychology and Gender Studies, her MA in community counseling, and has a certificate in sex therapy. She is currently working on completing a certificate in sex education and writing educational cliterature. She believes that everyone deserves accurate information about the bodies and experiences. Much of her work centers the experiences of the LGBTQ community. Now a days she spends her time providing counseling to teens, living in a community of quirky queers and contemplating ingenious ways to empower people to become more comfortable and loving with their parts.

Maggie Mertens is a writer, journalist, and editor in Seattle. Her essays and reporting have appeared in numerous national publications. Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (Algonquin Books, June 2024) is her first book.

With 25+ years of experience coaching authors and teaching at four top-ranked universities, Susan V. Meyers currently directs the Creative Writing Program at Seattle University. She holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota and a PhD from the University of Arizona, and has been a writer in residence at more than a dozen different arts centers nationally and internationally. Both her nonfiction book on immigration and her circus-centered historical novel, Failing the Trapeze, have won major awards, including the Nilsen Award and grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, 4Culture, Artist Trust, and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her essays and stories have likewise been nominated for The Best American Series and several Pushcart Prizes and have recently appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The Rumpus, Calyx, Hippocampus, and The Minnesota Review. You can find her at susanvmeyers.com

Jory Mickelson is a queer, nonbinary writer and educator who lives in the Pacific Northwest. Their first book, WILDERNESS//KINGDOM, is the inaugural winner of the Evergreen Award Tour from Floating Bridge Press and winner of the 2020 High Plains Book Award in Poetry.

Their publications include Court Green, Painted Bride Quarterly, Jubilat, Sixth Finch, The Rumpus and other journals in the United States, Canada, and the UK. They are the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and have received fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation, Winter Tangerine, Centrum Writers Conference, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico.

They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Idaho and are an alumnus of Western Washington University in Bellingham. You can find out more about them and their work at www.jorymickelson.com

Jarret Middleton is the author of Darkansas and the novella, An Dantomine Eerly. He was the founding editor of Dark Coast Press and the classics library Pharos Editions, an imprint of Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press. His fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in Shelf Awareness, The Quarterly Conversation, The Weeklings, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Collagist, SmokeLong Quarterly, and HTMLGIANT, as well as appearing in the print anthologies The Breadline Anthology; Hotel Angeline: A Novel in 36 Voices; and In Heaven, Everything is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch.

He lives in Seattle, WA.

PATRICK MILIAN is the author of The Unquiet Country, forthcoming from Entre Ríos Books, and the chapbook Pornographies. His work has recently appeared in Poetry, Gulf Coast, Carolina Quarterly, and the anthology Between Certain Death and a Possible Future, a Lambda Literary Award nominee. His musical collaborations have been performed across the country, including the song cycle The Gleaners with composer Emerson Eads, which was a finalist for the American Prize in Composition. He received his MFA and PhD from the University of Washington, where he was a Joff Hanauer Fellow. He’s newly tenured faculty at Green River College. IG: @patrick.milian 

Joseph Millar's first collection of poems, Overtime, was a finalist for the 2001 Oregon Book Award. His second collection, Fortune, appeared in 2007, followed by a third, Blue Rust, in 2012. Kingdom was released in early 2017, and his latest collection, Dark Harvest, New & Selected Poems, was released in 2021.

Millar grew up in Pennsylvania and attended Johns Hopkins University before spending 30 years in the San Francisco Bay area working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. It would be two decades before he returned to poetry. His work—stark, clean, unsparing—records the narrative of a life fully lived among fathers, sons, brothers, daughters, weddings and divorce. He has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in such magazines as DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, APR, and Ploughshares. Millar teaches in Pacific University's low-residency MFA Program and in North Carolina State's MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Danielle Mitchell (she/her) is a feminist poet, teaching artist, and entrepreneur. She is the Founding Director of The Poetry Lab, a community-based learning program that rallies in service of working class writers across the globe. Danielle is the author of Makes the Daughter-in-Law Cry, winner of the Clockwise Chapbook Prize (Tebot Bach, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Vinyl, Four Way Review, Transom, New Orleans Review, Nailed Magazine and others. Danielle has received scholarships to travel to Patmos Island, Greece to study poetry, as well as grants from Poets & Writers and the Ashaki M. Jackson No Barriers Grant from the Women Who Submit. She is the inaugural winner of the Editor's Prize from Mary Magazine and the Editor's Choice Award from The Mas Tequila Review. She has performed on stages all over Southern California including the Segerstrom Center for the Arts. Danielle holds bachelor’s degrees in Women's and Gender Studies and Creative Writing from the University of Redlands and is an alumna of the Community of Writers. She is currently working on a manuscript of poems about misogyny and the Internet.

Annesha Mitha is a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her work is published or forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, American Short Fiction, Catapult, The Margins, and The Offing. She has received fellowships from The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Kundiman, and Storyknife Writers Retreat. She currently works as a counsellor with Crisis Text Line and a content writer with the Bengali Mental Health Movement. She lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan with a hound named Flower.

Danielle Mohlman is a nationally produced playwright based in Seattle, WA. She is a company member at Dacha Theatre, where she serves as the Associate Producer of Literary Management, and a thought partner at The Trust.

Joshua Mohr is the author of five novels, including Damascus, which The New York Times called "Beat-poet cool." He’s also written Fight Song and Some Things that Meant the World to Me, one of O Magazine’s Top 10 reads of 2009 and a San Francisco Chronicle best-seller, as well as Termite Parade, an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times. His novel All This Life won the Northern California Book Award. He’s written a memoir, Sirens, and is under contract with FSG for the second installment. His next novel, Get Rich, will be published by FSG in winter 2022 and has already been optioned by Circle of Confusion Television Studios. Recently, AMC bought his noir show.