Teachers

Amy Hirayama is a UW Bothell Creative Writing and Poetics MFA candidate who is currently working on her thesis. She is a former middle school teacher who worked in South Seattle for seven years. Amy uses writing as a way to explore her mixed-race Hapa identity, imagine spaces of belonging for herself and connect across difference. Born in the Pacific Northwest, she finds inspiration in the beauty of this region. Amy is a 2021-2022 Imagining America PAGE Fellow. Her poetry can be found in the fall/winter 2021 issue of Strait Up magazine as well as the forthcoming chapbook Hariboetry.

Paul Hlava Ceballos is the author of banana [ ], which won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. banana [ ] also was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award and the Kate Tufts Award. His collaborative chapbook, Banana [ ] / we pilot the blood, shares pages with Quenton Baker and Christina Sharpe. He is a CantoMundista and has been featured on the Poetry Magazine Podcast and Seattle’s The Stranger. He currently is the Poetry Editor of The Seattle Met and practices echocardiography. 

Bill Hollands was born and raised in Miami, Florida, graduated from Williams College, and received his MA in English as a Dr. Herchel Smith Fellow at Cambridge University. He worked for the New York Public Library and Microsoft before becoming a high school English teacher. He lives in Seattle with his husband and their son. He has returned to poetry after a long hiatus, and his recent poems have appeared in such journals as The Adroit Journal, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, Rattle, The Florida Review, DIAGRAM, Boulevard, and Plume, as well as on The Slowdown podcast. A multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee, he has been a finalist for North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize, Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize in Poetry, Smartish Pace’s Erskine J. Poetry Prize, and New Ohio Review’s NORward Prize. He reads submissions for Poetry Northwest. His debut poetry collection Mangrove (ELJ Editions) will be published in 2025.

NICOLE HOMER is a community college educator, poet, writer, performer, and author of Pecking Order. Homer lives online at nicolehomer.com and lurks on social media as @realnicolehomer. 

Minda Honey's essays have been featured by Longreads, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Teen Vogue, and elsewhere, including the anthologies Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger and A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South. www.mindahoney.com

A native New Englander, Elise Hooper spent several years writing for television and online news outlets before getting an MA and teaching high-school literature and history. She now lives in Seattle with her husband and two daughters. Previous novels include The Other Alcott and Learning to See.

Amanda Hosch (she/her) is the author of the middle grade mystery, Mabel Opal Pear and the Rules for Spying. An English as a Second/Foreign Language teacher by profession, she taught abroad for almost a decade. A fifth-generation New Orleanian, Amanda now lives in Seattle with her family, two rescue cats, and a ghost cat. Currently, she writes copy for tech companies and volunteers with refugees as ESL Talk Time Facilitator.

Jenne Hsien Patrick is a writer and artist based in Seattle. She writes poetry, hybrid text/image works and comics, often incorporating textiles and papercutting. They are currently writing about motherhood, family history, self-preservation and survival as an inheritance from the matriarchal lines of their family. Jenne is a Tin House Workshop alum, and their work has appeared in publications such as Hayden’s Ferry Review, wildness/Platypus Press, and Honey Literary among others.

Vanessa Hua is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of a short story collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities, and the novel, A River of Stars, which O, The Oprah Magazine calls "a marvel" and The Economist says is "delightful." For two decades, she has been writing, in journalism and in fiction, about Asia and the Asian diaspora. She has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award, and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, as well as honors from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Asian American Journalists Association. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. She works and teaches at the San Francisco Writers' Grotto.