Teachers

Sequoia Nagamatsu is the author of the National Bestselling novel, How High We Go in the Dark (2022), a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and the story collection, Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone (2016), silver medal winner of the 2016 Foreword Reviews Indies Book of the Year Award, an Entropy Magazine Best Book of 2016, and a notable book at Buzzfeed. His work has appeared in publications such as Conjunctions, The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, Tin House, Iowa Review, Lightspeed Magazine, and One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories, and has been listed as notable in Best American Non-Required Reading and the Best Horror of the Year.

Arlene Naganawa works with high school and middle school writers in poetry, fiction, and academic writing. Arlene's work appears in such journals as Crab Orchard Review, Crab Creek Review, Pontoon, Calyx, All the Sins, Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Caketrain, and others. Her poems have been featured on Poetry on Buses and in Washington 129, an anthology of Washington State poets curated by Tod Marshall. She is the author of three chapbooks and is currently part of the Pongo Publishing Teen Writing team and a Writing and Critical Thinking instructor with Minds Matter Seattle, a nonprofit organization that helps high school students from low income families to prepare for success in college.

Chiku Nance is a chamoru artist & engineer.

Shankar Narayan explores identity, power, mythology, and technology in a world where the body is flung across borders yet possesses unrivaled power to transcend them. Shankar is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the winner of prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, Hugo House, Jack Straw, Flyway, and River Heron. He is a 4Culture grant recipient for Claiming Space, a project to lift the voices of writers of color, and his chapbook, Postcards From the New World, won the Paper Nautilus Debut Series chapbook prize. Shankar draws strength from his global upbringing and from his work at the intersection of civil rights and technology. In Seattle, he awakens to the wonders of Cascadia every day, but his heart yearns east to his other hometown, Delhi. Connect with him at shankarnarayan.net.

Describe your teaching style.

As a teacher, I aim to create an inclusive, respectful, courageous, open, mutually engaging, and joyful space that connects with each writer as a complete being and helps move them toward finding and strengthening their true voice. Creating a writing community is also an explicit aim of my classes — a space in which writers learn and explore together, inspire growth in one another's writing, and serve as resources for one another even after the class has ended.

I combine the following key elements:

+Courageous

I aim for an environment in which writers will feel empowered to engage deeply with the subject matter, connect it to their own experiences and themes, and create their best and most fearless writing.

+Open

I teach my classes in a structured but flexible way that strikes a balance between following a preset curriculum and allowing opportunities for new ideas to open up channels of learning. I create spaces where all writers can engage and explore together, understanding that everyone has valuable knowledge and perspectives to contribute.

+Engaging

Learning, for me, always goes both ways, and I continue to be humbled by how much I learn in every class I teach. My classes include lots of engagement and discussion, and build in in-class writing as well as courageous sharing. Writers are also encouraged to highlight questions or other needs so I can provide resources in response.

+Joyful

Writing classes should be fun! I aim to work with a range of emotions including humor and levity, which can help balance somber subject matter. I often work with subject matter that brings out strong emotions, which I try to recognize and create appropriate space to work through.

+Community

I believe teaching without connection is impossible. So I try to get to know and understand writers in my classes as complete human beings in the context of their writing goals, and to encourage them to get to know, understand, and learn from one another. Writers need other writers, and I see the project of strengthening the mutual bond between writers as being every bit as important as imparting knowledge of a particular subject matter.

=Voice

Ultimately, I aim to impact the lives of writers in my classes by helping them find and strengthen their voices and achieve their own writing goals, whatever those may be.

Shelby Natasha is a songwriter and music producer in Seattle, Washington. Growing up between China and the Pacific Northwest, her music is heavily influenced by both cultures, landing in a space between Alt R&B and Chinese folk music.

D.A. Navoti is a member of the Gila River Indian Community and a multidisciplinary storyteller, writer, and composer. His artistic work spans across three "landscapes"—written, musical, and visual—a hybrid form that explores what it means to be Indigenous in the 21st century. Navoti is a 2022 Artist Trust fellow and a 2022 Artist Support Program resident with Jack Straw Cultural Center. Previously, Navoti was a writer fellow with Jack Straw Cultural Center (2016) and Hugo House (2017). His literary work has appeared in Homology Lit, Spartan, Indian Country Today, Cloudthroat, and elsewhere. In 2021, Navoti was recognized as an Indigenous Stories of Strength awardee by the John Hopkins Center for American Indian Health and a recipient of the Resiliency Fund from Potlatch Fund. Navoti was also awarded a 2020 Radical Imagination grant from NDN Collective, and he was a 2020 CityArtist from the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture. Most recently, Navoti founded and curated We the Indigenous, a West Coast literary series, and he founded Wellness-ish-ness, a blog for creative hot messes. Learn more at www.danavoti.com 

River Vicco Naylor is a multi-disciplinary artist who has studied creative writing, filmmaking, music, and comics. River has been teaching arts and writing to students K-12 since 2015. Teaching is one of the true joys of their life, and they love sharing their passions and facilitating arts programs. They believe in education that centers students and encourages them to express their truest self. Facilitating an equitable learning environment is essential to these goals. You can find River around Seattle collaborating in bands, short films, and as the Youth Programs Manager at Northwest Film Forum.

Deborah Nedelman is a novelist and former psychologist with expertise in the Amherst Writing Method.

Sarah Neilson (moderator) is a freelance culture writer and interviewer whose work regularly appears in The Seattle Times, Them, and Shondaland, among other outlets. They are an alumni of Tin House Craft Intensive, and their memoir writing has been published in Catapult and Ligeia. When not freelancing, they are working on a memoir manuscript, enjoying the Pacific Northwest outdoors, and snuggling her adopted cats.

Sierra Nelson is a poet, president of Seattle’s Cephalopod Appreciation Society, and co-founder of literary performance art groups The Typing Explosion and Vis-à-Vis Society. Her poetry books include The Lachrymose Report (PoetryNW Editions, 2018), lyrical adventure I Take Back the Sponge Cake made with visual artist Loren Erdrich (Rose Metal Press), and forthcoming Vis-à-Vis Society collaboration 100 Rooms: A Bridge Motel Project (Entre Rios Books). Recently Nelson’s poems accompanying ichthyologist Adam Summer’s fish skeleton photographs were exhibited at the Ljubljana Natural History Museum and Piran Aquarium in Slovenia.

Theo Pauline Nestor is the author of Writing Is My Drink: A Writer’s Story of Finding Her Voice (And a Guide to How You Can Too) (Simon & Schuster, 2013) and How to Sleep Alone in a King-Size Bed: A Memoir of Starting Over (Crown, 2008). Nestor's essays have appeared numerous places including the New York Times, Seattle Times, and the Rumpus.

Website: theonestor.com

Instagram: @theonestor

Describe your teaching style.

Informative, practical, and empowering. I break down processes step-by-step.