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.
Intisaar is a Seattle-based Palestinian-American singer/songwriter/guitarist. She is most known for her emotive and unique melody lines, powerful vocal range, and interesting chord progressions. When playing live, she is an acoustic/electric powerhouse that commands the room with the vulnerability and charm of a 90s female icon, and can still lighten the mood with humor and grace between songs. She has played famed Seattle venues like The Crocodile, The Moore, Neumos, The Sunset, and The Nectar Lounge, and toured across the US with her 2015 debut album, Borrowed Ground.
Ramón Isao is a recipient of the Tim McGinness Award for Fiction, as well as fellowships from Artist Trust and Jack Straw Cultural Center. His stories appear in such journals as The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, Moss, and Hobart, and his screen credits include ZMD and Dead Body. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and serves as Fiction Editor at New Orleans Review.
Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of the interdisciplinary collaboration (with visual artist Carrie DeBacker) Alchemy For Cells & Other Beasts, the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees, and the poetry collection Rust Fish; her prose appears in such places as Brevity and Gettysburg Review. Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation as well as a Residency in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Maya is Associate Professor of English for Central Washington University, and Affiliate Poetry Faculty for Western Colorado University's low-res MFA. Find Maya on Twitter @MayaJZeller.
Sonora Jha is the author of the memoir How to Raise a Feminist Son (2021) and the novel Foreign (2013). After a career as a journalist covering crime, politics, and culture in India and Singapore, she moved to the United States to earn a Ph.D. in media and public affairs. Sonora’s OpEds, essays, and public appearances have featured in The New York Times, on BBC, and elsewhere. She is a professor of journalism and lives in Seattle. She teaches fiction and essay writing for Hugo House, Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, and Seattle Public Library. She is an alumna and board member of Hedgebrook and has served on the jury for awards for Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, and Hugo House. Her new novel, The Laughter, is forthcoming from Harper Via in early 2023.
Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Pleiades, khōréō, The Florida Review Online, Wigleaf, Baffling Magazine, and the anthologies Best Microfiction 2021 & 2022, Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness, and Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest. She co-organized the performance series Fight for Our Lives and served as the 2020-2022 Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House. In 2023, she will be a visiting writer at University of Washington Bothell.
© 2022 Hugo House