Teachers

Kendra DeColo is the author of I am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World (BOA Editions, 2021), My Dinner with Ron Jeremy (Third Man Books, 2016) and Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia Books, 2014), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of a 2019 Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and has received awards and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Millay Colony, Split this Rock, and the Tennessee Arts Commission. Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Tin House Magazine, Waxwing, Los Angeles Review, Bitch Magazine, VIDA, and elsewhere. She is co-host of the podcast RE/VERB: A Third Man Books Production and she lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Claire Dederer is the bestselling author of two critically acclaimed memoirs: Love and Trouble and Poser. Her new nonfiction book, Monsters, is based on her viral Paris Review essay "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?" Monsters will be published by Knopf in April 2023. Claire's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Nation, Vogue, Slate, and many other publications. She is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency and is currently on the faculty of the Creative Writing MFA at Pacific University.

Rebecca Delacruz-Gunderson is a mixed Filipina & White Washingtonian. Since graduating from Williams College in 2018, she has served as Field Director for State Senator T’wina Nobles’ campaign, worked at The Bush School, lived in Singapore, and taught writing classes. Currently working toward a Masters in English at UBC, she will be returning to Bush as an English teacher & college counselor this fall. Her work has been published in Entropy.

Before joining Hugo House as Executive Director, Diana Delgado was most recently Literary Director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center in Tucson. Diana is a bilingual Spanish-speaking poet and arts administrator committed to diversifying the literary ecosystem. A first-generation Latinx college graduate, she earned a BFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia. She is a Hedgebrook alum, and her volume of poetry, Tracing the Horse, was a New York Times New & Noteworthy pick. Diana has worked for nonprofit organizations including the Coalition for Hispanic Family Services in Brooklyn, NY, and the William J. Clinton Non-Profit Foundation.

Risa Denenberglives on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state where she works as a nurse practitioner and volunteers with End of Life Washington. She is a co-founder and editor at Headmistress Press, publisher of lesbian/bi/trans poetry and curator of The Poetry Café, an online meeting place where poetry chapbooks are celebrated and reviewed. Her poetry and poetry book reviews have been published widely.

Nicola DeRobertis-Theye’s debut novel The Vietri Project will be published in March 2021 by Harper. She was an Emerging Writing Fellow at the New York Center for Fiction, and her work has been published in Agni, Electric Literature, and LitHub. A graduate of UC Berkeley, she received an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, where she was the fiction editor of its literary magazine Ecotone. She has taught creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington and the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts. A native of Oakland, CA, she now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Writer and writing coach Stephanie Dethlefs helps people get their stories onto the page with ease and self-compassion. She is the author of the middle grade novel Unspoken, and her writing can be found in a variety of publications.

Cara Diaconoff is the author of Unmarriageable Daughters: Stories and a novel, I’ll Be a Stranger to You. Her fiction has appeared in Indiana Review, The Adirondack Review, and elsewhere. She teaches writing and literature at Bellevue College. For more information check out Cara's LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/caradiaconoff/.

Nicole Dieker teaches writing, freelancing, and publishing classes (including Hugo House online classes) and works one-on-one with authors as a developmental editor and copyeditor. She’s been a full-time freelance writer since 2012, and spent five years as a writer and editor for The Billfold, a personal finance blog where people had honest conversations about money.

Nicole’s debut novel, The Biographies of Ordinary People: Volume 1: 1989–2000, published in May 2017; The Biographies of Ordinary People: Volume 2: 2004–2016 followed in May 2018. The two books are a Millennial-era Little Women that follow three sisters from childhood to adulthood.

Visit NicoleDieker.com to learn more — including Nicole’s thoughts on writing, money, teaching and the process of taking your work from good to excellent.

Adelle Dimitui is a graphic novelist whose work is heavily influenced by her childhood growing up in Myanmar and the Philippines. She aims to highlight underrepresented narratives and cultures, particularly those centered around life in the Global South. Since her graduation from Princeton University, Adelle has been based in Seattle where she currently works in cybersecurity. Adelle spends her free time singing, songwriting, scuba diving, and flying planes. 

Cass Donish is author of the poetry collections Your Dazzling Death (Knopf, 2024), The Year of the Femme (University of Iowa Press, 2019), and Beautyberry (Slope Editions, 2018); and a nonfiction chapbook, On the Mezzanine (Gold Line Press, 2019).

Peter Donovan is an musical storyteller. His songs span genres and feature narratives based on both real-life and fictitious characters, written with a contemplative heart. After finding success and a dedicated fanbase with Seattle’s All The Real Girls and his side project The Rose Petals (alongside Elijah Ocean), Donovan returned in 2022 with his first proper solo album, This Better Be Good. His previous releases spun expertly-crafted character sketches that earned plaudits from Paste Magazine, Consequence of Sound, American Songwriter, and more. With This Better Be Good, Donovan spreads his wings, combining the plaintive soul of indie rock, the heartfelt sincerity of Americana, and the stirring studio pageantry of ‘70s singer-songwriters, drawing them together to explore more intimate depths.

Anna Dorn is an author, editor, and teacher living in Los Angeles. She has published three books: Exalted (Unnamed Press, 2022), Bad Lawyer (Hachette, 2021), and Vagablonde (Unnamed Press, 2020).