Teachers

Elsa Sjunneson is a Deafblind author and editor living in Seattle, Washington. Her fiction and nonfiction writing has been praised as "eloquence and activism in lockstep" and has been published in dozens of venues around the world. She has been a Hugo Award finalist seven times and has won Hugo, Aurora, and BFA awards for her editorial work. When she isn't writing, Sjunneson works to dismantle structural ableism and rebuild community support for disabled people everywhere. Her debut memoir, Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman's Fight to End Ableism, released in October of 2021 from Tiller Press.

Judith Skillman’s Oscar the Misanthropist, won the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award, 2021. Her work has appeared in Cimarron Review, Threepenny Review, Zyzzyva, and other literary journals. She is the recipient of awards from Academy of American Poets and Artist Trust, and lead editor of When Home Is Not Safe, Writings on Domestic Verbal, Emotional, and Physical Abuse, McFarland. Skillman’s new book is Subterranean Address, New & Selected Poems 2014-2022, Deerbrook Editions. Visit www.judithskillman.com for more information.

Ed Skoog is the author of four books of poems, most recently Travelers Leaving for the City (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, The New Republic, American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from The Lannan Foundation and George Washington University, and has served as writer-in-residence at the Richard Hugo House. He lives in Portland, Oregon. 

Beth Slattery moved to Seattle after eighteen years of teaching creative writing and literature at Indiana University East. Since her relocation, she has been writing and editing. Beth is currently working on a collection of personal essays about her mid-life marriage to a Zimbabwean, a move from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest, and a reluctant acceptance of the call to adventure. Her most recent publications appear in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies and Southern Women’s Review. Beth’s recent editing work includes being a “beta” reader for an author with a multi-book publishing contract, content and copy editing of a personal essay collection, and providing comprehensive editing services on an edited academic volume that was later published by Oxford University Press. She has an M.A. in fiction writing from Miami University and an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction from the University of Southern Maine—Stonecoast.

Describe your teaching style.

I'm a firm believer that we learn best when we discuss subjects, ask big questions (that sometimes don't have answers), and then apply that new knowledge (or questions) to our writing. In other words: we talk a lot; we write a lot. Added bonus: we have fun.

Aisha is the author of The Fluency of Light (University of Iowa Press 2013) and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit (1913 Press 2017), Borealis (Coffee House 2021) and a collaborative book written with her father, Captioning the Archives (McSweeney's Publications 2021). Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit was nominated for the Iowa Essay Prize, chosen by Maggie Nelson as the winner of the 1913 Open Prose Contest, and won CLMP’s Firecracker award for Nonfiction in 2018. Her writing can be found in Ecotone, Ninth Letter, Callaloo, Michigan Quarterly Review, Guernica, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, and Gulf Coast, among other journals. She is the recipient of a 2020 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2021 National Magazine Award. She holds a dual appointment with LSA English Department's Helen Zell Writers' Program and the Residential College.

Dominic Smith is the author of six novels, including The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, which was a New York Times bestseller and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. His essays, reviews, and short fiction have appeared in numerous publications, including The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and The Australian. He is a recipient of the Dobie Paisano Fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters, a new works grant from the Australia Council for the Arts, and a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Danez Smith is a Black, Queer, Poz writer & performer from St. Paul, MN. Danez is the author of Homie, (Graywolf Press, 2020), winner of the Minnesota Book Award, the Heartland Bookseller Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award; and [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. Danez is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and is the co-host of VS with Franny Choi, a podcast sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and Postloudness.

Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, The Best American Poetry, and more. You can follow her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.

Nat Oleander Smith studied playwriting at Amherst College and completed their MFA at Ohio University. They are the recipient of the Denis Johnston Playwriting Prize, and have taught fiction and screenwriting in Kenya and playwriting around the US.

Megan Snyder-Camp is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Wintering (Tupelo) and The Gunnywolf (Bear Star), both of which were published in September 2016. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Djerassi, the 4Culture Foundation, and elsewhere.

Rachel Sobel is a writer of speculative and literary fiction about dykes and other queer people. A graduate of the Hunter MFA in Fiction, she has lived in NYC and Seattle.

Describe your teaching style.

My classes are expansive and specific, aimed at giving concrete tools to address the writing pitfalls students face. I'm big on asking questions, interrogating your own process, and recognizing that what works for someone else might not work for you. I endorse reading absolutely everything, from silly fluff to pretentious works of enormous philosophical seriousness, and from poetry to nonfiction.

Ellen Sollod is a Seattle-based interdisciplinary artist whose is best known for her artist books and her site specific public art installations. Her artist books combine writing, photography, drawing and printmaking. She is represented in numerous museum and university collections, including Yale University Center for the Book, NYPL Spencer Collection of Prints and Drawings, University of Washington Suzallo Library Special Collections, University of Puget Sound Collins Library, Seattle Art Museum Dorothy Bullitt Library, and Tufts University Special Collections. Ellen has received artist residencies and awards from Ucross Foundation, Playa, Brush Creek Arts Foundation, Willapa Bay AIR, Centrum, 4Culture, Seattle Office of Arts and Culture.

MAYA SONENBERG’s story collection Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters received the 2022 Sullivan Prize in short fiction and was published in August 2022. Previous books and chapbooks include Cartographies (winner of the Drue Heinz Prize), Voices from the Blue Hotel, 26 Abductions, and After the Death of Shostakovich Père. Her stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, Electric Literature, The Collagist, DIAGRAM, and many other literary journals. The daughter of two painters, she was raised in New York City, and studied with Annie Dillard at Wesleyan University and with Robert Coover, John Hawkes, and Meredith Steinbach at Brown University, where she received her MFA. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Washington, and lives in Seattle. 

Jen Soriano (she~they) is a Filipinx writer and movement builder who has long worked at the intersection of grassroots organizing, narrative strategy, and art-driven social change. Jen has won the International Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Fugue Prose Prize, and fellowships from Hugo House, Vermont Studio Center, Artist Trust, and the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. Jen is also an independent scholar and performer, and has served as poet in residence with Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility. Jen is author of the chapbook “Making the Tongue Dry,” and co-editor of Closer to Liberation: A Pina/xy Activist Anthology. She received a BA in History and Science from Harvard and an MFA in fiction and nonfiction from the Rainier Writing Workshop. Originally from a landlocked part of the Chicago area, Jen now lives with her family in Seattle, near the Duwamish River and the Salish Sea. Her debut book, Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing, is now available from Amistad/HarperCollins.