Teachers

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.

Dave Nolet is a Northwest Upright Jazz Bass player and sometimes guitar and bossa nova singer. He performs jazz throughout the Northwest and performs in The Jazz Train. Formerly a member of the Brazilian music group Arco Voz with Jim Nolet and Marcia Lopez, Dave performed in New York City and throughout the East Coast. He received a Performance Arts degree from Cornish Institute, studying with Gary Peacock, Art Lande and Julien Priester. He helped arrange, compose and record a Kirtan album with Steve Gold, “So much Magnificence,” which has received upwards of six million hits on Spotify. Dave currently enjoys life in Seattle and Winthrop, Washington.

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.

Molly Olguín is a queer writer and educator based in Seattle. She holds a BA in English from Williams College and an MFA in Fiction from The Ohio State University. She teaches English and creative writing to high school students. Her collection The Sea Gives Up The Dead is the winner of the 2023 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, and is out now with Red Hen Press. Her short stories have appeared in Orange & Bee, Paranoid Tree, Redivider, The Normal School, River Styx, Quarterly West, and others. She is a 2025 Jack Hazard Fellow, and was a recipient of the Loft Mentor Series fellowship in 2019. She was awarded the 2015 AWP Intro Awards Prize in Fiction for her short story “Seven Deaths.” With Jackie Hedeman, she is the creator of the queer sci fi audio drama “The Pasithea Powder.” 

Co-owner of Speculatively Queer, Isabela Oliveira has been a professional editor for years, from technical documents to pop culture content. While attending college, she kept busy as the poetry editor and later the editor-in-chief of her university’s literary journal, the Salmon Creek Journal. Isabela started speaking on panels at fan conventions in 2016 and has been at it ever since. These days, she’s working as an editor by day, and an occasional podcast co-host, a crafter and maker, and an aspiring voice actress in her free time.

Nikkita Oliver (they/them) is a Seattle-based creative, community organizer, abolitionist, educator, and attorney. Working at the intersections of arts, law, education, and community organizing Nikkita strives to create experiences which draw us closer to our humanity and invites us to imagine what we hope to see in the future.

Nikkita has opened for Cornel West and Chuck D of Public Enemy, featured on the Breakfast Club, KUOW's The Week in Review, Cut Stories, and performed on The Late Night Show with Stephen Colbert. Nikkita's writing has been published in the South Seattle Emerald, Crosscut, the Establishment, Last Real Indians, The Seattle Weekly, and The Stranger. Nikkita organizes with No New Youth Jail, Decriminalize Seattle, Covid-19 Mutual Aid – Seattle, and the Seattle Peoples Party.

Nikkita is the executive director of Creative Justice, an arts-based alternative to incarceration and a healing engaged youth-led community-based program.

Nikkita was the first political candidate of the Seattle Peoples Party running for Mayor of Seattle in 2017 narrowly missing the general election by approximately 1,100 votes; coming in third of 21 candidates.

Nikkita speaks and performs for events, at universities and conferences, and facilitates trainings on equity, law and justice, education, and arts activism all over the United States.

Follow on IG and Twitter @nikkitaoliver