Teachers

Rhea Melina (she/her) is a multi-ethnic poet, birth-worker, parent, herbalist, educator, and hopeful romantic. Her chapbooks include a place to put things (Bottlecap Press, 2023), Not My Wasteland (Bone Machine, 2024), and Ballard Coyote(Scumbag Press, 2025). Her poems have been published by Elizabeth Ellen’s Hobart, Gnashing Teeth, Literary Underground, Hare’s Paw Journal, Fiilthy Glo, Blood+Honey, Text Power Telling, and Papers Pub, among others, and her poem "Faith," calling for a free Palestine, was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She believes that all illegal occupations and wars should cease and refuses to settle for less. found confetti is her first full-length collection and is available now from Carbonation Press and www.antiquatedfuture.com.

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.

Born in the North and raised in the South by native Dutch and Indian parents, Natasha Kochicheril Moni writes and resides in the Columbia River Gorge. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews have been published in over 70 magazines, anthologies, and journals including DIAGRAM, Indiana Review, Verse, The Rumpus, and Entropy. Natasha's poetry collections include The Cardiologist's Daughter (Two Sylvias Press, 2014), Lay Down Your Fleece (Shirt Pocket Press, 2017), Nearly (dancing girl press, 2018), and A Nation (Imagined) (winner of the 2018 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Competition, 2018). As a former editor for Crab Creek Review, panelist for Artist Trust and Hedgebrook, and intern at Small Press Distribution Books, Natasha enjoys mentoring writers on their submission and publication journeys.

Website: natashamoni.com

Amanda is the author, most recently, of TOUCHED OUT: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, & Control, available now from Beacon Press. Her work has been featured at The New York Times, The Guardian, Elle, Time, The Cut, Mother Tongue, Slate, Electric Literature, Vox, Rumpus, Salon, The Believer, Ms. Magazine, Poetry Foundation, and in numerous literary journals. She was a 2020 Best American Essays notable.

She has taught, lectured and presented work at Stanford University, Columbia University, New York University, University of California Berkeley, University of Chicago, St. Mary's College of California, California State University East Bay, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, University of Virginia, State University of New York at Buffalo, Diablo Valley College, and many others. Amanda has been teaching for over a decade at the college level and at various arts organizations, including at Catapult, Corporeal Writing, Hugo House, Writing Workshops, and Write or Die. Her work has received support from In Cahoots, Riverrun Foundation, and Juniper Writer’s Institute.

She holds an MFA in Writing from California Institute of the Arts and a PhD in English literature from SUNY at Buffalo. She runs the popular newsletter Mad Woman and lives in California.

José Luis Montero is a technologist by trade and a bilingual writer by choice. Born and raised in México but having spent most of his adulthood in Seattle, his passion for storytelling transcends any medium, leading him to explore radio, photography, and filmmaking before directing his artistic focus to the written word. In addition to holding a BS in computer science and an MBA, he earned a certificate in Literary Fiction from the University of Washington and a Masters in Narrative and Poetry from Escuela de Escritores in Madrid. After returning from Spain, he interned at Copper Canyon Press and served as an assistant editor for Narrative Magazine before joining the Jack Straw Writers Program in 2021. He was president of the board for Seattle Escribe, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting Spanish literature, and he currently serves as president for the board of Seattle City of Literature, the nonprofit that manages Seattle’s designation as a UNESCO City of Literature.