Teachers

Mary Lane Potter (PhD, University of Chicago; MFA, Warren Wilson) has deep experience writing, editing, and teaching fiction and creative nonfiction. She’s the author of the novel A Woman of Salt (Counterpoint), Strangers and Sojourners: Stories from the Lowcountry (Counterpoint), and the memoir Seeking God and Losing the Way. Her essays and stories have appeared in in Parabola, Witness, River Teeth, Still Point Arts Quarterly, The Ekphrastic Review, Minerva Rising, Women Studies Quarterly, Beloit Fiction Journal, North American Review, Tampa Review, Tiferet, SUFI Journal, Spiritus, Leaping Clear, and others. She’s received a Washington State Arts Commission/Artist Trust Fellowship and enjoyed writing residencies at MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Caldera, and the Collegeville Institute of Cultural and Ecumenical Studies. A dedicated and experienced teacher, she’s taught writing for years, most recently at Hugo House, The Loft Literary Center, and The Collegeville Institute. Website: http://members.authorsguild.net/marylapotter/.

Passionate about all aspects of writing, Potter is especially tuned in to voice, character development, and narrative structure—and to the challenges of writing women’s experiences, the body, and spirituality.

Favorite writers; John Keene, Audré Lorde, Clarice Lispector, Merce Rodoreda, Kazuo Ishiguro, Isaac Babel, James Welch, M. Scott Momaday, George Saunders, Leslie Marmon Silko, Barry Lopez. Octavia Butler, George Eliot.

Kamala Puligandla is a writer and editor in LA, who writes autobiographical fiction and essays on queer love and futures. She is well-known for her contagious laughter, her iconic hairstyle, and her easily undone heart. Her first novel, Zigzags, came out from Not A Cult in October 2020 and her novella You Can Vibe Me On My FemmePhone was released from Co-Conspirator Press in 2021. Find her at kamalapuligandla.com, and follow her on Instagram @thatkamala.

Katherine Quevedo was born and raised near Portland, Oregon, where she works as an analyst and lives with her husband and two sons. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in Fireside Magazine, Nightmare, Best Indie Speculative Fiction Vol. III and IV, Factor Four, Flame Tree Publishing’s Christmas Gothic, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Rhysling Award and received an honorable mention in the Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest. Her mini-chapbook The Inca Weaver’s Tales is forthcoming from Sword & Kettle Press, and her poems have appeared in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Coffin Bell, NonBinary Review, Eye to the Telescope, and elsewhere. Her articles have appeared on the official websites of Writer’s Digest and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA). She holds an MBA from Portland State University and degrees in Economics and English from Santa Clara University. Find her at www.katherinequevedo.com.

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.

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.

Ingrid Ricks is an NYT-bestselling memoir author, writing coach, and inspirational speaker who is passionate about leveraging personal storytelling to foster healing, awareness, empathy, and change. Over the past decade, she has helped thousands of students of every age find healing and empowerment by writing the deeply personal stories they needed to tell, and has produced eight anthologies in partnership with high schools and non-profits. Ingrid, who views personal storytelling as the key to healing and unity in today’s divided world, regularly presents her Healing Through Personal Storytelling workshops in partnership with organizations throughout the region and has delivered keynote talks on the subject to educators and social workers nationwide. Ingrid’s books include the coming-of-age memoir, Hippie Boy: A Girl’s Story, and Focus, a memoir about her journey with the blinding eye disease Retinitis Pigmentosa. She has also ghostwritten several memoirs and has shared stories from her childhood on Salon and NPR.

Ines Rodrigues holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia University, and published her first novel, Days of Bossa Nova, in 2017. Her stories appears in The Plentitudes Journal, Tint Journal, 650 Where Writers Read Anthology, and Columbia Anthology 2023.

Lola Rogers translates novels, short stories, poems, essays, comics, and children’s books. She was recently awarded a 2024 Foreword INDIES Silver Prize for her translation of Fishing for the Little Pike, by Juhani Karila.

PATRICK ROSAL currently serves as inaugural Codirector of the Mellon-funded Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers-Camden, where he is a Professor of English. He is the author of five full-length poetry collections including the forthcoming The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems.

He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Research Scholar program. Residencies include Civitella Ranieri, a Lannan Residency in Marfa, TX, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. He is co-founding editor of Some Call It Ballin’, a literary sports magazine.

Brooklyn Antediluvian (2016), won the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Prize for best book of poetry and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry. Previously, Boneshepherds (2011) was named a small press highlight by the National Book Critics Circle and a notable book by the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of My American Kundiman (2006), and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (2003). His collections have also been honored with the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award, Global Filipino Literary Award and the Asian American Writers Workshop Members' Choice Award.

He has received teaching appointments at Princeton University, Penn State Altoona, Centre College, and the University of Texas, Austin, Drew University's Low-Residency MFA program and Sarah Lawrence College. He taught creative writing for several years at Bloomfield College where he previously earned his B.A. and twice served on the faculty of Kundiman’s Summer Retreat for Asian American Poets. In addition to conducting workshops in Alabama prisons through Auburn University, he has taught high school workshops through the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Sarah Lawrence College's Summer Writing Conference for High School Students, Urban Word NYC, and the Volume workshops in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Camden's MFA program, where he teaches courses on poetry, performance, improvisation, collaboration, and community art.

His poems and essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies including The New York Times, Tin House, Drunken Boat, Poetry, New England Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Grantland, Brevity, Breakbeat Poets, and The Best American Poetry. His work has been recognized by the annual Allen Ginsberg Awards, the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Arts and Letters Prize, Best of the Net among others. His chapbook Uncommon Denominators won the Palanquin Poetry Series Award from the University of South Carolina, Aiken.

His poems and voiceovers were included in the Argentine feature-length film Anhua: Amanecer which screened at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival. He has also appeared on the Leonard Lopate Show and the BBC Radio's World Today.

His invited readings and performances include several appearances at the Dodge Poetry Festival, the Stadler Center for Poetry, WordFest in Asheville, the poetry reading series at Georgia Tech, Poetry @ MIT, the Carr Reading Series at the University of Illinois, the Whitney Museum, Lincoln Center, Sarah Lawrence College, where he earned his MFA, and hundreds of other venues that span the United States, London, Buenos Aires, South Africa and the Philippines. 

Mel Ruth is a poet, a professor, a mentor, and a student. Mel is currently a PhD candidate at Georgia State University where they major in Creative Writing with a Concentration in Poetry. Mel obtained their MFA from University of Central Arkansas, and their BFA from Salisbury University. Mel has numerous years of teaching experience, in including, but not limited to, First Year Writing, Dual College Enrollment Composition, Introduction to Creative Writing, Forms & Theory of Poetry, and American Literature. Mel’s chapbook, “A Name Among Bone,” was selected as the winner of the 2021 Cow Creek Chapbook prize, and is forthcoming from Emerald City Press in early 2022. Their chapbook was also listed as a semi-finalist in the Spring 2020 Black River Chapbook Contest through Black Lawrence Press. Mel was the 2018-2019 Oxford American Magazine Editorial Assistant Fellow, and their work has been selected as a finalist for the Slice Literary’s Bridging the Gap Award. Mel has poems featured in, in forthcoming from, Hawai’i Pacific Review, The Emerson Review, Red Earth Review, Sierra Nevada Review and more. Their reviews have been featured in Pleiades, New Pages, Entropy, and The Rumpus. On top of being a poet, Mel is also seeking representation for their LGBTQ+ Young Adult Novel, “Good Intentions.” For more information go to melruth.com or follow Mel on Twitter @_Mel_Ruth_.

Co-owner of Speculatively Queer, Jed Sabin is a jack-of-all-trades with professional experience as an editor, writer, scientist, project coordinator, and logistics manager. They were editor-in-chief of their college student newspaper, and they worked as an editor on the Maze of Games puzzle novel. Their writing has been published by Daily Science Fiction and Wired Magazine. Their hobbies include playing hockey, inventing weird cocktails, and maintaining a spreadsheet of over 600 queer movies.

MATTHEW SALESSES is the author of the bestsellers The Hundred-Year Flood, an Adoptive Families Best Book of 2015 and Amazon.com Best Book of September, and Craft in the Real World, a Best Book of 2021 at NPR, Esquire, Library Journal, Independent Book Review, Chicago Tribune, Electric Literature, and others. His latest novel is the PEN/Faulkner Finalist Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, a Thrillist.com and Entropy Best Book of 2020. Previous books include I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying; Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity; and The Last Repatriate. Two more books are forthcoming: a novel, The Sense of Wonder, and a memoir-in-essays, To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time.

Matthew was adopted from Korea. In 2015 Buzzfeed named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers. His essays can be found in Best American Essays 2020, NPR Code Switch, The New York Times Motherlode, The Guardian, and other venues. His short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, PEN/Guernica, and Witness, among others. He has received awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, [PANK], HTMLGIANT, IMPAC, Inprint, and elsewhere.

Matthew is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA/PhD program at Oklahoma State University. He earned a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Emerson College. He serves on the editorial boards of Green Mountains Review and Machete (an imprint of The Ohio State University Press), and has held editorial positions at Pleiades, The Good Men Project, Gulf Coast, and Redivider. He has read and lectured widely at conferences and universities and on TV and radio, including PBS, NPR, Al Jazeera America, various MFA programs, and the Tin House, Kundiman, and One Story writing conferences.

Edward Sambrano III is a Latinx poet, critic, and educator from San Antonio, Texas. They received their MFA from the University of Florida, and have received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. Their writing has appeared in Pleiades, Waxwing, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. They can be found on Twitter @SambranoPoet

Edward Sambrano III is a Latinx poet, critic, and educator from San Antonio, Texas. They received their MFA from the University of Florida, and have received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. Their writing has appeared in Pleiades, Waxwing, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. They can be found on Twitter @SambranoPoet

Edward Sambrano III is a Latinx poet, critic, and educator from San Antonio, Texas. They received their MFA from the University of Florida, and have received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. Their writing has appeared in Pleiades, Waxwing, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. They can be found on Twitter @SambranoPoet

Edward Sambrano III is a Latinx poet, critic, and educator from San Antonio, Texas. They received their MFA from the University of Florida, and have received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. Their writing has appeared in Pleiades, Waxwing, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. They can be found on Twitter @SambranoPoet

Rana San is an intermedia artist, film festival curator, and video poetry educator with an interest in experimental modes of storytelling using analog media, stop motion, and direct animation. Rana co-directs Cadence Video Poetry Festival, an annual showcase of literary works presented as visual media. She is the Artistic Director at Northwest Film Forum and has recently presented work at SIFF (WA), Eugene Contemporary Art (OR), NYC Indie Theatre Film Festival (NY), and Experiments in Cinema (NM). ranasan.art

RAKESH SATYAL is an Executive Editor who specializes in serious narrative nonfiction, as well as literary fiction and fiction in translation. He acquires across all the HarperOne lists — HarperOne, Amistad, HarperVia, and HarperCollins Español. He held previous editorial positions at Atria/Simon & Schuster, Harper/HarperCollins, and Doubleday/Random House. He has acquired and edited many New York Times bestsellers, including Let Love Have the Last Word by Common, Resistance by Tori Amos, I Have Something to Tell You by Chasten Buttigieg, the Children of Eden series by Joey Graceffa, I Can't Date Jesus by Michael Arceneaux, Holding by Graham Norton, and Furious Love by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger. Other authors with whom he has worked include Michael Ausiello, Guy Branum, Terry Castle, Paolo Cognetti, Marcia Gay Harden, Daniel Lavery, Armistead Maupin, Janet Mock, and Jake Shears.

An award-winning novelist (No One Can Pronounce my Name and Blue Boy), Rakesh has taught in the publishing program at New York University and currently serves as Vice President of the board of Lambda Literary, the world's leading LGBTQ+ literary organization. He is based in New York.

Molly Schaeffer’s writing has appeared in The Recluse, Tagvverk, Prelude, and The Poetry Project Newsletter; her chapbook STATE ZAP* is published by MO(0)ON/IO. She works in writing and visual art, and teaches in Bard College's Language and Thinking Program and the Summer @Brown Pre-College Program. She holds an MFA in poetry from Brown University. For more information go to mollyschaeffer.com.

Describe your teaching style.

My teaching style is very discussion-focused and generative. We work together as a group (sometimes in partners/breakout rooms) to parse out meaning. I tend to pair readings with generative prompts. Oftentimes there will also be shorter in-class writing work, as well.

Hannah Schoettmer's poetry has appeared in venues like The Louisville Review, SOFTBLOW, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, ONE ART, and elsewhere. She's received a fellowship from Brooklyn Poets. Her debut chapbook, Body Panopticon (Bottlecap Features), was released in 2022.

Heidi Seaborn thought she’d grow up to be a writer. And eventually, she did. But first, she had a long global business career, raised three children, divorced, remarried, and then finally, in her late 50’s took a class at the Hugo House that helped launch her second act as a poet, essayist, and editor. Since 2016, Heidi’s authored two full-length collections of poetry, including PANK Books 2020 Poetry Award winner An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe (2021), Give a Girl Chaos (C&R Press, 2019), and three chapbooks of poetry including the 2020 Comstock Review Prize Chapbook, Bite Marks (2021), as well as Finding My Way Home (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Once a Diva (dancing girl press, 2021), as well as a poetic political pamphlet Body Politic (Mount Analogue Press, 2017). She’s won or been shortlisted for over two dozen awards. Her poetry and essays have recently appeared in American Poetry Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Best American Poetry, Brevity, Copper Nickel, The Cortland Review, The Financial Times, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, The Slowdown, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU and a BA from Stanford University. After living all over the world, she now resides in her hometown of Seattle.

Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She earned an MLA in Africana studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. Sealey is the author of the collections Ordinary Beast (2017), a finalist for the PEN Open Book and Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named (2016), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her other honors and awards include a 2019 Rome Prize, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, a Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, a Daniel Varoujan Award, and a Poetry International Prize. She has been a fellow at Cave Canem, the Poetry Project, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, and the MacDowell Colony. She is currently the executive director at Cave Canem, the 2018-2019 Doris Lippman Visiting Poet at The City College of New York, a visiting professor at Boston University, and a 2019-2020 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.

Kascha Semonovitch’s poems and essays have appeared in journals including Quarterly West, The Bellingham Review, Zyzzyva, The Kenyon Review and others, and in the chapbook Genesis by Dancing Girl Press. She has a PhD in philosophy from Boston College, an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. She has fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation, and her creative nonfiction was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Kascha has edited two collections of philosophical essays on early twentieth century European thought, and published academic essays, mostly recently Attention and Expression in Simone Weil. She has taught philosophy at Boston College, Seattle University, and Hugo House in Seattle. She runs an art gallery in Seattle. Teaching Philosophy: I believe that we learn by reading – whether the work of our classmates, contemporary authors or canonical works. The work of a teacher lies in asking –and re-asking –questions that motivate us to pay attention to these texts. In class, we think together by articulating our interpretations. When we reach a conflict of interpretation – “Oh, I thought Robert Hass was talking about beauty” or “I thought Descartes meant his elbow”– then we inquire into the reasons for the conflict. After such careful reading, we are ready to re-read our own writing. We are better at paying attention to what is happening in syntax and semantics. As a faculty member at Seattle University for over seven years, I taught the history of philosophy, critical thinking, and ethics. Philosophers pay attention to the history and internal consistency of systems and concepts. This type of paying attention is also invaluable to writers. For example, we might ask whether poet thought through the connections between the terms in a text and the deep history of texts that precede it? Does a fictional or poetic world hold together consistently? I love learning by reading with students.

Website: kaschasemonovitch.com