Teachers

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. 

Denne Michele Norris is the editor-in-chief of Electric Literature. A 2021 Out100 Honoree, her writing has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, VCCA, and the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction, and appears in McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and ZORA. She co-hosts the critically acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot, and is hard at work on her debut novel. Follow her on Twitter and IG @thedennemichele.

Emet North has lived in a dozen states over the past decade and has no fixed residence, though they feel most at home in the mountains. In previous lives, they worked in an observational cosmology lab on a grant from NASA, taught snowboarding in Montana, researched Lie algebras, led wine tastings, waited tables, trained horses, and wrote a thesis on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. They translate from Spanish to English with a particular focus on queer and trans voices and are always looking for new projects.

Fred Northup, Jr. is one of the Pacific Northwest’s busiest entertainers: as a fundraising auctioneer, host and emcee, author, and comedy improviser. For 10 years, Fred was a company member of Seattle’s famed “TheatreSports” comedy improv group, and he travels the country emceeing and designing entertainment for major corporate events. In addition to his work on stage and on camera, Fred Northup runs a video and event production company, Southdown Creative. He’s also the co-founder of RainGlobes, the globe that rains! When not entertaining the masses, Fred can be found in Seattle entertaining his wife, Ashley, and their two children.

Ethan Nosowsky is Editorial Director at Graywolf Press, where he, is responsible for shaping Graywolf’s prose lists; he acquires fiction and nonfiction titles. He began his career at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and was most recently editorial director at McSweeney’s. He has edited books by Jeffery Renard Allen, Hilton Als, Deborah Baker, David Byrne, Geoff Dyer, Dave Eggers, Stephen Elliott, J. Robert Lennon and Jenny Offill, among many others. He has taught in the creative writing program at Columbia University and contributed to Bookforum, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer, and Threepenny Review.

Greg November is a short story writer, an English instructor at North Seattle College and Highline College, and a senior submissions reader for New England Review. He was a 2021 Jack Straw Writer, a finalist for the 2020 Curt Johnson Prose Award for Fiction, and runner-up for The Missouri Review's 2021 Miller Audio Prize. His stories have most recently appeared in Boulevard, Carve, Hawaii Pacific Review, Epiphany, 34th Parallel, 3Elements Review, and Juked, among other places. He has an MFA from UC, Irvine.

Kevin O’Rourke lives in Seattle, where he works in tech and writes about health. His first book, the essay collection As If Seen at an Angle, was published by Tinderbox Editions; he is currently working on several follow-up projects, including a book about surviving suicide. Other writing has appeared in the LA Review of Books, Kenyon Review, and Think Global Health, among others. Learn more at kforourke.com.