Teachers

Elisabeth Vasquez Kikuchi is a second-generation Filipina American photographer and poet. Her art explores her identity as the daughter of an immigrant, and the impact of a migratory upbringing on her sense of belonging. She lives in Seattle with her husband, daughter and two cats. Elisabeth is a Capricorn.

Lavanya Vasudevan is an Indian-American writer living near Seattle, WA. Her stories appear in Ploughshares, Chicago Quarterly Review, Wigleaf, The Pinch Journal, and elsewhere. Her work has been selected for Wigleaf Top 50, The Best Small Fictions Anthology, and The Masters Review Anthology. She is an alum of the inaugural American Short Fiction Workshop, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, Kenyon Review Workshop, and Tin House Workshop. Find her online at www.lavanyavasudevan.com and on Twitter at @vanyala.

LIV VESSENES is a sophomore at University of Washington, where she studies math and creative writing. She fell in love with theater at Bainbridge Performing Arts in elementary school. Since then, several of her plays have been produced, and her poetry published. Her other interests include fashion design and dance.

María de Lourdes Victoria is an award-winning, bilingual author, born and raised in Mexico and living in the US. She is the author of novels, short stories and children's books. Maria is the founder of Seattle Escribe.

Neena Viel is a horror writer who lives in a cabin in the woods. A 2021-2022 Pitch Wars mentee, her work explores social horror and humor through a Black lens. Her debut novel, Listen To Your Sister, in which three siblings travel to a remote cabin in the wake of events following the youngest sibling’s Black Lives Matter activism and confront a nightmare world, is slated for a 2025 release from St. Martin’s Press. 

Meera Vijayann is a writer and essayist based in Kirkland, Washington. As a writer who lives with a chronic illness, she is drawn to social invisibility within South Asian diasporic cultures, and the influence of mayam, the Tamil word for illusion. Her writing is shaped by the decade she spent as a development professional and journalist reporting on sexual violence in India and has appeared in Catapult, Entropy, Electric Literature, and The Guardian, among others. Her essay about how immigration laws separated her from her family won the Medium Writer’s Challenge Finalist Prize in 2021. Through her fiction, she hopes to gently peel away the nostalgia that pervades South Asian literature and dive into gaps in collective memory. She is currently working on her debut novel, which explores how the falsehoods perpetuated by America’s H1B work visa program affect two young Tamil immigrants.

Elizabeth Villamán 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 MAGAZINE. She is the author of the novella THE SECRET SKIN, the horror novel THE DEER KINGS, and the SF thriller AN OATH OF DOGS.

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 is the author of The Two of Them Might Outlast Me (2022). She has received writing fellowships from Artist Trust, the Jack Straw Cultural Center, Wonju, UNESCO City of Literature, and Inprint. Her work has appeared in Bennington Review, New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. A poet with a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Houston, Jeanine is a long-time poetry teacher and most recently taught English at Kangwon National University in Chuncheon, South Korea.

Describe your teaching style.

Positive, fun, and generous, I love to make my students feel welcome and let them know it's important to me that they're there.

RACHAEL MARIE WALKER (she/they) is a Seattle-based writer who fell in love with words, music, and their collisions in the weeds of Virginia. Rachael enjoys writing poetry and prose about queerness, bodies, complicating womanhood, and ideas of home. Rachael's work has been selected for awards including the Bill Hallberg award and the Melanie Hook Rice prize, both for creative nonfiction. Outside of writing and reading, Rachael enjoys long walks, bicycling, painting, and baking. They tweet @rachaelwalking. 

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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.

Lyzette Wanzer is a San Francisco writer, editor, and writing workshop instructor. Her work appears in over twenty-five literary journals, magazines, books, and newspapers. Library Journal named her book, TRAUMA, TRESSES, & TRUTH: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives, a Top 10 Best Social Sciences Book. Her articles have appeared in Essay Daily, The Naked Truth, and the San Francisco University High School Journal. Her research interests include professional development for creative writers, Black feminism, critical race theory, and the lyrical essay form.

Lyzette serves as judge of the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition’s Intercultural Essay category and the Women’s National Book Association’s Effie Lee Morris Writing Contest’s Fiction category. She presents her work at conferences across the country, including the American and Popular Culture Association, Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), College English Association, Desert Nights, Rising Stars (Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing), Empowering Wom[x]n of Color Conference, Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture Since 1900, Grub Street’s Muse & The Marketplace, San Francisco Writers Conference, The Society for the Study of African American Life and History, and Southern Humanities Council. In August 2021 she produced her own two-day virtual conference, Trauma, Tresses, & Truth: A Natural Hair Conference, featuring panels, workshops, and readings examining the policing, perception, politics, and persecution of Black women’s natural hair.

A National Writers’ Union and Authors Guild member, Lyzette has been awarded writing residencies at Blue Mountain Center (NY), Kimmel Harding Center for the Arts (NE), Playa Summer Lake (OR), Horned Dorset Colony (NY), Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow (AR), Headlands Center for the Arts (CA), The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada, PlySpace (IN), and The Anderson Center (MN). Her work has been supported with grants from Center for Cultural Innovation, San Francisco Arts Commission, California Arts Council, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Black Artist Foundry, The Awesome Foundation, and California Humanities, a National Endowment for the Humanities partner.