Teachers

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.

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.