Teachers

ANTHONY WARNKE’s poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and has appeared in Cimarron Review, North American Review, and Salt Hill, among other journals. His chapbook, Super Worth It, was selected for the 2021 Emerging Poets Series from Newfound Press. He was a finalist for the 2022 New Millennium Writing Award in poetry. Anthony also publishes scholarship on community colleges and is an amateur jazz vocalist. He teaches writing at Green River College.

LAURA WARRELL is a contributor to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and is a graduate of the creative writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in HuffPost, The Rumpus, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She has taught creative writing and literature at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and through the Emerging Voices Program at PEN America in Los Angeles, where she lives.

imagine it written in cursive, a water-wave like palindrome – acca (they/them/y’all) is a trans poet, educator and practitioner of abolitionist values and care work through daily actions and play. They facilitate creative interdependence through art and outdoor time since transitioning from ‘able-bodied’ to ‘no longer living that illusion’. They live into the queer disabled poc legacies of ferocity through tenderness, believe crying is a vital technology and have deep reverence for rest. They bring authenticity, adaptability and responsibility to unwinding our collective bodies into something more free. Our capacity to heal is not in question, it is only the matter of remembering ‘how’ together. and so, they write.

James T. Washburn (he/him) is a gay, trans, and disabled Storyteller-Activist based in Seattle. His work is deeply inspired by his community and experiences at the intersection of marginalized identities. He takes inspiration from folklore, mythology, and queer history; his work focuses on discovering queerness in traditional stories and reimagining familiar tropes and archetypes through a queer lens. James' works span from immersive novellas to chamber operas and physical theatre, and he is the Founding Artistic Director of Magpie Artists' Ensemble, a multidisciplinary queer collective. He is joined for this reading by local performers Jasmine Flora (she/her) and Michelle Marais (she/they).

Learn more about on Bjørn Watkins on Instagram!

Melissa Watkinson-Schutten is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. She calls the Salish Sea home and works to ensure equitable access to the marine environment. Her most published work is within academia, including a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Indigenous Sociology. Melissa grew up visiting the printing rooms of the newspaper where her mother worked. Her dream to become a writer was reignited throughout the pandemic.

Lillo Way's new collection Lend Me Your Wings was published by Shanti Arts. Her chapbook, Dubious Moon, won the Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest. Her poems have won the E.E. Cummings Award and a Florida Review Editors’ Prize. Her writing has appeared in New Letters, Poet Lore, Tampa Review, Louisville Review, Poetry East, and many anthologies. Way has received grants from the NEA, NY State Council on the Arts, and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation for her choreographic work involving poetry. www.lilloway.com

I’m a poet and poetry teacher with two books and twenty-plus years of experience editing creative nonfiction, poetry, and hybrid forms. I'm particularly interested in work that pushes against traditions of usage and syntax, though at heart I'm as happy to edit a grant application as I am an essay or poem. I find great pleasure in the process of diving deep into the possibilities of a given text, and I enjoy working with authors at any/all stages of their endeavors and careers. 

Michael Dylan Welch has had his haiku read for the Empress of Japan and at the Baseball Hall of Fame, chiseled in stone in New Zealand, and printed on balloons in Los Angeles. One of his translations from the Japanese appeared on the back of 150 million U.S. postage stamps in 2012. Michael also directs the annual Seabeck Haiku Getaway, cofounded the biennial Haiku North America conference, founded the American Haiku Archives at the California State Library, founded the Tanka Society of America, and founded National Haiku Writing Month. Michael has published his haiku, senryu, tanka and related poetry in hundreds of journals in more than 20 languages. He has published 75 books, mostly haiku-related, including several translations from the Japanese. Aside from Japanese forms, Michael served two terms as poet laureate of Redmond, Washington, where for many years he has been president of the Redmond Association of Spokenword and curator of the monthly SoulFood Poetry Night. Michael is originally from England, lived there and in Ghana and Australia, became a Canadian as a teenager, and in 2022 he and his Japanese wife became U.S. citizens. He also has a day job and lives with his family in Sammamish, Washington. You can visit his main website at www.graceguts.com.

Lisa Wells is the author, most recently, of Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World, a finalist for the 2022 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Her debut collection of poetry, The Fix, won the Iowa Poetry Prize. You can find her essays in Harper’s Magazine, Granta, N+1, The New York Times, The Best American Science & Nature Writing, and in Orion Magazine where she writes the column “Abundant Noise.” 

Rachel Werner is a teaching artist for Hugo House, The Loft Literary Center, and Lighthouse Writers Workshop in addition to being the founder of The Little Book Project WI. Her literary writing and craft essays have been featured by Off Menu Press, Digging Through The Fat, and Voyage YA Literary Journal. A selection of Rachel's recipes is included in Wisconsin Cocktails (UW-Press, 2020), and her poetry in the anthology Hope Is The Thing: Wisconsinites on Perseverance in a Pandemic (The Wisconsin Historical Society, 2021). She also regularly contributes content to TheKitchn, The Spruce Eats, and Fabulous Wisconsin. Her latest book, Glow and Grow: A Brown Girl's Positive Body Guide (Free Spirit Publishing), is forthcoming in fall 2024.

Monica West is the author of Revival Season, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, a Barnes and Noble Discover selection, and short listed for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She received her B.A. from Duke University, her M.A. from New York University, and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was a Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow. She has received fellowships and awards from Hedgebrook, Kimbilio Fiction, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She teaches in the MFA in Writing program at the University of San Francisco.

Lesley Wheeler is the author of the essay collection Poetry’s Possible Worlds and Poetry Editor of Shenandoah. Her previous books include The State She’s In, her fifth poetry collection, and Unbecoming, her first novel. Her work has received support from the Fulbright Foundation, Bread Loaf, Sewanee Writers Workshop, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Wheeler’s poems and essays appear in Kenyon Review Online, Poetry, Ecotone, and Massachusetts Review, and other journals. @LesleyMWheeler

SARAH WHEELER is a writer who trekked her way from Rhode Island to Washington, where she is a nontraditional English undergraduate at the University of Washington, with intentions of joining the Creative Writing option. Once finished with her degree, she will pursue MFA candidacy in prose. Her focus tends toward the visceral and the internal, with emphasis on familial relationships as seen through the lens of the body itself.