Teachers

Born in New Jersey, Courtney holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Montana and a BA in Art History from Princeton. Her work has appeared in The Fairy Tale Review, The Masters Review, The Indiana Review, Barrelhouse, and The Los Angeles Review, among others. When Courtney's not writing, she can be found coaching lacrosse, hiking with her baby on her back, or looking for weird little pockets of wonder in the world. Courtney lives in Seattle, where she was a Hugo House Fellow in 2018-2019.

2005 Texas Poet Laureate Alan Birkelbach is a Texas native and 4th generation German-American. He is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, Western Writers of America, National Park Foundation, and The Academy of American Poets.

He is a Spur Award Winner, two-time international Indie Book Award Finalist, winner of North Texas Book Festival Award, Pushcart Prize Nominee, editor for several editions of the TCU Press Texas Poet Laureate Series, winner of the Pat Stodghill Book Publication Award and winner of the Edwin M. Eakin Memorial Book Publication Award.

One of eight co-authors (all from the Southwest) of the anthology book 8 Voices: Contemporary Poetry from the American Southwest from Baskerville Publishers, Inc. This book is now part of the teaching curriculum for SMU University, Dallas, Texas. 

His twelfth book, “The National Parks: A Century of Grace”, with fellow Texas Poet Laureate Karla K. Morton, is from TCU Press. The poets visited all 62 National Parks, wrote poetry and took photos, with a percentage of the sales from the book going back to the Parks System. This is to help culturally preserve our greatest treasures – our National Parks for the next 100 years. 

Alan Birkelbach currently lives in Raton, New Mexico in the shadow of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. 

Liza Birnbaum's writing has appeared in Web Conjunctions, jubilat, Tammy, Open Letters Monthly, and other publications. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and teaches at Hugo House, Cornish College of the Arts, and the University of Washington's Robinson Center. She's been awarded residencies from Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Arts and Agriculture and Fishtrap. For more of Liza go to lizabirnbaum.com

Doctora en literatura europea, Universidad Autónoma, Madrid, Spain

Margarita Borrero es novelista, premiada y publicada en España, y escritora de relatos, género en el que ha ganado media docena de primeros lugares en distintos certámenes en España, Estados Unidos y Canadá. Durante más de una década se ha desempeñado como docente de Escuela de escritores, una de las instituciones privadas de escritura creativa más grandes del mundo hispanohablante, miembro de la Asociación Europea de programas de escritura creativa. También ha trabajado como profesora asociada en Mount Saint Mary University, en Los Ángeles.

PhD European Literature, Universidad Autónoma, Madrid, Spain

Margarita Borrero is an award-winning novelist from Colombia. She has received numerous short story awards in Spain, Canada and the United States. She teaches at Madrid’s Escuela de Escritores, one of the top private creative writing institutions of the Hispanic world and a member of the European Association of Creative Writing Programs. She has also worked as an associate professor at Mount Saint Mary University in Los Angeles.

s.c.bostwick (they/them) is a nonbinary trans poet born and raised on the traditional lands of the Puyallup people (Tacoma, WA). They received their BA in English from Western Washington University and their MFA in Poetry from the University of Notre Dame. s.c.bostwick was a recipient of the Hugo Fellowship in 2021-22 and their work can be found in Homology Lit, Dream Pop Journal, and DELUGE. They are currently working on projects that are concerned with family, transness, migration, power, and the construction industry. Find them on socials: @s.c.bostwick  

Portia Botchway is a Halfrican and a lifelong learner, athlete, and explorer. She immersed herself in writing while attending a public, boarding, arts high school in South Carolina; and takes inspiration from the lyricism of Taiye Selasi, Khadijah Queen, Ken Liu, Colleen McCullough, and Pat Conroy. She collects clouds.

Amy Bowers is a Florida native currently living in Connecticut with her family. Her writing explores art, domestic culture, the insect and natural worlds, and manufactured places and spaces. She is currently working on an essay collection about growing up in central Florida among amusement parks, alligators, and hurricanes. She holds an MFA in CNF from Bennington and has work published or forthcoming in [PANK], Washington Square Review, West Trade Review, OxMag, Farm-ish, Assay, and LA Review of Books. Her essay Manual is published (fall 2021) in A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays, edited by Randon Billings Noble and published by the University of Nebraska Press.

Sabra Boyd is a writer, editor, journalist, and public speaker whose work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Eater, Vice, IndieWire, Psychology Today, HuffPost, The Seattle Times, and more. From personal essays to investigative journalism, Sabra enjoys helping others build their own successful writing careers.

Hannah Brancato (she/her) is an artist and educator based in Baltimore, whose art practice is grounded in collective storytelling, and the creation of public rituals to bring people’s stories together. She is faculty at Maryland Institute College of Art, Towson University and UMBC. In Fall 2021 she was a Studio Resident at VisArts, culminating in the solo exhibition, Inheritance of White Silence, a socially engaged project investigating ways to resist inherited white supremacy culture. Hannah is currently working to document the integral role of art in social justice work, through a series of interviews with anti-sexual violence activists called Move Slowly; and by teaching Art x Resistance, a collaborative research-based course of her own design. She is a recipient of the 2021 Rubys Artist Grant for Dreamseeds, an installation of textiles, sound, and interactive components that will invite current and budding activists in Baltimore to develop visions for the future, co-created with Sanahara Ama Chandra.

Brancato is co-founder FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture, an art/organizing collective that produces creative interventions to create a culture of consent, best known for the Monument Quilt. She was a FORCE collective member from 2010-2020, is a 2015 OSI-Baltimore Community Fellow, and as part of FORCE, is the recipient of the 2016 Sondheim Artscape Prize, awarded to one artist or collective in the Mid-Atlantic region per year.

Brancato’s work has received widespread media coverage, including Afterimage, Ms Magazine, Voice of America, Bmore Art, the Washington Post, MSNBC, Surface Design Journal, and Fast Company. 

Bella Bravo is a writer new to Seattle. They earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2022. Their stories and essays have appeared in NY Tyrant, Spoil, and Commune. For more information go to bellabravo.com and follow on Instagram @bellabravo.

Lynn Breedlove, author of the novel Godspeed and the performance text On Freak Show, derived from his one-man-show of the same name. For his long-term contributions to Bay Area queer culture – from stints in music ensembles from Tribe8 to The Homobiles, to entrepreneurial accomplishments such as establishing the first all-female bicycle courier company, Lickety Split, to the pioneering, queer-centric ride share business Homobiles, Breedlove received a Certificate of Honor from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Breedlove last joined Sister Spit on their 1998 tour.

Susan Briante is the author most recently of Defacing the Monument (Noemi Press 2020), a series of essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics and the state, winner of the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism in 2021. In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly calls the collection “a superb examination of the ethical issues facing artists who tell others’ stories” and a “dazzlingly inventive and searching text.” 

Briante’s collection of poetry The Market Wonders (Ahsahta Press) was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. The Kenyon Review calls it “masterful at every turn.” The collection was recently translated into Spanish by the poet Giancarlo Huapaya and published under the title El Mercado se pregunta by Kriller71 (Madrid). Briante is also the author of the poetry collections Pioneers in the Study of Motion and Utopia Minus (an Academy of American Poets Notable Book of 2011. Of Utopia Minus, Publisher’s Weekly declared: “this book finds an urgent language for the world in which we live.”

She has received grants and awards from the Atlantic Monthly, the MacDowell Colony, the Academy of American Poets, the US-Mexico Fund for Culture, and (most recently) the Ucross Foundation. Recent work has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, The Best American Poetry (2021) and The Brooklyn Rail. She is a professor of English in the creative writing program at the University of Arizona. There she serves as co-coordinator of the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program, which brings MFA students to the US-Mexico border to engage in reciprocal research projects with community-based environmental and social justice groups. She is also a member of the Detained project, a team of artists, scholars and activists who record and archive the oral histories of formerly detained migrants and asylum seekers.

Sara Brickman is a queer Jewish writer and performer born in Ann Arbor, MI. The winner of the Split This Rock Poetry Prize, Sara has received grants and scholarships from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Yiddish Book Center, 4Culture, and Artist Trust, and their performance have appeared at On The Boards and theaters and community spaces nationwide. A BOAAT Writers Fellow and Ken Warfel Fellow for Poetry in Community, their writing appears in Narrative, Adroit, The Indiana Review, Muzzle, and the anthologies Ghosts of Seattle Past, The Dead Animal Handbook, and Courage: Daring Poems for Gutsy Girls. They are currently at work on a book of poems and hybrid essay collection and performance about community resilience, trauma, statuary, and collective organizing in Charlottesville, VA during the white-nationalist rallies of 2017. Sara holds an MFA from the University of Virginia and lives in Seattle, where they work in a library, teach writing to youth and adults, and parent a cat named Latke. 

Sharon Bridgforth is a writer that creates ritual/jazz theatre. A 2020-2023 Playwrights’ Center Core Member, Sharon has received support from the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, Creative Capital, MAP Fund and the National Performance Network.

Matt Briggs is a writer from the Pacific Northwest. His essay "Falling and Always Falling: Twin Peaks and the Clear-Cut Landscape" appeared in Moss: Volume One. His short stories have been published in The Seattle Review, StringTown, the Chicago Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of eight works of fiction, including the novel in stories The Remains of River Names and the novel Shoot the Buffalo, which was nominated for a Washington State Book Award and won the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award. Briggs grew up in the Snoqualmie Valley and currently live in Des Moines, Washington.