Teachers

Hannah Tinti is the author of the bestselling novel The Good Thief, which won the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the story collection Animal Crackers, a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her novel The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley was a national bestseller, finalist for the Edgar Award and New England Book Award for Best Novel of the Year, and has been optioned for television. Tinti is also the co-founder and executive editor of One Story magazine, which won the AWP Small Press Publisher Award, CLMP’s Firecracker Award, and the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Excellence in Editing. She teaches creative writing at New York University’s MFA program, cofounded the Sirenland Writers Conference, and from 2010–2013 was the literary commentator on Selected Shorts.

Miriam BC Tobin (she|her) is a Seattle-based playwright, theatre artist, and writing instructor. She has performed on stages across the US and Europe and has taught drama to youth in Seattle, NYC, Denver, and on a farm in the Czech Republic. She founded MBCT; Modern But Classical Theatre in NYC to de- and re-construct classic plays into highly physical adaptations. Her play The War of Women received a roundtable reading at The Lark and several of her plays premiered at Goddard College’s Ten-Minute Play festival. Honors & awards include a Hedgebrook residency, PEN Writing Scholarship, Newington-Cropsey Fellowship, the London Dramatic Academy Fellowship, and she was a Pipeline Theatre PlayLab semi-finalist. Miriam was the fall 2020 Editor-in-Chief of The Pitkin Review and is currently a dramatic writing editor with The Clockhouse. Her work appears in multiple issues of The Pitkin and Smith & Kraus. Miriam also runs SCRiB LAB, a writing organization aimed at creating community through experimentation.

Describe your teaching style.

I'm all about interaction, collaboration, and discussion. My teaching style is very open, and I welcome all ideas and questions in the classroom. Each class is a mixture of different learning styles, including presented lessons, reading and writing exercises, and open discussions.

Tina Tocco is a Pushcart Prize nominee. As a writer for both children and adults, her work has appeared in kiddie magazines, such as Highlights, Cricket, Humpty Dumpty, AppleSeeds, and Odyssey, and in literary journals, including New Ohio Review, River Styx, Sou’wester, Roanoke Review, Potomac Review, Portland Review, and Italian Americana. Her children’s poetry collection, The Hungry Snowman and Other Poems, was released by Kelsay Books in 2019; her grown-up work was selected for The Best Small Fictions 2019 (Sonder Press, 2019), Best Nonfiction Food (Woodhall Press, 2020), and other anthologies. A recipient of multiple awards, Tina was a runner-up for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrator’s Work-in-Progress Grant and a finalist in CALYX’s Flash Fiction Contest. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Manhattanville College, where she was editor-in-chief of Inkwell. Tina has taught for GrubStreet, Hudson Valley Writers Center, Arts Escape, Kids Short Story Connection, and other organizations.

Describe your teaching style.

Very relaxed. Very positive.

R.E. Toledo ("Rossy"): Narradora y poeta, escribe y aboga por los derechos de los inmigrantes. Cursó la Maestría en Letras Hispánicas en la Universidad de Tennessee y la Maestría en Escritura Creativa en Español de la Universidad de Nueva York. Sus colecciones de poesía Pregonero despertar de voces (Abismos, 2013) y Azules sueños naranjas (miCielo, 2013) fueron publicadas en el 2013 y presentadas durante la Feria del Libro del Zócalo, en la Ciudad de México, 2013. Sus poemas y cuentos han sido publicados en Letras Femeninas, Label me Latino/a, Revista Esperanza, para personas invidentes y con problemas de visión y la revista de estudios generales del ITAM. Fue coeditora de la revista del programa de Literatura Creativa en Español, Imanhattan, No. 3 (2012). Coeditó la antología de textos transfronterizos, bilingües/biculturales Nos pasamos de la Raya/We Crossed The Line (Abismos, 2016). Actualmente se encuentra trabajando en el segundo volumen de Nos pasamos de la raya/We Crossed The Line, y su tercera colección de poesía, Vacíos. Trabaja como voluntaria para HoLa Hora Latina, dirigiendo el comité artístico de esta organización sin fines de lucro. Así mismo, es parte de Knoxville Immigrant Transit Assistance (KITA), donde participa dos veces por semana ayudando a inmigrantes en tránsito. En su tiempo libre es probable encontrarla haciendo trabajo voluntario, practicando senderismo en las bellas Montañas Humeantes, o haciendo yoga. 

R.E. Toledo  (“Rossy”):  graduated with an M.A. in Hispanic Studies from the University of Tennessee and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from NYU. Her first two collections of poetry Pregonero despertar de voces (Abismos, 2013) and Azules sueños naranjas (miCielo, 2013) were published and presented in Mexico City during the International Book Fair, Mexico City, 2013. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in Letras Femeninas, Label me Latino/a, Revista Esperanza, for the visually challenged and impaired and ITAM’s magazine for General Studies. She was co-editor of Imanhattan, the literary magazine of NYU’s Creative Writing Program in Spanish. She coedited the anthology of bilingual/bicultural transborder texts, Nos pasamos de la Raya/We Crossed the Line (Abismos, 2016). She is currently working in the second volume of Nos pasamos de la raya/We Crossed the Line, and her third poetry collection, Vacíos. She is the Art Committee Chair and Art Director for HoLa Hora Latina a local 501(c 3). Additionally, she volunteers with Knoxville Immigrant Transit Assistance (KITA), helping immigrants in transit. During her free time, you might find her volunteering, hiking the beautiful Smoky Mountains,  or practicing yoga.

Eugenia Toledo was born in Temuco, Chile, grew up in the same neighborhood as Pablo Neruda, and came to Seattle after the 1973 military coup. Her bilingual volume, Trazas de mapa, trazas de sangre/Map Traces, Blood Traces (Mayapple Press, 2017), was a Washington State Book Award and PEN Los Angeles Award in Translation Finalist. 

John Whittier Treat, a resident of Seattle since 1983, has published many short stories—one was a winner of the Christopher Hewitt Prize and another was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is the author of a novel, THE RISE AND FALL OF THE YELLOW HOUSE, which was a finalist was the 2016 Lambda Literary Foundation Prize for Best Gay Fiction, and a 2020 novella, MAID SERVICE. His opinion pieces have appeared in THE NEW YORK TIMES, HUFFINGTON POST, LITHUB and OUT magazine.

Nicole Treska is the author of the debut memoir Wonderland. Her short fiction has appeared in New York Tyrant magazine, Epiphany literary journal, and Egress: New Openings in Literary Art. Her interviews and reviews are up at Electric Literature, Guernica, The Millions, BOMB, The Rumpus, and then some. She lives in Harlem with her husband, James, and their three-legged dog, Nadine.

Sergio Troncoso is the author of Nobody’s Pilgrims, an adventure story about three teenagers, Turi, Molly, and Arnulfo, on the run from evil and unwittingly carrying even a greater menace in their stolen truck. Troncoso also wrote A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son and edited Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in Between Worlds, which received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews. A Fulbright scholar and past president of the Texas Institute of Letters, Troncoso teaches at the Yale Writers’ Workshop.

Arianne True (Choctaw, Chickasaw) is a queer poet and folk artist based in Tacoma, WA. She teaches and mentors youth poets around Puget Sound and moonlights as a copyeditor. Arianne has received fellowships from Jack Straw, Hugo House, and Artist Trust, and is a proud alum of Hedgebrook and of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She was recently the Seattle Repertory Theater’s first Native Artist-in-Residence. You can find more of her work collected online at ariannetrue.com.

Brian Turner is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently: The Wild Delight of Wild Things (2023), The Goodbye World Poem (2023), and The Dead Peasant’s Handbook (2023), all forthcoming with Alice James Books. His other collections include Here, Bullet to Phantom Noise, and the memoir My Life as a Foreign Country. He is the editor of The Kiss and co-editor of The Strangest of Theatres anthologies. A musician, he has also written and recorded several albums with The Interplanetary Acoustic Team, including 11 11 (Me Smiling) and The Retro Legion’s American Undertow. His poems and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Harper’s, among other fine journals, and he was featured in the documentary film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, which was nominated for an Academy Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, he has received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Orlando, Florida, with his dog, Dene, the world’s sweetest golden retriever.