Teachers

Mary Lane Potter (PhD, University of Chicago; MFA, Warren Wilson) has deep experience writing, editing, and teaching fiction and creative nonfiction. She’s the author of the novel A Woman of Salt (Counterpoint), Strangers and Sojourners: Stories from the Lowcountry (Counterpoint), and the memoir Seeking God and Losing the Way. Her essays and stories have appeared in in Parabola, Witness, River Teeth, Still Point Arts Quarterly, The Ekphrastic Review, Minerva Rising, Women Studies Quarterly, Beloit Fiction Journal, North American Review, Tampa Review, Tiferet, SUFI Journal, Spiritus, Leaping Clear, and others. She’s received a Washington State Arts Commission/Artist Trust Fellowship and enjoyed writing residencies at MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Caldera, and the Collegeville Institute of Cultural and Ecumenical Studies. A dedicated and experienced teacher, she’s taught writing for years, most recently at Hugo House, The Loft Literary Center, and The Collegeville Institute. Website: http://members.authorsguild.net/marylapotter/.

Passionate about all aspects of writing, Potter is especially tuned in to voice, character development, and narrative structure—and to the challenges of writing women’s experiences, the body, and spirituality.

Favorite writers; John Keene, Audré Lorde, Clarice Lispector, Merce Rodoreda, Kazuo Ishiguro, Isaac Babel, James Welch, M. Scott Momaday, George Saunders, Leslie Marmon Silko, Barry Lopez. Octavia Butler, George Eliot.

Katie Prince is a poet and essayist. Her first poetry book, Tell This to the Universe, was a finalist for the 2019 National Poetry Series and won the 2021 Pamet River Prize from YesYes Books. In the spring of 2017, she served as artist-in-residence at Klaustrið, in Iceland’s Fljótsdalur valley, and in 2019, she received a GAP Award from Artist Trust to continue working on the project she began there. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her work has been published in Electric Literature, New South, Fugue, the Adroit Journal, and Poetry Northwest, among others. You can find her online at www.katieprince.com.

Naomi Price-Lazarus (she/her) is a sexuality educator, event facilitator, dance party host, and ultimate frisbee player and coach. She is passionate about creating space for youth and adults to explore and celebrate their bodies and sexualities, all the while building a stronger sense of self and connection to the community. She also creates and sells art that celebrates sexual anatomy and pleasure. Outside of her many jobs, Naomi spends her time playing sports, baking cookies, and traveling around the world. Follow her @Super_Clit

Rena Priest is a member of the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) Nation. She is the incumbent Washington State Poet Laureate and Maxine Cushing Gray Distinguished Writing Fellow. Priest is also the recipient of an Allied Arts Foundation Professional Poets Award, an American Book Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Nia Tero, The Vadon Foundation, and Indigenous Nations Poets. She has authored three books and edited two anthologies. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Learn more at renapriest.com. 

Kamala Puligandla is a writer and editor in LA, who writes autobiographical fiction and essays on queer love and futures. She is well-known for her contagious laughter, her iconic hairstyle, and her easily undone heart. Her first novel, Zigzags, came out from Not A Cult in October 2020 and her novella You Can Vibe Me On My FemmePhone was released from Co-Conspirator Press in 2021. Find her at kamalapuligandla.com, and follow her on Instagram @thatkamala.

Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children’s book, and the novels Since I Laid My Burden Down and 100 Boyfriends. He is the recipient of a 2022 award from the Rauschenberg Foundation for risk-taking in art, and 2018 Whiting Award for Fiction, as well as named one of ‘32 Black Male Writers for Our Time’ by T: New York Times Style Magazine. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers.

Kate Pyontek holds an MFA from Ohio State University. Kate’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Ecotone, the lickety~split, Four Way Review, and New Ohio Review. Kate is originally from New Jersey. For more information check out katepyontek.com. Or follow Kate on Instagram @kapyontek or on Twitter @pyontek.

Bel-Quiaoit Quarless is inclined to break through western ideals of art and transform it into its beginning form: art for human’s sake. Peddling poems and novellas from underneath a secret burrow, their sublimity concerns the dark corners of human existence, in an erotic, dismal, pathetic rain-mundane way. They invite you to break apart their work and toss a follow to their instagram @kaocountry.

Khadijah Queen is the author of six books of poetry and hybrid prose, most recently Anodyne (Tin House 2020), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Other books include I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books 2017), praised in O Magazine, The New Yorker, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere as “quietly devastating” and “a portrait of defiance that turns the male gaze inside out.” Individual works appear in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, The Offing, Harper’s Magazine, The Poetry Review (UK), and widely elsewhere. With fiction writer K. Ibura, she co-edited an anthology of speculative writing, Infinite Constellations, available March 7, 2023. United States Artists recognized her work with a $50,000 Disability Futures Fellowship in 2022. She holds a PhD in English from University of Denver.

Katherine Quevedo was born and raised near Portland, Oregon, where she works as an analyst and lives with her husband and two sons. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in Fireside Magazine, Nightmare, Best Indie Speculative Fiction Vol. III and IV, Factor Four, Flame Tree Publishing’s Christmas Gothic, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Rhysling Award and received an honorable mention in the Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest. Her mini-chapbook The Inca Weaver’s Tales is forthcoming from Sword & Kettle Press, and her poems have appeared in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Coffin Bell, NonBinary Review, Eye to the Telescope, and elsewhere. Her articles have appeared on the official websites of Writer’s Digest and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA). She holds an MBA from Portland State University and degrees in Economics and English from Santa Clara University. Find her at www.katherinequevedo.com.

Lauren Davis is the author of The Milk of Dead Mothers (YesYes Books, forthcoming), Home Beneath the Church (Fernwood Press), and When I Drowned (Kelsay Books). She holds an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars.

SANJANA RAMESH is from everywhere and nowhere, although most recently Ann Arbor, Michigan and Chennai in India. Their work has appeared in Café Shapiro, The Dragon Poet Review and Bring Your Words: A Writers’ Community Anthology. Navigating new facets of their diaspora and what their queerness means within that diaspora, Sanjana attempts to write these into their work through a lens of magical realism or just plain old magic. They often spend their time attempting to navigate Seattle’s public transport (and, inexplicably, always getting lost), drawing, and pining away for their cat back home in Michigan. 

Evan Ramzipoor (they/them) is a writer based in California. Their work has appeared in the North American Review, Slate: Future Tense, fractured lit, McSweeney’s, Salon, and Forbes. They have an MFA from Brooklyn College. The Ventriloquists is their first novel.

Describe your teaching style.

Since I'm a writer, my students and I are colleagues. We're learning and experimenting together.