Teachers

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.

Kimberly Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American diaspora poet originally from Omaha, Nebraska but now living in New York City. Her work can be found in diaCRITICS, Hobart, Muzzle Magazine, The Minnesota Review, and others. She was a recipient of a Beatrice Daw Brown Prize, and she was a finalist for Frontier Poetry’s 2021 OPEN and New Poets Awards and Palette Poetry’s 2021 Previously Published Poem Prize. She was a 2021 Emerging Voices Fellow at PEN America and is currently a 2022-2023 Poetry Coalition Fellow.

Susan Nguyen's debut poetry collection Dear Diaspora won the Prairie Schooner Book Award, an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, and a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. She is the editor of Hayden's Ferry Review.

Nhatt Nichols (she/her) is a multidisciplinary journalist, poet, and artist whose work focuses on the intersections of humans, animals, and their environment.

A graduate of The Royal Drawing School in London, she uses words and images to cover food and environmental issues using solutions journalism practices for High Country News, Edible Magazine, Civil Eats, Modern Farmer, and The Daily Yonder. She is the founder and editor of The Jefferson County Beacon, a rural weekly news outlet.

Nhatt is a 2024 Blue Sky Community Action Fellow and a 2023 Artist Trust Literary Gap grant recipient for her project documenting the history of human/animal dependency and the current refugee crisis in Białowieża, Europe’s oldest forest. Her first museum show, Nhatt Nichols: The Willapa Oyster and its Environs, was on display at The Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum in 2025.

Her first book, This Party of the Soft Things (Bored Wolves 2022), a heavily researched graphic poem, is now awaiting its third printing. Her first novella, Burn Morels, is forthcoming from Bored Wolves this summer.

Tiana Nobile is a Korean American adoptee, Kundiman fellow, and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. A finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, she is the author of CLEAVE (Hub City Press, 2021). Her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, Southern Cultures, and the Texas Review, among others. Tiana received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College, MAT in Elementary and Special Education from the University of New Orleans, and MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Describe your teaching style.

I work to foster a space where everyone in the room feels comfortable to participate. I think it's so interesting when folks' reading of a work might be different and encourage lively discussion. I like to facilitate rather than lead and plan my classes as a balance between discussion of the reading, generative writing, and sharing new work.

A maker of fiction and memoir, Dawn Noel Chen claims the mixed-race heritage of Filipino, Scandinavian, and Scotch-Irish. Taking Anne Liu Kellor's class gave her the guts to write about her race, and her life.

Darren Nordlie is the 2022 1st place winner in Poetry for EPIC Group Writers, published in two anthologies curated by two different Washington State Poet Laureates, Wordswell, Ghost Mic Poetry Vol.1 and Vol.2 by Everett Poetry Night and featured in VALA's Emerging from Darkness, Flourishing in the New Normal exhibition. He served as a volunteer for a year before being promoted to Vice President of the Redmond Association of Spokenword (RASP). His experiences as a mixed race, sensitive, well traveled, and intellectually curious middle-aged man offer him a uniquely informed perspective. He writes poetry to wrestle with questions, self-express, and to make audiences feel and/or think differently.