Teachers

Christina Berke is a Chilean-American writer and educator with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. She’s been supported by Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Hedgebrook, and Storyknife. Her work is in Edible, Pithead Chapel, Teen Vogue and elsewhere.

Grace Bialecki is a writer, spoken word poet, and workshop facilitator. She has performed at KGB Bar and as the featured poet at Paris Lit Up, and her work has appeared in various publications including Catapult and Epiphany Magazine. Bialecki is the co-founder of the storytelling series Thirst, and the author of the novel Purple Gold (ANTIBOOKCLUB). 

For more information check out Grace's website (www.graciebialecki.com) or Twitter (www.twitter.com/graciebialecki).

Describe your teaching style.

I feel myself as a facilitator more than a teacher. Although I'll be discussing my practice, I'll also be engaging with the students and asking about their process. My goal is to empower attendees to try new techniques they can then adapt to their own needs.

Born in New Jersey, Courtney holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Montana and a BA in Art History from Princeton. Her work has appeared in The Fairy Tale Review, The Masters Review, The Indiana Review, Barrelhouse, and The Los Angeles Review, among others. When Courtney's not writing, she can be found coaching lacrosse, hiking with her baby on her back, or looking for weird little pockets of wonder in the world. Courtney lives in Seattle, where she was a Hugo House Fellow in 2018-2019.

Liza Birnbaum's writing has appeared in Web Conjunctions, jubilat, Tammy, Open Letters Monthly, and other publications. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and teaches at Hugo House, Cornish College of the Arts, and the University of Washington's Robinson Center. She's been awarded residencies from Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Arts and Agriculture and Fishtrap. For more of Liza go to lizabirnbaum.com

Megan Boatright is a writer and editor from rural Florida, now living in Seattle, WA. She has an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago, where she was a writing instructor before transitioning into TTRPG development and editing.

Amy Bowers is a Florida native currently living in Connecticut with her family. Her writing explores art, domestic culture, the insect and natural worlds, and manufactured places and spaces. She is currently working on an essay collection about growing up in central Florida among amusement parks, alligators, and hurricanes. She holds an MFA in CNF from Bennington and has work published or forthcoming in [PANK], Washington Square Review, West Trade Review, OxMag, Farm-ish, Assay, and LA Review of Books. Her essay Manual is published (fall 2021) in A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays, edited by Randon Billings Noble and published by the University of Nebraska Press.

Sabra Boyd is a writer, editor, journalist, and public speaker whose work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Eater, Vice, IndieWire, Psychology Today, HuffPost, The Seattle Times, and more. From personal essays to investigative journalism, Sabra enjoys helping others build their own successful writing careers.

Bella Bravo is a writer new to Seattle. They earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2022. Their stories and essays have appeared in NY Tyrant, Spoil, and Commune. For more information go to bellabravo.com and follow on Instagram @bellabravo.

Susan Briante is the author most recently of Defacing the Monument (Noemi Press 2020), a series of essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics and the state, winner of the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism in 2021. In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly calls the collection “a superb examination of the ethical issues facing artists who tell others’ stories” and a “dazzlingly inventive and searching text.” 

Briante’s collection of poetry The Market Wonders (Ahsahta Press) was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. The Kenyon Review calls it “masterful at every turn.” The collection was recently translated into Spanish by the poet Giancarlo Huapaya and published under the title El Mercado se pregunta by Kriller71 (Madrid). Briante is also the author of the poetry collections Pioneers in the Study of Motion and Utopia Minus (an Academy of American Poets Notable Book of 2011. Of Utopia Minus, Publisher’s Weekly declared: “this book finds an urgent language for the world in which we live.”

She has received grants and awards from the Atlantic Monthly, the MacDowell Colony, the Academy of American Poets, the US-Mexico Fund for Culture, and (most recently) the Ucross Foundation. Recent work has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, The Best American Poetry (2021) and The Brooklyn Rail. She is a professor of English in the creative writing program at the University of Arizona. There she serves as co-coordinator of the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program, which brings MFA students to the US-Mexico border to engage in reciprocal research projects with community-based environmental and social justice groups. She is also a member of the Detained project, a team of artists, scholars and activists who record and archive the oral histories of formerly detained migrants and asylum seekers.

Sara Brickman is a queer Jewish writer and performer born in Ann Arbor, MI. The winner of the Split This Rock Poetry Prize, Sara has received grants and scholarships from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Yiddish Book Center, 4Culture, and Artist Trust, and their performance have appeared at On The Boards and theaters and community spaces nationwide. A BOAAT Writers Fellow and Ken Warfel Fellow for Poetry in Community, their writing appears in Narrative, Adroit, The Indiana Review, Muzzle, and the anthologies Ghosts of Seattle Past, The Dead Animal Handbook, and Courage: Daring Poems for Gutsy Girls. They are currently at work on a book of poems and hybrid essay collection and performance about community resilience, trauma, statuary, and collective organizing in Charlottesville, VA during the white-nationalist rallies of 2017. Sara holds an MFA from the University of Virginia and lives in Seattle, where they work in a library, teach writing to youth and adults, and parent a cat named Latke. 

S.K. Brownell is writer, artist, and educator from the American Midwest. Their work has been shortlisted for the inaugural Samuel R Delany Fellowship in Speculative Fiction and has received the National Partners of the American Theatre Playwriting Excellence Award, Solstice Literary Prize in Fiction Editor's Choice, and other honors. They are a Tin House Workshop alumn and a Sewanee Conference Tennessee Williams Scholar. Their fiction, poetry, and drama has appeared in Speculative North, Decoded, Great Lakes Review, Newfound, and elsewhere. Stephanie holds an MFA from Boston University and teaches at Carroll University, GrubStreet, and Pioneer Valley Writers Workshop. They currently live in Boston with a cat called Wander. Find them online at skbrownell.com or @skbrownell.

Twitter: www.twitter.com/skbrownell

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh, 2016), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She and E.J. Koh co-translated Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (Zephyr Press, 2021). Cancio-Bello has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kundiman, the Knight Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association, and her work has appeared in Best Small Fictions, Kenyon Review Online, The New York Times, and more. She is co-director for the Adoptee Literary Festival and PEN America Miami/South Florida Chapter, and a program coordinator for Miami Book Fair. www.marcicalabretta.com

With a BA in English, an MA in German, and an MFA in Creative Writing, Tara Campbell has a demonstrated aversion to money and power. Originally from Anchorage, Alaska, she has also lived in Washington DC, Oregon, Ohio, New York, Germany and Austria. She currently lives in Seattle, WA.

She's proud to be on the current roster for the Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, and is a mentor the the 19th season of AWP's Writer to Writer Mentorship Program. She's the recipient of the following awards from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities: the 2016 Larry Neal Writers' Award in Adult Fiction, the 2016 Mayor's Arts Award for Outstanding New Artist, and Arts and Humanities Fellowships for 2018 – 2022. She is also a 2017 Kimbilio Fellow and winner of the 2018 Robert Gover Story Prize.

Tara earned her MFA from American University in 2019, and is a fiction editor at Barrelhouse. She teaches creative writing with venues such as American University, Johns Hopkins University, Hugo House, Clarion West, the Writer's Center, Politics and Prose, Catapult, and the National Gallery of Art's Virtual Studio.

Follow her on: Twitter: @TaraCampbellCom or Instagram: @thetreevolution or Bluesky: @taracampbell.bsky.social or Mastodon: @TaraCampbell@writing.exchange or Facebook: CampbellTaraP

Sarah Campbell is a content curator who leads exploratory workshops anchored in humanities artifacts. She has worked for PwC, Microsoft, McKinsey, and ?What If!, and taught at the University of Luxembourg and SUNY Buffalo, where she earned her English Ph.D.

Kate Carmody is a recipient of a CINTAS Foundations grant supporting artists born in Cuba or of Cuban descent. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Potomac Review, Essay Daily, No Contact, Los Angeles Review, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and Lunch Ticket, among others. She received her MFA from Antioch University in Los Angeles. While pursuing her MFA in creative nonfiction, she worked as a blogger, assistant blog editor, and the assistant lead editor for the youth spotlight series at Lunch Ticket. In addition to teaching at Hugo House, she teaches writing through the Loft Literary Center, Austin Bat Cave, and Antioch’s Continuing Education Program. In 2012, she received the Facing History and Ourselves Margot Stern Strom Teaching Award and in 2017, was selected by Facing History and Ourselves to participate in a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant-funded study to assess if peer-led professional development can improve teachers’ instruction of literacy standards. She lives in Denver, Colorado with her husband and dog. The three of them are in a band called Dadafacer.

Bill Carty is the author of Huge Cloudy (Octopus Books, 2019), which was long-listed for The Believer Book Award, and We Sailed on the Lake, published by Bunny Presse/Fonograf Editions in 2023. He has received poetry fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Artist Trust, Hugo House, and Jack Straw Cultural Center. He was awarded the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, and his poems have appeared in the jubilat, Best American Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Iterant, Paperbag, The Kenyon Review, 32 Poems, and other journals. Originally from Maine, Bill now lives in Seattle, where he is Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest. He teaches at Hugo House, the UW Robinson Center for Young Scholars, and Edmonds College.

Elaine Castillo is the author of the widely acclaimed debut novel, America is Not the Heart (Viking, 2018), named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The Boston Globe, Kirkus Reviews, the New York Public Library, and many others. In August 2022, Viking will publish her first work of nonfiction, How to Read Now, on the politics and ethics of our reading culture. Her writing has appeared in Freeman’s, The Rumpus, Lit Hub, Taste Magazine, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Her short film, A Mukkbang, was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space. She is a VONA Foundation Fellow, and was a three-time recipient of the Roselyn Schneider Eisner Prize for prose while at UC Berkeley. She has also been nominated for the Pat Kavanagh Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a Gatewood Prize.

Claudia Castro Luna is the author of Cipota Under the Moon (Tia Chucha Press, 2022); One River, A Thousand Voices (Chin Music Press, 2020 & 2022); Killing Marías (Two Sylvias, 2017) finalist for the WA State Book Award 2018, and the chapbook This City (Floating Bridge, 2016). She served as Washington’s State Poet Laureate (2018-2021) and as Seattle's inaugural Civic Poet (2015-2017). She was named Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow in 2019. Her most recent non-fiction is in There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis (Vintage). Born in El Salvador, Castro Luna came to the United States in 1981. Living in English and Spanish, she writes and teaches in Seattle on unceded Duwamish lands where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children. 

Jos Charles is author of a Year & other poems (Milkweed Editions, 2022), feeld (Milkweed Editions, 2018), a Pulitzer-finalist and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series selected by Fady Joudah, and Safe Space (Ahsahta Press, 2016). She is the founding-editor of THEM, the first trans literary journal in the US, and engages in direct gender justice work with a variety of organizations and performers. Charles's poetry has appeared in Poetry, PEN, Washington Square Review, BLOOM, Denver Quarterly, Action Yes, The Feminist Wire, The Capilano Review, and elsewhere. Among her awards are the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a 2015 Monique Wittig Writer's Scholarship.

Mayur Chauhan is an L.A-based immigrant, writer, actor, and comedian, originally from Delhi. Mayur is a Key West Literary Seminar and Bread Loaf scholar. His humor pieces have been published in McSweeney’s and many other publications.

Describe your teaching style.

My coaching is writer-centered and engaging. I encourage the participants to become more confident in their voice and their work while staying open to suggestions. If there's one thing I'd repeat at least 589 times in class is "You are the final decision maker."

I believe self-care and playfulness are as important as craft and marketplace. Also, I love to meet everyone's pets via Zoom.

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, which won the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and the GLCA New Writers Award. Longlisted for the National Book Award, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and was named one of the best of 2017 by The Brooklyn Rail, Entropy, Library Journal, and others. About the collection, Stephanie Burt says,“As Chen’s younger self had to escape from constricting familial expectations (become a lawyer, marry a woman, buy a house), the adult writer has to escape from the constrictions of autobiography, into hyperbole, stand-up comedy, fairy tale, twisted pastoral. It’s easy to imagine a young reader seeing himself here as he had not seen himself in poems before.” He is also the author of two chapbooks, Set the Garden on Fire (Porkbelly Press, 2015) and Kissing the Sphinx (Two of Cups Press, 2016).

In an interview with NPR, Chen explained, ““I felt like I couldn’t be Chinese and American and gay all at the same time. I felt like the world I was in was telling me that these had to be very separate things.” As someone who was struggling with his sexuality and thinking about identity— with immigrant parents and wondering how to come out, “Poems were a way for those different experiences to come together, for them to be in the same room.”

His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry, Tin House, Poem-a-Day, The Best American Poetry, Bettering American Poetry, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Recently, his work has been translated into French, Greek, Spanish, and Russian. Poets & Writers Magazine featured him in their Inspiration Issue as one of “Ten Poets Who Will Change the World.” He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda Literary, and the Saltonstall Foundation.

Chen earned his MFA from Syracuse University and is pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing as an off-site Texas Tech University student. He lives in frequently snowy Rochester, NY with his partner, Jeff Gilbert and their pug dog, Mr. Rupert Giles.

Chen is the 2018-2020 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University.

Joyce Chen is a writer, editor, and community builder who draws inspiration from many coastal cities. She has covered entertainment and human interest stories for Rolling Stone, Architectural Digest, Elle, Refinery29, the New York Daily News, and People, among others, and her creative writing credits include Poets & Writers, Lit Hub, Narratively, and Slant’d, among others. She has contributed op-eds to Paste magazine, and writes book reviews for Orion and Hyphen magazines. In 2022, she co-edited the anthology Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times, a collection of poetry paired with essays and life lessons. She is a proud VONA alum and was a 2019-2020 Hugo House fellow. She is also the executive director of The Seventh Wave, an arts and literary nonprofit that champions art in the space of social issues.

Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry winner) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing (speCt! Books) and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 1st edition; AK Press, 2nd edition) and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets (Achiote Press). They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center and the Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. A community organizer, they have worked in Asian American communities in San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside, Boston, Milwaukee, Houston and Seattle and are currently a core member of the Massage Parlor Outreach Project. They currently teach at University of Washington Bothell in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics. www.chinginchen.com