Teachers

Bonnie J. Rough is an award-wining author, essayist, and journalist who loves the writing classroom, whether as student, mentor, or both at once. Her latest book is Beyond Birds and Bees: Bringing Home a New Message to Our Kids about Sex, Love, and Equality (Seal Press 2018). She has written recently for the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Cut, Washington Post, Slate, and many other outlets. Her previous two books, Carrier: Untangling the Danger in My DNA (winner of a Minnesota Book Award) and The Girls, Alone: Six Days in Estonia (named one of Amazon's Best Kindle Singles), are literary memoirs. Rough earned her MFA from the University of Iowa in 2005. She has taught in various writing programs including the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and as faculty for the Ashland University low-residency MFA program. She has been the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, and awards, with her creative work appearing in anthologies and publications including the Best American series, Modern Love, The Sun magazine, Brain, Child, the Seattle Review of Books, and dozens of other literary journals and magazines.

Mel Ruth is a poet, a professor, a mentor, and a student. Mel is currently a PhD candidate at Georgia State University where they major in Creative Writing with a Concentration in Poetry. Mel obtained their MFA from University of Central Arkansas, and their BFA from Salisbury University. Mel has numerous years of teaching experience, in including, but not limited to, First Year Writing, Dual College Enrollment Composition, Introduction to Creative Writing, Forms & Theory of Poetry, and American Literature. Mel’s chapbook, “A Name Among Bone,” was selected as the winner of the 2021 Cow Creek Chapbook prize, and is forthcoming from Emerald City Press in early 2022. Their chapbook was also listed as a semi-finalist in the Spring 2020 Black River Chapbook Contest through Black Lawrence Press. Mel was the 2018-2019 Oxford American Magazine Editorial Assistant Fellow, and their work has been selected as a finalist for the Slice Literary’s Bridging the Gap Award. Mel has poems featured in, in forthcoming from, Hawai’i Pacific Review, The Emerson Review, Red Earth Review, Sierra Nevada Review and more. Their reviews have been featured in Pleiades, New Pages, Entropy, and The Rumpus. On top of being a poet, Mel is also seeking representation for their LGBTQ+ Young Adult Novel, “Good Intentions.” For more information go to melruth.com or follow Mel on Twitter @_Mel_Ruth_.

MARTHA RYAN is a writer and educator who is just about to have an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington, Seattle. Her work tends to ignore genre convention and often insists upon discomfort and dislocation. She received a bachelor's degree in Global Health from the University of Southern California in 2016. A 2017 Fulbright scholar, Martha has published her public health research contributions in a handful of peer-reviewed journals including Social Science and Medicine, JAMA Open, Sexual Health and Reproductive Matters, and Health Economics. Her creative works are published or forthcoming from Foglifter, Fugue, and Channel. 

Co-owner of Speculatively Queer, Jed Sabin is a jack-of-all-trades with professional experience as an editor, writer, scientist, project coordinator, and logistics manager. They were editor-in-chief of their college student newspaper, and they worked as an editor on the Maze of Games puzzle novel. Their writing has been published by Daily Science Fiction and Wired Magazine. Their hobbies include playing hockey, inventing weird cocktails, and maintaining a spreadsheet of over 600 queer movies.

MATTHEW SALESSES is the author of the bestsellers The Hundred-Year Flood, an Adoptive Families Best Book of 2015 and Amazon.com Best Book of September, and Craft in the Real World, a Best Book of 2021 at NPR, Esquire, Library Journal, Independent Book Review, Chicago Tribune, Electric Literature, and others. His latest novel is the PEN/Faulkner Finalist Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, a Thrillist.com and Entropy Best Book of 2020. Previous books include I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying; Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity; and The Last Repatriate. Two more books are forthcoming: a novel, The Sense of Wonder, and a memoir-in-essays, To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time.

Matthew was adopted from Korea. In 2015 Buzzfeed named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers. His essays can be found in Best American Essays 2020, NPR Code Switch, The New York Times Motherlode, The Guardian, and other venues. His short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, PEN/Guernica, and Witness, among others. He has received awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, [PANK], HTMLGIANT, IMPAC, Inprint, and elsewhere.

Matthew is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA/PhD program at Oklahoma State University. He earned a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Emerson College. He serves on the editorial boards of Green Mountains Review and Machete (an imprint of The Ohio State University Press), and has held editorial positions at Pleiades, The Good Men Project, Gulf Coast, and Redivider. He has read and lectured widely at conferences and universities and on TV and radio, including PBS, NPR, Al Jazeera America, various MFA programs, and the Tin House, Kundiman, and One Story writing conferences.

Edward Sambrano III is a Latinx poet, critic, and educator from San Antonio, Texas. They received their MFA from the University of Florida, and have received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. Their writing has appeared in Pleiades, Waxwing, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. They can be found on Twitter @SambranoPoet

Rana San is an intermedia artist, film festival curator, and video poetry educator with an interest in experimental modes of storytelling using analog media, stop motion, and direct animation. Rana co-directs Cadence Video Poetry Festival, an annual showcase of literary works presented as visual media. She is the Artistic Director at Northwest Film Forum and has recently presented work at SIFF (WA), Eugene Contemporary Art (OR), NYC Indie Theatre Film Festival (NY), and Experiments in Cinema (NM). ranasan.art

TENZIN SANGPO is a Tibetan refugee who grew up in Nepal and India. He initially studied physics at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, before transferring to Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. There he received a B.A. in Creative Writing with a minor in English Literature. Tenzin's essays explore the parallels between modern physics and Buddhism, his fiction the trauma of exile, the legacy of genocide, and the wisdom in compassion. His writings have appeared in Perceptions, Catch, Quiver, and Applied Physics Letters. He is an M.F.A candidate in Creative Writing-Prose at the University of Washington – Seattle. 

RAKESH SATYAL is an Executive Editor who specializes in serious narrative nonfiction, as well as literary fiction and fiction in translation. He acquires across all the HarperOne lists — HarperOne, Amistad, HarperVia, and HarperCollins Español. He held previous editorial positions at Atria/Simon & Schuster, Harper/HarperCollins, and Doubleday/Random House. He has acquired and edited many New York Times bestsellers, including Let Love Have the Last Word by Common, Resistance by Tori Amos, I Have Something to Tell You by Chasten Buttigieg, the Children of Eden series by Joey Graceffa, I Can’t Date Jesus by Michael Arceneaux, Holding by Graham Norton, and Furious Love by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger. Other authors with whom he has worked include Michael Ausiello, Guy Branum, Terry Castle, Paolo Cognetti, Marcia Gay Harden, Daniel Lavery, Armistead Maupin, Janet Mock, and Jake Shears.

An award-winning novelist (No One Can Pronounce my Name and Blue Boy), Rakesh has taught in the publishing program at New York University and currently serves as Vice President of the board of Lambda Literary, the world’s leading LGBTQ+ literary organization. He is based in New York.

Originally from Southside Virginia, Caitlin Scarano is a writer based in Bellingham, Washington. She holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her second full length collection of poems, The Necessity of Wildfire, was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the Wren Poetry Prize. Find her at caitlinscarano.com