Teachers

Kamala Puligandla is a writer and editor in LA, who writes autobiographical fiction and essays on queer love and futures. She is well-known for her contagious laughter, her iconic hairstyle, and her easily undone heart. Her first novel, Zigzags, came out from Not A Cult in October 2020 and her novella You Can Vibe Me On My FemmePhone was released from Co-Conspirator Press in 2021. Find her at kamalapuligandla.com, and follow her on Instagram @thatkamala.

Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children’s book, and the novels Since I Laid My Burden Down and 100 Boyfriends. He is the recipient of a 2022 award from the Rauschenberg Foundation for risk-taking in art, and 2018 Whiting Award for Fiction, as well as named one of ‘32 Black Male Writers for Our Time’ by T: New York Times Style Magazine. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers.

Kate Pyontek holds an MFA from Ohio State University. Kate’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Ecotone, the lickety~split, Four Way Review, and New Ohio Review. Kate is originally from New Jersey. For more information check out katepyontek.com. Or follow Kate on Instagram @kapyontek or on Twitter @pyontek.

Bel-Quiaoit Quarless is inclined to break through western ideals of art and transform it into its beginning form: art for human’s sake. Peddling poems and novellas from underneath a secret burrow, their sublimity concerns the dark corners of human existence, in an erotic, dismal, pathetic rain-mundane way. They invite you to break apart their work and toss a follow to their instagram @kaocountry.

Khadijah Queen is the author of six books of poetry and hybrid prose, most recently Anodyne (Tin House 2020), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Other books include I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books 2017), praised in O Magazine, The New Yorker, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere as “quietly devastating” and “a portrait of defiance that turns the male gaze inside out.” Individual works appear in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, The Offing, Harper’s Magazine, The Poetry Review (UK), and widely elsewhere. With fiction writer K. Ibura, she co-edited an anthology of speculative writing, Infinite Constellations, available March 7, 2023. United States Artists recognized her work with a $50,000 Disability Futures Fellowship in 2022. She holds a PhD in English from University of Denver.

Katherine Quevedo was born and raised near Portland, Oregon, where she works as an analyst and lives with her husband and two sons. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in Fireside Magazine, Nightmare, Best Indie Speculative Fiction Vol. III and IV, Factor Four, Flame Tree Publishing’s Christmas Gothic, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Rhysling Award and received an honorable mention in the Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest. Her mini-chapbook The Inca Weaver’s Tales is forthcoming from Sword & Kettle Press, and her poems have appeared in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Coffin Bell, NonBinary Review, Eye to the Telescope, and elsewhere. Her articles have appeared on the official websites of Writer’s Digest and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA). She holds an MBA from Portland State University and degrees in Economics and English from Santa Clara University. Find her at www.katherinequevedo.com.

Lauren Davis is the author of The Milk of Dead Mothers (YesYes Books, forthcoming), Home Beneath the Church (Fernwood Press), and When I Drowned (Kelsay Books). She holds an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars.

SANJANA RAMESH is from everywhere and nowhere, although most recently Ann Arbor, Michigan and Chennai in India. Their work has appeared in Café Shapiro, The Dragon Poet Review and Bring Your Words: A Writers’ Community Anthology. Navigating new facets of their diaspora and what their queerness means within that diaspora, Sanjana attempts to write these into their work through a lens of magical realism or just plain old magic. They often spend their time attempting to navigate Seattle’s public transport (and, inexplicably, always getting lost), drawing, and pining away for their cat back home in Michigan. 

Evan Ramzipoor (they/them) is a writer based in California. Their work has appeared in the North American Review, Slate: Future Tense, fractured lit, McSweeney’s, Salon, and Forbes. They have an MFA from Brooklyn College. The Ventriloquists is their first novel.

Describe your teaching style.

Since I'm a writer, my students and I are colleagues. We're learning and experimenting together.

Shobha Rao is the author of the short story collection An Unrestored Woman, and the novel Girls Burn Brighter. She is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, and her story “Kavitha and Mustafa” was chosen by T.C. Boyle for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2015. Girls Burn Brighter has been longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a finalist for the California Book Award. She lives in San Francisco.

Kate Raphael is a Lambda-nominated novelist, journalist, anarchafeminist and queer activist based in Seattle. Her prescient novel, The Midwife’s In Town, imagining a feminist underground in the South after Roe v. Wade has been overturned, came out in February 2022. Her Palestine mystery novels, Murder Under the Bridge and Murder Under the Fig Tree, won the Independent Publishers Book Award (IPPY) and Foreword INDIEs Award. Kate received a 2011 Hedgebrook residency. She is a producer of KPFA radio Women’s Magazine, where one of her joys is interviewing authors. Kate has taught workshops in social justice fiction and writing for radio for seven years. She is pursuing an MFA in Writing at Goddard College. Connect with her at www.kateraphael.com or on Facebook and check out the Radical Fiction Facebook Group.

Midge Raymond is the author of the novel My Last Continent and the award-winning short-story collection Forgetting English. Her writing has appeared in TriQuarterly, American Literary Review, Bellevue Literary Review, the Los Angeles Times magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, and many other publications. Midge worked in publishing in New York before moving to Boston, where she taught communication writing at Boston University for six years. She has taught creative writing at Boston’s Grub Street Writers, Seattle’s Richard Hugo House, and San Diego Writers, Ink, and she is co-founder of the boutique publisher Ashland Creek Press.