Teachers

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.

Shobha Rao is the author of the short story collection An Unrestored Woman, and the novel Girls Burn Brighter. She is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, and her story “Kavitha and Mustafa” was chosen by T.C. Boyle for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2015. Girls Burn Brighter has been longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a finalist for the California Book Award. She lives in San Francisco.

Kate Raphael is a Lambda-nominated novelist, journalist, anarchafeminist and queer activist based in Seattle. Her prescient novel, The Midwife’s In Town, imagining a feminist underground in the South after Roe v. Wade has been overturned, came out in February 2022. Her Palestine mystery novels, Murder Under the Bridge and Murder Under the Fig Tree, won the Independent Publishers Book Award (IPPY) and Foreword INDIEs Award. Kate received a 2011 Hedgebrook residency. She is a producer of KPFA radio Women’s Magazine, where one of her joys is interviewing authors. Kate has taught workshops in social justice fiction and writing for radio for seven years. She is pursuing an MFA in Writing at Goddard College. Connect with her at www.kateraphael.com or on Facebook and check out the Radical Fiction Facebook Group.

Midge Raymond is the author of the novel My Last Continent and the award-winning short-story collection Forgetting English. Her writing has appeared in TriQuarterly, American Literary Review, Bellevue Literary Review, the Los Angeles Times magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, and many other publications. Midge worked in publishing in New York before moving to Boston, where she taught communication writing at Boston University for six years. She has taught creative writing at Boston’s Grub Street Writers, Seattle’s Richard Hugo House, and San Diego Writers, Ink, and she is co-founder of the boutique publisher Ashland Creek Press.

Putsata Reang is a journalist and author of the debut memoir, Ma and Me, (FSG/MCD May 2022). She has helped train reporters across the globe in conflict and post-conflict nations including Cambodia, Afghanistan, Thailand and Bangladesh, and her writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, The Seattle-Times, the San Jose Mercury News, Ms., and the Guardian, as well as anthologized in essay collections highlighting women's and Khmer voices. Putsata is an alum of writers residencies at Hedgebrook, Mineral School, and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, as well as the Jack Straw Writing Fellowship program. She has received grants from Washington State Artist Trust and the Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship. 

Robin Reid Drake is a Chicago-based writer from the American South. They place power in poetic processes to bring transformative change in individuals & communities. They hold an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and have received several awards and residencies for their writing. They currently teach writing at 826CHI as well.

Vincent Antonio Rendoni is the author of A Grito Contest in the Afterlife, which was the winner of the 2022 Catamaran Poetry Prize for West Coast Poets. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions multiple times. His work has appeared in The Sycamore Review, The Vestal Review, The Texas Review, Quarterly West, and So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library.

Anastacia-Reneé (She/They) is a queer writer, educator, interdisciplinary artist, speaker and podcaster. She is the author of (v.) (Black Ocean) and Forget It (Black Radish) and, Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere and Sidenotes from the Archivist, forthcoming from Amistad (an imprint of HarperCollins). They were selected by NBC News as part of the list of “Queer Artist of Color Dominate 2021’s Must See LGBTQ Art Shows.” Anastacia-Renee was former Seattle Civic Poet (2017-2019), Hugo House Poet-in-Residence (2015-2017), Arc Artist Fellow (2020) and Jack Straw Curator (2020). Her work has been anthologized in: Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature, Home is Where You Queer Your Heart, Furious Flower Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, Afrofuturism, Black Comics, And Superhero Poetry, Joy Has a Sound, Spirited Stone: Lessons from Kubota’s Garden, and Seismic: Seattle City of Literature. Her work has appeared in, Hobart, Foglifter, Auburn Avenue, Catapult, Alta, Torch, Poetry Northwest, A-Line, Cascadia Magazine, Hennepin Review, Ms. Magazine and others. Renee has received fellowships and residencies from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, VONA, Ragdale, Mineral School, and The New Orleans Writers Residency.

Juan Carlos Reyes has published the novella A Summer's Lynching and the fiction chapbook Elements of a Bystander. His fiction and essays have appeared in West Branch, Waccamaw, Florida Review, and Moss, among others. He’s received an Artist Trust Storyteller Grant and a PEN USA Emerging Voices Fellowship. He is the former Board President of Seattle City of Literature and is currently a Professor of Creative Writing at Seattle University.

Seema Reza is the author of the books A Constellation of Half-Lives and When the World Breaks Open. She is the CEO of Community Building Art Works, a non-profit organization that brings workshops led by professional artists to service members, veterans, and clinicians and is featured in the 2018 HBO documentary We Are Not Done Yet. Her writing has been widely anthologized and has appeared in the Washington Post, McSweeney’s, The LA Review, LitHub and Electric Literature among others. Case studies from her work with military populations have appeared in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Related Diseases in Combat Veterans.

Susan Rich is the author of four collections of poetry including Cloud Pharmacy, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, named a finalist for the Foreword Prize and the Washington State Book Award, Cures Include Travel, and The Cartographer’s Tongue, winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry and the Peace Corps Writers Award. Along with Brian Turner and Jared Hawkley, she is editor of The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Writing Across Borders. She has received awards and fellowships from Artist Trust, CityArtists, 4Culture, The Times Literary Supplement of London, Peace Corps Writers and the Fulbright Foundation. Rich’s poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, New England Review, and the Southern Review.

She has worked as a staff person for Amnesty International, an electoral supervisor in Bosnia Herzegovina, and a human rights trainer in Gaza and the West Bank. Rich lived in the Republic of Niger, West Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer, later moving to South Africa to teach at the University of Cape Town on a Fulbright Fellowship.

Rich’s international awards include the Times Literary Supplement Award, a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland and a residency at Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain. Other poetry honors include an Artist Trust Fellowship, a 4 Culture Award, a Seattle CityArtist Project Award, a GAP Award, and participation in the Cuirt Literary Festival in Galway, Ireland.

Her poems have been published in the Antioch Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Christian Science Monitor, Harvard Review, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Northwest Review, Poetry International and The Southern Review. Anthologized poems and essays are included in Best Essays of the Northwest, Poets of the American West, Poem Home: An Anthology of Ars Poetica, I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poets in Defense of Human Rights, Poem Revised: 54 Poems, and The Working Poet: 75 Poetry Writing Exercises. Susan is an alumna of Hedgebrook, the Helen Whiteley Center and the Ucross Foundation. She serves on the boards of Crab Creek Review, Floating Bridge Press and Whit Press.

Educated at the University of Massachusetts, Harvard University, and the University of Oregon, Susan Rich lives in Seattle and teaches at Highline College where she runs the reading series, Highline Listens: Writers Read Their Work. She has two collections forthcoming: The Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Press) and Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press).