Teachers

See a live performance of Michael Wallenfels on YouTube!

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.

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.