Teachers

USAMA LALI is a Pakistani writer working with English, Urdu and Punjabi, currently finishing his second year at the UW MFA program on the prose track. He is a recipient of the David Guterson Award 2023 and a Commonwealth Short Story Prize shortlistee whose Punjabi poetry translations have appeared in Pancham and fiction is forthcoming in Addastories. You can find him on instagram @usamalali and twitter @usamalali_

Meghan Lamb is the author of COWARD, Failure to Thrive, All of Your Most Private Places, and Silk Flowers. She is a lecturer at the University of Chicago and the nonfiction editor of Nat. Brut, a Whiting Award-winning journal. Go to http://meghanlamb.com/ for more information.

Susan Landgraf was awarded an Academy of American Poets’ Laureate award in 2020. Books include The Inspired Poet from Two Sylvias Press, What We Bury Changes the Ground, and Other Voices. More than 400 poems have been published in journals and magazines, most recently Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Calyx, The Meadow, and Tar River. She’s given more than 150 writing workshops and served as Poet Laureate of Auburn, Washington, from 2018 to 2020.

Susan Landgraf was awarded an Academy of American Poets’ Laureate award in 2020. Books include The Inspired Poet from Two Sylvias Press, What We Bury Changes the Ground, and Other Voices. More than 400 poems have been published in journals and magazines, most recently Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Calyx, The Meadow, and Tar River. She’s given more than 150 writing workshops and served as Poet Laureate of Auburn, Washington, from 2018 to 2020.

Piper Lane is a writer, teacher, and fisherman from Homer, Alaska. She holds an MFA from UW Seattle. Both a Hugo House fellow alum and a Hedgebrook alum, her work can be found in PANK, Fourth River, Territory, and elsewhere. For more information go to piperlane.org or follow on Twitter: thealaskanwitch and Instagram: piper__l.

Sigrun Susan Lane is a poet from Seattle Washington. After a successful career in business, she returned to her initial passion: to be a writer. She began writing poetry with Nelson and Beth Bentley and publishing poems in regional and national journals such as the Crab Creek Review and The Seattle Review. She’s won prizes for her poems from the Seattle Arts Commission and the King County Arts Commission.

Lane has published three chapbooks; Little Bones and SALT from Goldfish Press and Drive from Finishing Line Press. SALT won the Josephine Miles award “for excellence in poetry” in 2020. Sigrun Susan is of Icelandic descent and often draws on her family’s history in her poems, stories of immigrants and of the “old country” and of its history.

Nora Lange’s novel Us Fools is longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, a Los Angeles Times bestseller, and New York Times Editors’ Choice. Nora’s writing has appeared in BOMB, Hazlitt, Joyland, American Short Fiction and elsewhere.

Angela Langer is originally from Colorado but has lived in Seattle for almost 18 years. She is a performer, theatre student, lawyer, lover of comedy, and proud dog parent of Frank the pug. She plays Forouq. 

Erin Langner is an essayist whose work focuses on art, architecture and identity. She is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic and METROPOLIS magazines. Her writing has also appeared or is forthcoming in december, The Offing, The Normal School, Hobart, The Stranger, and ARCADE. She lives in Seattle and works on exhibitions and publications at the Frye Art Museum. Her debut collection, Souvenirs from Paradise, will be published by Zone 3 Press in 2022.

Jon Lanthier is a writer, filmmaker, and musician. He's published several pieces of arts criticism; directed an award-winning documentary; and led workshops on antiracist nonprofit communications. He believes that the best art facilitates conversations between creators and their communities.

Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe is from the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian Tribes. Native to the Pacific Northwest, she draws inspiration from her coastal heritage as well as her life in the city. She writes with a focus on trauma and resilience, ranging topics from PTSD, sexual violence, the work her great grandmother did for the Lushootseed language revitalization, to loud basement punk shows and what it means to grow up mixed heritage. Sasha teaches creative writing at the Native Pathways Program at Evergreen and is a mentor for Seattle’s youth poet laureate program. Her memoir, Red Paint, has received starred reviews from Kirkus and Shelf Awareness and is available through Counterpoint Press. Her collection of poetry, Rose Quartz, is available through Milkweed Press. Her essay collection, Thunder Song, is forthcoming from Counterpoint Press. 

Ana-Maurine Lara (PhD) is a scholar and a national award-winning novelist and poet. She is the author of: Erzulie’s Skirt (RedBone Press, 2006), When the Sun Once Again Sang to the People (KRK Ediciones, 2011), Watermarks and Tree Rings (Tanama Press, 2011), Kohnjehr Woman (RedBone Press, 2017), Cantos (letterpress, limited edition 2015), and Sum of Parts (Tanama Press, 2019). Her academic books include: Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty (SUNY Press, 2020) and Streetwalking: LGBTQ Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic (Rutgers University Press, 2020). Lara’s work focuses on questions of Black and Indigenous people and freedom. She has been published in literary journals (Sable LitMag, Transitions Literary Journal), scholarly journals (Small Axe, Bilingual Revue, Sargasso, Feminist Review) and numerous anthologies, as a scholar and as a creative writer. She is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Oregon, in the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

David Lasky is the co-author of the Eisner-Award-winning graphic novel, Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song, but he is better known to children as the guy who colored Cece Bell’s awesome graphic novel, El Deafo, a Newbery Honor Book. David is currently at work on a graphic novel that will focus on the historic Georgetown Steam Plant, commissioned by Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture and City Light. He teaches comics at numerous venues in the Seattle area, including Richard Hugo House and Coyote Central.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Dorianne Laux’s most recent collection is Only As The Day Is Long: New and Selected, W.W. Norton. She is also author of The Book of Men, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and Facts about the Moon, winner of the Oregon Book Award. She recently published a limited edition chapbook, SALT, from The Field Office Press. Laux teaches poetry at North Carolina State and Pacific University. In 2020, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

REID LAUZON (they/them) is currently a Junior studying Creative Writing at the University of Washington. Originally from Salt Lake City, Utah, they now consider Seattle home. They are passionate about minimalist fiction and contemporary poetry. They received an Honorable Mention in the 2021 Seattle Colleges League for Innovations Student Literary Contest, Poetry division. In their spare time, they are a full-time cat parent, crow feeder, and an occasional fire spinner.