Teachers

Bethany C Morrow is an Indie Bestselling author who writes for adult and young adult audiences, in genres ranging from speculative literary to contemporary fantasy to historical. She is the author of the novels Mem and A Song Below Water, which is an Audie, Ignyte, and Locus finalist. She is editor/contributor to the young adult anthology Take the Mic, the 2020 ILA Social Justice in Literature award winner. Her work has been chosen as Indies Introduce and Indie Next picks, and featured in The LA Times, Forbes, Bustle, Buzzfeed, and more. She is included on USA TODAY's list of 100 Black novelists and fiction writers you should read.

Karla K. Morton has fifteen poetry collections. A National Heritage Wrangler Award Winner, Foreword Book of the Year Award winner, twice a Next Generation Indie National Book Award winner, Betsy Colquitt award winner, E2C Grant recipient, and shortlisted for the Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Prize, she’s published in journals such as American Life in Poetry, Alaska Quarterly Review, Arkansas Review, Southword, descant, Boulevard, Comstock Review, Lascaux Review, Grub Street, Right Hand Pointing, New Ohio Review, and many more. Her poetry book with fellow laureate Alan Birkelbach about the National Parks “The National Parks: A Century of Grace” (TCU Press) has just entered its second printing in less than one year of release. It is very historic, as there has never been a book of poetry written about all 62 National Parks in-situ to help culturally preserve and protect them for the next seven generations. 

Her most recent book, “Politics of the Minotaur” won the 2022 Firebird Book Award for Poetry, the poetry Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and is short-listed for the International Rubery Book Award. She was named Texas Poet Laureate in 2010. 

Peter Mountford is the author of the novels A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (2012 Washington State Book Award in fiction), and The Dismal Science (a NYT editor's choice). His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Southern Review, The Atlantic, The Sun, Granta, and The Missouri Review. He is currently on faculty at Sierra Nevada University's MFA program, teaches at Creative Nonfiction, Hugo House, and is a writing coach and developmental editor. Peter's former students and clients have gone on to publish numerous books and stories and articles, and include two NYT best-selling novelists (Tara Conklin and Rachel Griffin).

Teaching Style and Philosophy: I believe the best I can do for students is help free them from the tyranny of talent and the whims of inspiration, which are fair-weather friends. Instead, I want you to hone your personal aesthetic, and to develop an authorial voice, and most importantly develop fluency with the elements of craft. One you can control what's happening on the page with ease, producing publishable work is no longer a mysterious fluke, but a familiar and non-scary process.

Website: petermountford.com

Charles Tonderai Mudede is a Zimbabwean-born writer, filmmaker, and cultural critic. He writes about film, books, music, crime, art, economics, and urban theory for The Stranger. Mudede has made three films, two of which, Police Beat and Zoo, premiered at Sundance, and one, Zoo, was screened at Cannes. Mudede has written for the New York Times, Arcade Journal, Cinema Scope, Ars Electronica, the Village Voice, Radical Urban Theory, and C Theory. Mudede is also on the editorial board for the Black Scholar, which is based at the University of Washington, and between 1999 and 2005, lectured on post-colonial theory at Pacific Lutheran University, and in 2003 published a short book, Last Seen, with Diana George. Mudede has lived in Seattle since 1989.

PETER MUNRO was born in Fairbanks, Alaska in 1957. He was raised in small fishing towns, going through his biggest changes in Sitka, Alaska. This has left him permanently afflicted with a love of fishing. Munro used to conduct research fishing in the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Alaska, and the Aleutian Islands. The data were to help estimate annual harvest levels of commercially important demersal fishes. When not at sea, the sad poet was chained to a computer in Seattle, mis-underestimating abundance parameters, failing to write papers, and making poems by night.  Now retired, Munro makes poems by day, out in the open, without fear of being found out. This now-happy poet studies in the MFA program at the UW. His poems have been published here and there. 

Twenty-one year old Somtochukwu is a theatre educator and performer from Nigeria and Florida. She's excited to share this production with you as it is her debut performance in the Puget Sound area.

Abby E. Murray's first poetry collection, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize in 2019. She is currently the editor of Collateral and lives near Washington DC. Check out more information by going to www.abbyemurray.com or go to Facebook: facebook.com/abbyemurray. Other social media handles are @abbyemurray.

Irish-American writer William Murray was born during the 1962 Century 21 Exposition—a Seattle World’s Fair baby. He is obsessed with the histories of Ireland and Seattle, and the place in them of his family, who came to Seattle in 1880 to work in the mines and railroads. Murray’s work includes pieces in Northern Ireland’s The Magpie of Kilcoo; the anthology Visually Uplifting; and the self-published chapbook se do bheatha bhaile (Welcome Home). He is currently working to become a seanchai, a traditional Gaelic storyteller, and on 99 Blocks, a ten-year study of Seattle’s Highway 99. Seeking to illustrate the past and speak truth to power, Murray is grateful to Hugo House, where he attends Works in Progress and takes classes.

Sequoia Nagamatsu is the author of the National Bestselling novel, How High We Go in the Dark (2022), a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and the story collection, Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone (2016), silver medal winner of the 2016 Foreword Reviews Indies Book of the Year Award, an Entropy Magazine Best Book of 2016, and a notable book at Buzzfeed. His work has appeared in publications such as Conjunctions, The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, Tin House, Iowa Review, Lightspeed Magazine, and One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories, and has been listed as notable in Best American Non-Required Reading and the Best Horror of the Year.

Arlene Naganawa works with high school and middle school writers in poetry, fiction, and academic writing. Arlene's work appears in such journals as Crab Orchard Review, Crab Creek Review, Pontoon, Calyx, All the Sins, Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Caketrain, and others. Her poems have been featured on Poetry on Buses and in Washington 129, an anthology of Washington State poets curated by Tod Marshall. She is the author of three chapbooks and is currently part of the Pongo Publishing Teen Writing team and a Writing and Critical Thinking instructor with Minds Matter Seattle, a nonprofit organization that helps high school students from low income families to prepare for success in college.

Samina Najmi is a professor of English at California State University, Fresno. Her memoir-in-essays, Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time, won the Aurora Polaris Award in Creative Nonfiction and was published Oct 1 by Trio House Press. It has received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and is featured among Poets & Writers’ five creative nonfiction debuts of the year. Samina is enrolled part-time in Fresno State’s MFA program in creative nonfiction, and this is keeping her humble. Daughter of multiple migrations, Samina has lived in Fresno since 2006 and watched with wonder her children, her students, and her citrus grow.

Chiku Nance is a chamoru artist & engineer.

Shankar Narayan explores identity, power, mythology, and technology in a world where the body is flung across borders yet possesses unrivaled power to transcend them. Shankar is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the winner of prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, Hugo House, Jack Straw, Flyway, and River Heron. He is a 4Culture grant recipient for Claiming Space, a project to lift the voices of writers of color, and his chapbook, Postcards From the New World, won the Paper Nautilus Debut Series chapbook prize. Shankar draws strength from his global upbringing and from his work at the intersection of civil rights and technology. In Seattle, he awakens to the wonders of Cascadia every day, but his heart yearns east to his other hometown, Delhi. Connect with him at shankarnarayan.net.

Describe your teaching style.

As a teacher, I aim to create an inclusive, respectful, courageous, open, mutually engaging, and joyful space that connects with each writer as a complete being and helps move them toward finding and strengthening their true voice. Creating a writing community is also an explicit aim of my classes — a space in which writers learn and explore together, inspire growth in one another's writing, and serve as resources for one another even after the class has ended.

I combine the following key elements:

+Courageous

I aim for an environment in which writers will feel empowered to engage deeply with the subject matter, connect it to their own experiences and themes, and create their best and most fearless writing.

+Open

I teach my classes in a structured but flexible way that strikes a balance between following a preset curriculum and allowing opportunities for new ideas to open up channels of learning. I create spaces where all writers can engage and explore together, understanding that everyone has valuable knowledge and perspectives to contribute.

+Engaging

Learning, for me, always goes both ways, and I continue to be humbled by how much I learn in every class I teach. My classes include lots of engagement and discussion, and build in in-class writing as well as courageous sharing. Writers are also encouraged to highlight questions or other needs so I can provide resources in response.

+Joyful

Writing classes should be fun! I aim to work with a range of emotions including humor and levity, which can help balance somber subject matter. I often work with subject matter that brings out strong emotions, which I try to recognize and create appropriate space to work through.

+Community

I believe teaching without connection is impossible. So I try to get to know and understand writers in my classes as complete human beings in the context of their writing goals, and to encourage them to get to know, understand, and learn from one another. Writers need other writers, and I see the project of strengthening the mutual bond between writers as being every bit as important as imparting knowledge of a particular subject matter.

=Voice

Ultimately, I aim to impact the lives of writers in my classes by helping them find and strengthen their voices and achieve their own writing goals, whatever those may be.

Ladane Nasseri is a writer, journalist and former Middle East correspondent for Bloomberg. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, LA Times, Businessweek, WNYC, PBS, McSweeney’s and elsewhere. She's the recipient of a MacDowell fellowship and other awards.