Teachers

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

Megan Boatright is a writer and editor from rural Florida, now living in Seattle, WA. She has an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago, where she was a writing instructor before transitioning into TTRPG development and editing.

Nicholas Boggs was an undergraduate when he discovered James Baldwin’s out-of-print children’s book, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. After he tracked down its illustrator, the French artist Yoran Cazac, he went on to coedit an acclaimed new edition of the book in 2018. His writing has also been anthologized in The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, James Baldwin Now, and Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin. He is the recipient of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Beinecke Library and Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, the Schomburg Center Scholars-in-Residence Program, and the National Humanities Center, as well as residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. He received his BA in English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from American University, and his PhD in English from Columbia. Born and raised in Washington, DC, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Melika Bokaie was born in December 1997 in Tehran. She studied dramatic arts and has spent several years teaching English to children. Passionate about travel, performance, and storytelling, Melika has spent the past seven years living and adventuring through various Latin American countries. She currently resides in Mexico. Her writing is deeply inspired by her experiences of travel, volunteering and the pursuit of personal transformation.

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.

Mateo Bracken is a poet, librettist, and actor who splits his time between Auburn and Seattle, Washington. He was the 2023-2024 Seattle Youth Poet Laureate and currently serves as the 2024-2026 Auburn Poet Laureate. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in the Gay & Lesbian Review, EchoX, The Washington State Queer Poetry Anthology, Abya Yala: Indigenous Connections in Latin America, Creative Colloquy, Bird Brains: A Lyrical Guide to the Birds of Washington State, and more. As a librettist in the Seattle Opera Creation Lab, he developed the twenty-minute chamber opera Blood Dawn of the Inti Sun in collaboration with composer Mina Pariseau. His first chapbook, Dear Spanish, was published in 2024 through Poetry Northwest and explores the languages of identity, heritage, and belonging. He is currently working on a manuscript about the settler colonial history of Auburn in verse.

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.