Teachers

Danez Smith is a Black, Queer, Poz writer & performer from St. Paul, MN. Danez is the author of Homie, (Graywolf Press, 2020), winner of the Minnesota Book Award, the Heartland Bookseller Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award; and [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. Danez is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and is the co-host of VS with Franny Choi, a podcast sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and Postloudness.

Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, The Best American Poetry, and more. You can follow her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.

Nat Oleander Smith studied playwriting at Amherst College and completed their MFA at Ohio University. They are the recipient of the Denis Johnston Playwriting Prize, and have taught fiction and screenwriting in Kenya and playwriting around the US.

Megan Snyder-Camp is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Wintering (Tupelo) and The Gunnywolf (Bear Star), both of which were published in September 2016. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Djerassi, the 4Culture Foundation, and elsewhere.

Rachel Sobel is a writer of speculative and literary fiction about dykes and other queer people. A graduate of the Hunter MFA in Fiction, she has lived in NYC and Seattle.

Describe your teaching style.

My classes are expansive and specific, aimed at giving concrete tools to address the writing pitfalls students face. I'm big on asking questions, interrogating your own process, and recognizing that what works for someone else might not work for you. I endorse reading absolutely everything, from silly fluff to pretentious works of enormous philosophical seriousness, and from poetry to nonfiction.

Ellen Sollod is a Seattle-based interdisciplinary artist whose is best known for her artist books and her site specific public art installations. Her artist books combine writing, photography, drawing and printmaking. She is represented in numerous museum and university collections, including Yale University Center for the Book, NYPL Spencer Collection of Prints and Drawings, University of Washington Suzallo Library Special Collections, University of Puget Sound Collins Library, Seattle Art Museum Dorothy Bullitt Library, and Tufts University Special Collections. Ellen has received artist residencies and awards from Ucross Foundation, Playa, Brush Creek Arts Foundation, Willapa Bay AIR, Centrum, 4Culture, Seattle Office of Arts and Culture.

MAYA SONENBERG’s story collection Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters received the 2022 Sullivan Prize in short fiction and was published in August 2022. Previous books and chapbooks include Cartographies (winner of the Drue Heinz Prize), Voices from the Blue Hotel, 26 Abductions, and After the Death of Shostakovich Père. Her stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, Electric Literature, The Collagist, DIAGRAM, and many other literary journals. The daughter of two painters, she was raised in New York City, and studied with Annie Dillard at Wesleyan University and with Robert Coover, John Hawkes, and Meredith Steinbach at Brown University, where she received her MFA. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Washington, and lives in Seattle. 

Jen Soriano (she~they) is a Filipinx writer and movement builder who has long worked at the intersection of grassroots organizing, narrative strategy, and art-driven social change. Jen has won the International Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Fugue Prose Prize, and fellowships from Hugo House, Vermont Studio Center, Artist Trust, and the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. Jen is also an independent scholar and performer, and has served as poet in residence with Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility. Jen is author of the chapbook “Making the Tongue Dry,” and co-editor of Closer to Liberation: A Pina/xy Activist Anthology. She received a BA in History and Science from Harvard and an MFA in fiction and nonfiction from the Rainier Writing Workshop. Originally from a landlocked part of the Chicago area, Jen now lives with her family in Seattle, near the Duwamish River and the Salish Sea. Her debut book, Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing, is now available from Amistad/HarperCollins.

Elizabeth Sotelo is a Ph.D. candidate, researcher, teacher, and writer. She was born and raised in Lima, Perú, before settling in California and Oregon. She holds an M.A. in Hispanic Studies from the University of California Riverside and a B.A. in Spanish (Literature and Linguistics) from California State Polytechnic University Pomona (CPP). Her main interest, recent research, and writing have been in literary chronicles. Her work can be read in Textos Híbridos, Latin American Literary Review, +Memoria(s), Litera, Cuadernos Literarios, Hermēneus, and Eugene Weekly. In 2015, she was granted the Spanish Short Story Award from CPP. Currently, she is working on her non-fiction book project, Lethal Footprints: Chronicles About Individuals Affected by the Wood Treatment Plant J.H. Baxter.

Elizabeth Sotelo es candidata a doctora, investigadora, docente y escritora. Nació y creció en Lima, Perú, antes de establecerse en California y Oregón. Tiene una Maestría en Estudios Hispánicos por la University of California Riverside y una licenciatura en español (Literatura y Lingüística) por la California State Polytechnic University Pomona (CPP). Su principal interés, investigación reciente y escritura ha sido la crónica literaria. Su trabajo puede leerse en Textos Híbridos, Latin American Literary Review, +Memoria(s), Litera, Cuadernos Literarios, Hermēneus y Eugene Weekly. En 2015 recibió el Short Story Award en CPP. Actualmente, está trabajando en su proyecto de libro de no ficción, Huellas Letales: crónicas sobre personas afectadas por la planta de tratamiento de madera J.H. Baxter.

Hailey Spencer is, in the words of her wife Elizabeth, an absolute cloud of a girl. She is the author of the poetry collection Stories for When the Wolves Arrive. She lives and writes in Seattle, Washington.

Katherine E. Standefer is the author of Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life (Little, Brown Spark 2020), which was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction, an NYT Book Review Editor’s Choice, and shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Lightning Flowers was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, on the goop podcast, and in O, The Oprah Magazine, and People Magazine. Standefer earned her MFA at the University of Arizona. Her writing appeared in The Best American Essays 2016 and won the 2015 Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction. Standefer was a 2018 Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good and a 2017 Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellow at the Mesa Refuge. She currently lives in the Tetons. 

Website: www.KatherineStandefer.com

Social Media: @girlmakesfire