Hugo House teachers are at the core of our goal to help writers become better writers. Our teachers are writers; they are selected on the basis of their active engagement in the literary world as well as their love of teaching.
Teachers
Hugo House teachers are at the core of our goal to help writers become better writers. Our teachers are writers; they are selected on the basis of their active engagement in the literary world as well as their love of teaching.
Ray Stoeve is the author of the young adult novels Between Perfect and Real (2021) and Arden Grey (2022), both Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selections. They also contributed to the young adult anthology Take The Mic: Fictional Stories of Everyday Resistance. They received a 2016-2017 Made at Hugo House Fellowship and created the YA/MG Trans and Nonbinary Voices Masterlist, a database that tracks all books in those age categories written by trans authors about trans characters. When they’re not writing, they can be found gardening, making art in other mediums, or hiking their beloved Pacific Northwest.
They enjoy fiction of all age categories and genres, especially historical and contemporary realist works about queer and trans characters. They are best equipped to provide sensitivity reads and consult on young adult novels. In addition to being a full-time writer, they also work with authors and publishers seeking sensitivity reads for queer and trans characters.
J. Ryan Stradal is the author of the New York Times bestseller Kitchens of the Great Midwest, the national bestseller The Lager Queen of Minnesota, and the forthcoming novel Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club. He lives in California.
Greg Stump has been a regular contributor to The Stranger for more than a decade. He is the co-creator of the comic book series Urban Hipster, a former writer and editor for The Comics Journal, and the creator of the weekly alternative-newspaper comic Dwarf Attack. He teaches comics through a variety of schools and organizations in the Seattle area and recently completed his first graphic novel, Disillusioned Illusions.
Leigh Sugar is a multidisciplinary artist from Michigan. She currently teaches writing at the Institute for Justice and Opportunity at John Jay College in New York City, and holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where she studied on fellowship. Poems appear in POETRY, jubilat, Pigeon Pages, and more. Leigh has taught in a variety of settings to folks ages 0 through older adulthood, including undergraduate creative writing at NYU, facilitating writing workshops in state prisons through the Prison Creative Arts Project, and teaching academic and professional writing to justice-system involved individuals. A disabled and chronically ill artist, Leigh aims to foster accessible arts spaces and invites active feedback from participants in order to make workshop as safe and supportive as possible. We are all responsible to ourselves and each other, and poetry workshops are such a sacred place to practice this system of community care. Find out more (and say hello!) at www.leighksugar.com.
Social Media: @lekasugar
Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of three collections of short fiction, most recently What We Do With the Wreckage, which won the 2017 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and was published by UGA Press in 2018. Her earlier collections are Swimming With Strangers (Chronicle, 2008) and This Life She's Chosen (Chronicle, 2005). Her short fiction has been published in Ploughshares, McSweeney's, One Story, and North American Review, among other journals, and she has been the recipient of a PEN/O. Henry Prize. Kirsten teaches fiction writing at Hugo House and 9th–12th grade English at a small independent school near Seattle.
Aimee Suzara is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, and performer based in Oakland, CA whose mission is to create, and help others create, poetic and theatrical writing about race, gender, and the body to provoke dialogue and social change. Her debut poetry book, Souvenir (WordTech Editions 2014) was a finalist for the WILLA Award 2015, and her plays A History of the Body and Tiny Fires were finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival 2015 and 2016. A YBCAway awardee and Spirited Woman Fellow (AROHO), her theater and performance work has been presented nationally and staged at Berkeley Repertory Theater, CounterPULSE, the World Theater, and Bindlestiff Studio and selected for PlayGround, United States of Asian America Festival, Emerging Performance Festival, The National One-Minute Play Festival, Utah Arts Festival, and APAture; she collaborated as a writer-performer with Deep Waters Dance Theater in 2007–2011 and with other groups such as the San Francisco State University University Dance Theater. She is a 4th season member of the Playground SF Writer's Pool at Berkeley Repertory Theater. An advocate for arts education, she has taught composition at Bay Area Colleges and Universities since 2006 and has offered workshops and coaching in creative writing since 2003. Visit www.aimeesuzara.net for more information.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aimeesuzarapoet/
Instagram: @aimeesuzara.artist
Anca L. Szilágyi is the author of Daughters of the Air, which Shelf Awareness called “a striking debut ,” and Dreams under Glass, which Buzzfeed Books called "a novel for our modern times." Her writing appears in Newsweek, Los Angeles Review of Books, Orion Magazine, and Lilith Magazine, among other publications. She is the recipient of awards from Vermont Studio Center, Artist Trust, Hugo House, Jack Straw, 4Culture, and elsewhere. Originally from Brooklyn, she has lived in Montreal, Seattle, and now Chicago.
Twitter: @ancawrites
Instagram: @anca_szilagyi
Website: ancawrites.com
Tess Taylor, an avid gardener, is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry including Work & Days, which was named one of the 10 best books of poetry of 2016 by the New York Times. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Times Literary Supplement, CNN, and the New York Times. She has also served as on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade. Taylor is local to the Bay Area where she tends to fruit trees and backyard chickens.
Michelle Tea is the author of over a dozen books, including Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My In/Fertility, forthcoming August 2022 from Dey Street/HarperCollins. She has been the recipient of awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, the California Library Association, and PEN/America. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow. Author of the popular tarot how-to, Modern Tarot, Tea is the host of the mystical podcasts Your Magic on Spotify and Ask the Tarot, on SpotifyGreenroom.
Jay Aquinas Thompson (he/they) is a poet, essayist, and teacher with recent or forthcoming work in Interim, Pacifica Literary Review, Passages North, COAST | NoCOAST, and Poetry Northwest, where they're a contributing editor. Their poem "Poor and Carefree Strangers," published in FIVES: a Companion to Denver Quarterly, was a 2021–2022 Best of the Net nominee, and they're a 2021 Tin House Workshop alum. They've been awarded grants and fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, the Community of Writers, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and King County 4Culture. They live with their child in Washington state, where they teach creative writing to public school students and incarcerated women. Twitter @jayaquinas; Instagram @freshwater_merman
Jay Aquinas Thompson (they/he) is a poet, essayist, and teacher of public school students and incarcerated women. Recent work is in Neon Door, Adroit, and Poetry Northwest; their memoir The Resurrection Appearances is forthcoming from Gold Line Press.
L. Timmel Duchamp is the publisher of Aqueduct Press, which she founded in 2004. Her work has been on the Otherwise Honor list multiple times and a finalist for the Sturgeon, Nebula, Homer, and Sidewise awards. The five-volume Marq’ssan Cycle won a special Otherwise Award honor in 2009. In 2008 she appeared as a Guest of Honor at WisCon. In 2009-2010 she was awarded the Neil Clark Special Achievement Award (“recognizing individuals who are proactive behind the scenes but whose efforts often don’t receive the measure of public recognition they deserve”). In 2015 she was the Editor Guest at Armadillocon. She has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award twice, for her work as a publisher and editor. She has taught at the Clarion West Writers Workshop as well as one-day Clarion West workshops. She lives in Seattle.
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.
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.
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.
Christie Valentin-Bati is a poetry teaching artist based in Chicago. Her work received honorable mention from the Academy of American Poets, was commissioned by the ACLU, and her micro-chapbook "Journal" was showcased in Porous Gallery. She loves plants and shadows.
Lydia K. Valentine is a playwright and poet, director and dramaturg, editor, and educator. Lydia’s first poetry collection, Brief Black Candles, was published in November 2020 by Not a Pipe Publishing. Her writing has also appeared in online and print publications such as Speak, The Pitkin Review, and Shout! An Anthology of Resistance Poetry and Short Fiction. The anthology from Blue Cactus Press, We Need a Reckoning, takes its name from one of Lydia’s three poems that will be included. She has been the recipient of various awards and recognitions with the most recent being named the 2021-2023 City of Tacoma Poet Laureate.
María de Lourdes Victoria is an award-winning, bilingual author, born and raised in Mexico and living in the US. She is the author of novels, short stories and children's books. Maria is the founder of Seattle Escribe.
Elizabeth Villamán grew up on an island near the sea and uncertainty. Her interest in art began with poetry and painting and, from then on, the fusion of the arts became the hallmark of his creative processes. He was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Writer, screenwriter, teacher, and actress. Graduated in the VIII promotion of the Master's Degree in Narrative and Intensive in Film Scripts, (Escuela de Escritores, Madrid, Spain), Master's Degree in People-Oriented Creativity Strategies, (Miguel de Cervantes European University). And a Specialization in the Teaching of Creative Writing (Escuela de Escritores, Madrid, Spain). Founder of Escribir es HOY. She has given creative workshops in Europe as well as in the United States, and has won various awards, with anthology publication with other authors, nationally and internationally. In 2019, she was the first winner of the Literary Residency scholarship in Coruña, through the René del Risco Bermúdez Foundation. In 2020 and 2022 she was selected for the Catapult Carribean Creative Online Grant, and in 2021 she won the second place Young Story Award in the Dominican Republic, among other awards Las Islas Rotas is one of her most recent book of stories.
Jaye Viner lives with a tall human and two fur bombs. She knows just enough about a variety of things to embarrass herself at parties she never attends. Her novel, Jane of Battery Park, is available from Red Hen Press.
Anna Vodicka's essays and travel writing have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including AFAR, Brevity, Electric Literature, Guernica, Harvard Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Ms., Longreads, Paste, Flash Nonfiction Funny, and Lonely Planet’s An Innocent Abroad. Her writing has been selected for Best of Brevity, Best Women's Travel Writing, Pushcart Prize Special Mention, The Missouri Review Audio Prize, and Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing notables, in addition to earning residency fellowships to Vermont Studio Center, PLAYA, and Hedgebrook, and grant support from Artist Trust, 4Culture, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She co-led The Golf Pencil Group writing program at the King County Jail, and teaches flash nonfiction and generative workshops at Hugo House.
Wendy N. Wagner is the editor-in-chief of NIGHTMARE MAGAZINE and the managing/senior editor of LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. She is the author of the novella THE SECRET SKIN, the horror novel THE DEER KINGS, and the SF thriller AN OATH OF DOGS.
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