Teachers

Marianne is a musician and mixed-media experimenter from Hermosillo, MX. Their work serves as a vessel of self-discovery that explores regret, change, nostalgia, and liberation. Marianne finds the challenge of expression across mediums exciting; It is discomfort met with reassurance and the attraction of learning something new. They are currently based out of Seattle as co-founder of indie multimedia collective HYPERboy.  

Anis is your hot gay dad. According to their titas, they are and always have been masyadong suplada, masungit, walang hiya. They write about surviving sexual violence, which is to say, they write about returning to trust. They are disliked, disbelieved, and less and less afraid. Follow their instagram attempts @artista_anisgisele.

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 (lisagluskinstonestreet.com) is the author of The Greenhouse (Frost Place Prize) and Tulips, Water, Ash (Morse Poetry Prize). She has terrible handwriting but is surprisingly good at math.

Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet (lisagluskinstonestreet.com) is the author of The Greenhouse (Frost Place Prize) and Tulips, Water, Ash (Morse Poetry Prize). She has terrible handwriting but is surprisingly good at math.

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.

Mónica Gomery is a queer, Venezuelan-American poet and rabbi based in Philadelphia. Her books include Mother of Mother of (Tupelo Press, 2027), selected by Ilya Kaminsky for the Helena Whitehill Book Award; Might Kindred (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), winner of the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize; Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon, 2018); and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books, 2017). Recent poems appear in Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, and Poetry Daily. Her writing been awarded the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize and the Sappho Prize for Women Poets. She serves on the clergy team of Kol Tzedek synagogue, is a member of Rabbis for Ceasefire, and co-hosts the 5-3-5 Poetry Salon. 

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. 

Shana Graham is a Seattle-based writer, producer, and somatic sex and relationship coach. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Witness, The Los Angeles Review, CRAFT, West Trade Review, Rust & Moth, and others. She’s been anthologized in the Seattle Erotic Art Festival Literary Anthology and was the recipient of the SEAF Literary Foundation Award in Short Works. She is working on a memoir in essays. Shana also creates living stories in the form of events filled with music, artistry, and general mayhem. You can find her at www.supershana.com (writing) and www.shanagraham.com (coaching).

Tim Greiving is an arts journalist and historian in Los Angeles who specializes in film music. He is the author of John Williams: A Composer's Life, the first biography of the renowned film composer. He regularly writes for the Los Angeles Times and has contributed to NPR, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Criterion, and many other outlets. He has written program notes for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Royal Albert Hall, and liner notes for more than a hundred soundtrack albums.

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.