Teachers

Jessica Gigot is a poet, farmer, and coach. She lives on a little sheep farm in the Skagit Valley. Her second book of poems, Feeding Hour (Wandering Aengus Press, 2020), won a Nautilus Award and was a finalist for the 2021 Washington State Book Award. Jessica’s writing and reviews appear in several publications, such as Orion, The New York Times, The Seattle Times, Ecotone, Terrain.org, Gastronomica, Crab Creek Review, and Poetry Northwest. She is currently a poetry editor for The Hopper and a 2022 Jack Straw Writer. Her latest work is A Little Bit of Land, published by Oregon State University Press.

c.r. glasgow (doc/she/we) is a non-binary, queer, first-generation Afro-Caribbean-American healing artist, writer, and educator. c’s work has been supported by fellowships and craft shops through Hugo House, VONA, The Watering Hole, Hurston/Wright, and Anaphora. We have also been the recipient of the Haitian Heritage Scholarship through VONA in 2021. Their chapbook the Devils that raised Us was longlisted at Frontier Poetry. c’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Killens Review, Black Lawrence Press, Breathe, Moko: Caribbean Arts & Letters, and Rigorous Magazine; and performances with Butch Is Not a Dirty Word, Leaf Lit Live!, Brooklyn Yawp, LitCrawl Seattle, and the Seattle Public Library, Hugo House, and Elliott Bay Book Company. With nearly 20 years as a healing artist, doc supports the global majority in addressing grief, liminal space, and intergenerational and ancestral traumas towards a path of embodied liberation.  

Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet is the author of The Greenhouse (Frost Place Chapbook Prize) and Tulips, Water, Ash (Morse Poetry Prize). Her poems have appeared in journals including Plume, Zyzzyva, and Kenyon Review and anthologies including Nasty Women Poets and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. She holds a BA in contemporary American literature from Yale University and an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, where she was a Javits Fellow. Lisa lives in Portland, OR, where she reads, writes, edits, parents, and cohosts the literary reading series Lilla Lit. (lisagluskinstonestreet.com)

Veronica Golos is author of four poetry books: A Bell Buried Deep (Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize); Vocabulary of Silence (New Mexico Poetry Prize); Rootwork and GIRL (Naji Naaman Honor Prize for Poetry.) Her work has been extensively translated into Arabic; also Persian and Italian. She lives in Taos, New Mexico.

Edgar Gomez is a Florida-born writer with roots in Nicaragua and Puerto Rico. A graduate of University of California, Riverside’s MFA program, he is a recipient of the 2019 Marcia McQuern Award for nonfiction. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in This American Life, POPSUGAR, Narratively, Longreads, Catapult, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Lamda Literary, and elsewhere online and in print. His first book, a memoir titled High-Risk Homosexual, is forthcoming in January 2022 with Soft Skull Press. He currently lives in New York, where he is saving up for good lotion. For more, visit EdgarGomez.net.

Laura Gonzalez is an editorial assistant at Catapult Books. Previously, she was a marketing assistant at Catapult, Counterpoint, and Soft Skull Press and a bookseller at The Strand. She lives in Philadelphia, where she likes to bake cookies and play with her cats.

Oranj Goodman is just happy to be here.  

SIMON GRAHAM is an MFA Candidate in Prose at the University of Washington. Their stories and essays have appeared in New York Tyrant, Vol 1. Brooklyn, Bull Magazine, X-R-A-Y, Hobart, and elsewhere. Prior to moving to Seattle, they lectured on climate change at Monash University in Melbourne and their writing on climate change has appeared in a number of Australian publications. 

Rachel Griffin writes young adult novels inspired by the magic of the world around her. She is the New York Times bestselling author of The Nature of Witches and the forthcoming Wild is the Witch, publishing August 2, 2022 with Sourcebooks Fire.

Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Rachel has a deep love of nature, from the mountains to the ocean and all the towering evergreens in between. She adores moody skies and thunderstorms, and hopes more vampires settle down in her beloved state of Washington.

On her path to writing novels, Rachel graduated from Seattle University with a Bachelor of Science in diagnostic ultrasound. She worked in healthcare for five years and taught ultrasound at her alma mater before making the switch to a small startup. She has been mentoring in Pitch Wars since 2017 and now writes full-time from her home in the Seattle area.

When she isn’t writing, you can find her wandering the PNW, reading by the fire, or drinking copious amounts of coffee and tea. She lives with her husband, small dog, and growing collection of houseplants.

Lili Gu is a poet and filmmaker passionate about exploring justice, liberation, and the human condition through storytelling. She studied poetry while in engineering school at Columbia University and went on to receive her MFA in Film Production and Directing from UCLA. Her work has received numerous accolades, screening internationally and on television networks such as PBS. This will be Lili’s return to poetry. Her writing works to uncover language away from the white gaze, speaking truth to power on themes of Chinese American assimilation, queerness, and intergenerational strength. She makes art as an act of love—toward visions of an imagined future in which all humans can not just survive, but thrive.