Teachers

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).

Ingrid Ricks is an NYT-bestselling memoir author, writing coach, and inspirational speaker who is passionate about leveraging personal storytelling to foster healing, awareness, empathy, and change. Over the past decade, she has helped thousands of students of every age find healing and empowerment by writing the deeply personal stories they needed to tell, and has produced eight anthologies in partnership with high schools and non-profits. Ingrid, who views personal storytelling as the key to healing and unity in today’s divided world, regularly presents her Healing Through Personal Storytelling workshops in partnership with organizations throughout the region and has delivered keynote talks on the subject to educators and social workers nationwide. Ingrid’s books include the coming-of-age memoir, Hippie Boy: A Girl’s Story, and Focus, a memoir about her journey with the blinding eye disease Retinitis Pigmentosa. She has also ghostwritten several memoirs and has shared stories from her childhood on Salon and NPR.

David Rigsbee is author of, most recently This Much I Can Tell You and Not Alone in My Dancing: Essays and Reviews, both from Black Lawrence Press. A Pushcart Prize winner and recipient of two NEA grants, he has also held fellowships to The American Academy in Rome, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Virginia Commission on the Arts, Djerassi Foundation, and Academy of American Poets. Besides eleven collections of poems, he has published critical books on Joseph Brodsky and Carolyn Kizer, and co-edited Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry. His translation of Dante’s Paradiso is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. A co-executor of the literary estate of Carolyn Kizer, he lives in New York's Hudson Valley.

https://blacklawrencepress.com/books/this-much-i-can-tell-you/

Lilliam Rivera is an award-winning writer and author of young adult and middle grade novels, most recently the YA novel Never Look Back (Bloomsbury YA, 2020), which BookPage called “a revelation” in a starred review, and the middle grade novel Goldie Vance: The Hotel Whodunit (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2020), which Kirkus praised as a “winner of a series opener.” She has two books forthcoming in Fall 2021; in September, Rivera’s first comic for DC Comics, Unearthed, and in October, We Light Up the Sky from Bloomsbury YA. Previous YA novels include Dealing in Dreams (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2019), which was featured in Teen Vogue, PBS Books, Los Angeles Times, and Bustle, among other outlets, and has received starred reviews from School Library Journal and Booklist; and The Education of Margot Sanchez (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2017), nominated for a 2017 Best Fiction for Young Adults by the Young Adult Library Services Association and was featured on NPR, New York Times Book Review, New York magazine, MTV.com, and Teen Vogue, among others. Rivera’s work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Elle, Tin House, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, to name a few. 

She is a 2016 Pushcart Prize winner and a 2015 Clarion alumni with a Leonard Pung Memorial Scholarship. Rivera has also been awarded fellowships from PEN Center USA, A Room Of Her Own Foundation, and received a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Speculative Literature Foundation. Her short story "Death Defiant Bomba" received honorable mention in Bellevue Literary Review's 2014 Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, selected by author Nathan Englander. She recently received honorable mention in the 2018 James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award.

Rivera was interviewed by Lightspeed in 2019 and was asked about a comment she made in an NPR interview about The Education of Margot Sanchez in which she explained her belief in “firsts’ in YA novels: “In young adult fiction, I believe a lot of the characters must go through a discovery of “firsts.” The first kiss. The first sense of shame. I love those moments in young adult literature when the protagonist discovers how their parents or adults are completely flawed and full of unrealized desires or dreams.”

Born in the Bronx and currently living in Los Angeles, Rivera has been a featured speaker in countless schools and book festivals throughout the United States and teaches creative writing workshops.

Erin Roberts is a writer of stories and games, including published pieces of interactive fiction in Sub-Q and Strange Horizons and Forge Your Quest, a fully-voiced interactive audio story for children.

Ines Rodrigues holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia University, and published her first novel, Days of Bossa Nova, in 2017. Her stories appears in The Plentitudes Journal, Tint Journal, 650 Where Writers Read Anthology, and Columbia Anthology 2023.

SIDNEY ROGERS is a queer and trans writer from Seattle, Washington. He is a Linguistics and Creative Writing undergraduate student at the University of Washington, and the president of the UW writing club, Writers in Progress. When not working on schoolwork or writing first drafts in his overflowing notes app, Sidney enjoys going to concerts with friends and keeping his pet rats from chewing through all the cords in his apartment.