Teachers

Kathryn Petruccelli holds an M.A. in teaching English language learners. A former slam host, she's taught young people through California Poets-in-the-Schools and Mass Poetry. Kathryn was a Best of the Net nominee and finalist for the Omnidawn Broadside Poetry Prize.

Brenda is the award-winning author of The Rock Eaters. Her stories have won an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, and inclusion in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her novella, Time’s Agent, is forthcoming from Tor.com in 2024.

Jekeva Phillips is a writer, performer, and educator. She is Editor-in-Chief of Word Lit Zine, a based lit quarterly, and owner of Paradise Lost Publishing. Her forthcoming poetry chapbook, Les Amants, hit the shelves this spring; and she is currently hard at work on her first novel, Sovereign. You may have seen Jekeva lecturing at Hugo House, performing improv as a member of CSz Seattle, traveling through space with the improvised Star Trek group, Where No Man Has Gone Before, or twirling in aerial fabrics at The School of Acrobatics and New Circus Arts. Jekeva is fascinated with storytelling in all of its many forms. Whether the story unfolds under stage lights or between the covers of a book, she loves falling into the unexpected journey.

“Deesha Philyaw uses the comic, the allegorical, and the geographic to examine Black intimacies and Black secrets. Her work is as rigorous as it is pleasurable to read.” –Kiese Laymon

“Tender, fierce, proudly Black and beautiful.” –Kirkus Reviews

Deesha Philyaw is the author of the debut short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (West Virginia University Press, 2020), which won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and a 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; the collection was also a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where Black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. Nine stories featuring four generations of characters who grapple with who they want to be in the world, the collection was praised as “luminous stories populated by deeply moving and multifaceted characters,” by Kirkus Reviews and “addictive while also laying bare the depth and vulnerability of Black women,” by Observer. Author Tara Campbell notes, “The love in Philyaw’s stories runs the gamut from sweet to bitter, sexy to sisterly, temporary to time tested, often with hidden aspects. The word secret in the title is earned, and some of the secrets are downright juicy.” The Secret Lives of Church Ladies is being developed for television by Tessa Thompson for HBO Max.

Philyaw’s work has been listed as Notable in the Best American Essays series, and her writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Brevity, dead housekeeping, Apogee Journal, Catapult, Harvard Review, ESPN’s The Undefeated, The Baltimore Review, TueNight, Ebony and Bitch magazines, and various anthologies.

Deesha is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and will be the 2022-2023 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. She is a past Pushcart Prize nominee for essay writing in Full Grown People. Philyaw lives in Pittsburgh, PA.

Felice Picano is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, memoirs, nonfiction, and plays. His work has been translated into many languages and several of his titles have been national and international bestsellers. He is considered a founder of modern gay literature along with the other members of the Violet Quill. Picano also began and operated the SeaHorse Press and Gay Presses of New York for fifteen years. His first novel was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Since then he’s been nominated for and/or won dozens of literary awards. Picano teaches at Antioch College, Los Angeles.

Heather is the a writer and producer of independent film and TV projects. She wrote and produced the TV pilot A Broad Abroad, winner of two 2024 Best Pilot awards, and produced the documentary The River, currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Describe your teaching style.

My teaching style is interactive and collaborative. I look forward to learning who is in the class, and what ideas and stories they will bring to the table. I want to encourage feedback among the students, and to give my own feedback on projects as well.

Zach Polis is a Canadian screenwriter, playwright, and former poet laureate. He has been featured with British Vogue, Vogue Italia, and Teen Vogue. The Zookeeper is his debut novel.

Maya C. Popa is a Romanian-American poet and author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W. W. Norton, 2022), and American Faith (Sarabande, 2019), which was a recipient of the North American Book Prize and a runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong. She is also the author of two chapbooks, both from the Diagram Chapbook Series: You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave and The Bees Have Been Canceled, which was a PBS Summer Choice.

About American Faith, Deborah Landau says, “Maya Popa’s clear-eyed lyrics register with steady power a spectrum of 21st-century violences. In poems that take on the devastating pressure of climate change, gun violence, and our threatened democracy, Popa uses her gift to grieve and in grieving forge song. Revelatory yet emphatically unsentimental, Popa’s unflinching distillations illuminate the facets of our broken world; there is much wisdom here, and grace, and heart.” And of her poetry Publishers Weekly reflects, “Child of immigrants, teacher, woman in a vulnerable body, the speakers of Popa’s poems seek to set the record straight, knowing how little anyone listens—to poetry, of course, but to other people in general. Popa’s questing and questioning lyric poems are kind company amid the uncertainty of the modern world.”

A selection of poems from her manuscript in progress received 2nd place in The Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize judged by John Burnside and Gillian Clarke, and she was recently Highly Commended in the Bridport Prize.

Popa is the recipient of awards from the Poetry Foundation, the Oxford Poetry Society, the Hippocrates Society in London, and the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ireland, among others. She is the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at NYU. She is director of creative writing at the Nightingale-Bamford school where she oversees visiting writers, workshops, and readings.

She holds degrees from Oxford University, NYU, and Barnard College and is currently pursuing her PhD on the role of wonder in poetry at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Daniel Pope is a writer and musician from Seattle. His work has been published in Narrative Magazine, the Bellevue Literary Review, MQR Mixtape, and Gulf Coast Journal.