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.
Teachers
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.
Shelby Natasha is a songwriter and music producer in Seattle, Washington. Growing up between China and the Pacific Northwest, her music is heavily influenced by both cultures, landing in a space between Alt R&B and Chinese folk music.
D.A. Navoti is a member of the Gila River Indian Community and a multidisciplinary storyteller, writer, and composer. His artistic work spans across three "landscapes"—written, musical, and visual—a hybrid form that explores what it means to be Indigenous in the 21st century. Navoti is a 2022 Artist Trust fellow and a 2022 Artist Support Program resident with Jack Straw Cultural Center. Previously, Navoti was a writer fellow with Jack Straw Cultural Center (2016) and Hugo House (2017). His literary work has appeared in Homology Lit, Spartan, Indian Country Today, Cloudthroat, and elsewhere. In 2021, Navoti was recognized as an Indigenous Stories of Strength awardee by the John Hopkins Center for American Indian Health and a recipient of the Resiliency Fund from Potlatch Fund. Navoti was also awarded a 2020 Radical Imagination grant from NDN Collective, and he was a 2020 CityArtist from the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture. Most recently, Navoti founded and curated We the Indigenous, a West Coast literary series, and he founded Wellness-ish-ness, a blog for creative hot messes. Learn more at www.danavoti.comÂ
River Vicco Naylor is a multi-disciplinary artist who has studied creative writing, filmmaking, music, and comics. River has been teaching arts and writing to students K-12 since 2015. Teaching is one of the true joys of their life, and they love sharing their passions and facilitating arts programs. They believe in education that centers students and encourages them to express their truest self. Facilitating an equitable learning environment is essential to these goals. You can find River around Seattle collaborating in bands, short films, and as the Youth Programs Manager at Northwest Film Forum.
Deborah Nedelman is a novelist and former psychologist with expertise in the Amherst Writing Method.
Sarah Neilson (moderator) is a freelance culture writer and interviewer whose work regularly appears in The Seattle Times, Them, and Shondaland, among other outlets. They are an alumni of Tin House Craft Intensive, and their memoir writing has been published in Catapult and Ligeia. When not freelancing, they are working on a memoir manuscript, enjoying the Pacific Northwest outdoors, and snuggling her adopted cats.
Sierra Nelson is a poet, president of Seattle’s Cephalopod Appreciation Society, and co-founder of literary performance art groups The Typing Explosion and Vis-à -Vis Society. Her poetry books include The Lachrymose Report (PoetryNW Editions, 2018), lyrical adventure I Take Back the Sponge Cake made with visual artist Loren Erdrich (Rose Metal Press), and forthcoming Vis-à -Vis Society collaboration 100 Rooms: A Bridge Motel Project (Entre Rios Books). Recently Nelson’s poems accompanying ichthyologist Adam Summer’s fish skeleton photographs were exhibited at the Ljubljana Natural History Museum and Piran Aquarium in Slovenia.
Theo Pauline Nestor is the author of Writing Is My Drink: A Writer’s Story of Finding Her Voice (And a Guide to How You Can Too) (Simon & Schuster, 2013) and How to Sleep Alone in a King-Size Bed: A Memoir of Starting Over (Crown, 2008). Nestor's essays have appeared numerous places including the New York Times, Seattle Times, and the Rumpus.
Website: theonestor.com
Instagram: @theonestor
Describe your teaching style.
Informative, practical, and empowering. I break down processes step-by-step.
Lindsay Newton is an editor and publishing consultant. Over her decade-long career, she worked for three of the top publishing institutions in the US—Simon & Schuster, Inc., Sourcebooks, and Writers House Literary Agency. There, she had the privilege of working with bestselling and award-winning authors such as Isabel Allende, Kevin Hart, Neil Gaiman, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, Colleen Hoover, and others. She started Newton Literary Services with the goal of helping aspiring authors to obtain literary representation and fulfill their dreams of getting published. Her clients have garnered representation by preeminent literary agencies including Aevitas Creative Management, Levine Greenburg Rostan, Dystel Goderich & Bourret, Stephanie Tade Agency, and more.
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. His most recent publication is the sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed. His other books are a short story collection, The Refugees; Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction); and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He has also published Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his six-year-old son, Ellison. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, he is also the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.
Phong Nguyen is the author of three novels (Bronze Drum, Roundabout, and The Adventures of Joe Harper) and two short fiction collections (Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History, and Memory Sickness). He is the Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing at the University of Missouri, where he teaches fiction-writing.
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