Teachers

She grew up on an island near the sea and uncertainty. Her interest in art began with poetry and painting and, from then on, the fusion of the arts became the hallmark of his creative processes. He was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Writer, screenwriter, teacher, and actress. Graduated in the VIII promotion of the Master's Degree in Narrative and Intensive in Film Scripts, (Escuela de Escritores, Madrid, Spain), Master's Degree in People-Oriented Creativity Strategies, (Miguel de Cervantes European University). And a Specialization in the Teaching of Creative Writing (Escuela de Escritores, Madrid, Spain). Founder of Escribir es HOY. She has given creative workshops in Europe as well as in the United States, and has won various awards, with anthology publication with other authors, nationally and internationally. In 2019, she was the first winner of the Literary Residency scholarship in Coruña, through the René del Risco Bermúdez Foundation. In 2020 and 2022 she was selected for the Catapult Carribean Creative Online Grant, and in 2021 she won the second place Young Story Award in the Dominican Republic, among other awards Las Islas Rotas is one of her most recent book of stories.

Jaye Viner lives with a tall human and two fur bombs. She knows just enough about a variety of things to embarrass herself at parties she never attends. Her novel, Jane of Battery Park, is available from Red Hen Press.

Anna Vodicka's essays and travel writing have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including AFAR, Brevity, Electric Literature, Guernica, Harvard Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Ms., Longreads, Paste, Flash Nonfiction Funny, and Lonely Planet’s An Innocent Abroad. Her writing has been selected for Best of Brevity, Best Women's Travel Writing, Pushcart Prize Special Mention, The Missouri Review Audio Prize, and Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing notables, in addition to earning residency fellowships to Vermont Studio Center, PLAYA, and Hedgebrook, and grant support from Artist Trust, 4Culture, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She co-led The Golf Pencil Group writing program at the King County Jail, and teaches flash nonfiction and generative workshops at Hugo House.

Wendy N. Wagner is the editor-in-chief of Nightmare Magazine and the managing/senior editor of Lightspeed. Her short stories, essays, and poems run the gamut from horror to environmental literature. Her longer work includes the novella The Secret Skin (one of The Washington Post’s best SF/F/H books of 2021), the horror novel The Deer Kings, the Locus bestselling SF eco-thriller An Oath of Dogs, and two novels for the Pathfinder role-playing game. She lives in Oregon with her very understanding family, two large cats, and a Muppet disguised as a dog. You can find her at winniewoohoo.com

Kris Waldherr's many books for adults and children include The Book of Goddesses (Abrams), Bad Princess (Scholastic), and Doomed Queens (Crown), which The New Yorker praised as “utterly satisfying." Her debut novel The Lost History of Dreams (Atria) received a starred Kirkus review and was named a CrimeReads best book of the year. Her upcoming books include Unnatural Creatures: A Novel of the Frankenstein Women. Waldherr's fiction has won fellowships from the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts, and a works-in-progress reading grant from Poets & Writers. She is also the creator of the Goddess Tarot, which has over a quarter of a million copies in print, and teaches the Tarot to writers and other creatives. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Jeanine Walker holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Her poetry collection, Diagram of Parts, is forthcoming from Groundhog Poetry Press. Her poems have appeared in Chattahoochee Review, New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.

Camille Wanliss is a New York-based writer and founder of Galleyway, an online platform that spotlights opportunities for BIPOC writers. She is a 2022 Periplus Fellow and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York.

Melissa Watkinson-Schutten is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. She calls the Salish Sea home and works to ensure equitable access to the marine environment. Her most published work is within academia, including a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Indigenous Sociology. Melissa grew up visiting the printing rooms of the newspaper where her mother worked. Her dream to become a writer was reignited throughout the pandemic.

I’m a poet and poetry teacher with two books and twenty-plus years of experience editing creative nonfiction, poetry, and hybrid forms. I'm particularly interested in work that pushes against traditions of usage and syntax, though at heart I'm as happy to edit a grant application as I am an essay or poem. I find great pleasure in the process of diving deep into the possibilities of a given text, and I enjoy working with authors at any/all stages of their endeavors and careers. 

Michael Dylan Welch is president of the Redmond Association of Spokenword, curator of SoulFood Poetry Night, and former poet laureate of Redmond, Washington. His poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies in at least 22 languages, and he has published dozens of books. Michael also runs National Haiku Writing Month (nahaiwrimo.com) and is founder/president of the Tanka Society of America. His personal website is www.graceguts.com.

Lisa Wells is the author, most recently, of Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World, a finalist for the 2022 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Her debut collection of poetry, The Fix, won the Iowa Poetry Prize. You can find her essays in Harper’s Magazine, Granta, N+1, The New York Times, The Best American Science & Nature Writing, and in Orion Magazine where she writes the column “Abundant Noise.” 

Rachel Werner is a teaching artist for Hugo House, The Loft Literary Center, and Lighthouse Writers Workshop in addition to being the founder of The Little Book Project WI. Her literary writing and craft essays have been featured by Off Menu Press, Digging Through The Fat, and Voyage YA Literary Journal. A selection of Rachel's recipes is included in Wisconsin Cocktails (UW-Press, 2020)—and her poetry in the anthology Hope Is The Thing: Hope is the Thing: Wisconsinites on Perseverance in a Pandemic (The Wisconsin Historical Society, 2021). She also regularly contributes content to TheKitchn, The Spruce Eats, and Fabulous Wisconsin.