Teachers

Theo Pauline Nestor is the author of Writing Is My Drink: A Writer’s Story of Finding Her Voice (And a Guide to How You Can Too) (Simon & Schuster, 2013) and How to Sleep Alone in a King-Size Bed: A Memoir of Starting Over (Crown, 2008). Nestor's essays have appeared numerous places including the New York Times, Seattle Times, and the Rumpus.

Website: theonestor.com

Instagram: @theonestor

Describe your teaching style.

Informative, practical, and empowering. I break down processes step-by-step.

Susan Nguyen's debut poetry collection Dear Diaspora won the Prairie Schooner Book Award, an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, and a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. She is the editor of Hayden's Ferry Review.

Tiana Nobile is a Korean American adoptee, Kundiman fellow, and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. A finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, she is the author of CLEAVE (Hub City Press, 2021). Her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, Southern Cultures, and the Texas Review, among others. Tiana received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College, MAT in Elementary and Special Education from the University of New Orleans, and MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Describe your teaching style.

I work to foster a space where everyone in the room feels comfortable to participate. I think it's so interesting when folks' reading of a work might be different and encourage lively discussion. I like to facilitate rather than lead and plan my classes as a balance between discussion of the reading, generative writing, and sharing new work.

Ethan Nosowsky is Editorial Director at Graywolf Press, where he, is responsible for shaping Graywolf’s prose lists; he acquires fiction and nonfiction titles. He began his career at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and was most recently editorial director at McSweeney’s. He has edited books by Jeffery Renard Allen, Hilton Als, Deborah Baker, David Byrne, Geoff Dyer, Dave Eggers, Stephen Elliott, J. Robert Lennon and Jenny Offill, among many others. He has taught in the creative writing program at Columbia University and contributed to Bookforum, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer, and Threepenny Review.

Greg November is a short story writer, an English instructor at North Seattle College and Highline College, and a senior submissions reader for New England Review. He was a 2021 Jack Straw Writer, a finalist for the 2020 Curt Johnson Prose Award for Fiction, and runner-up for The Missouri Review's 2021 Miller Audio Prize. His stories have most recently appeared in Boulevard, Carve, Hawaii Pacific Review, Epiphany, 34th Parallel, 3Elements Review, and Juked, among other places. He has an MFA from UC, Irvine.

Kevin O’Rourke lives in Seattle, where he works in tech and writes about health. His first book, the essay collection As If Seen at an Angle, was published by Tinderbox Editions; he is currently working on several follow-up projects, including a book about surviving suicide. Other writing has appeared in the LA Review of Books, Kenyon Review, and Think Global Health, among others. Learn more at kforourke.com.

Co-owner of Speculatively Queer, Isabela Oliveira has been a professional editor for years, from technical documents to pop culture content. While attending college, she kept busy as the poetry editor and later the editor-in-chief of her university’s literary journal, the Salmon Creek Journal. Isabela started speaking on panels at fan conventions in 2016 and has been at it ever since. These days, she’s working as an editor by day, and an occasional podcast co-host, a crafter and maker, and an aspiring voice actress in her free time.

Alli is a prose writer with a Masters in Creative Writing from University of Glasgow. Her work is featured in Crab Fat Magazine, The Bookends Review, The Daily Drunk Mag, and others. Alli was accepted to the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop Summer 2021. As well as writing, she spends her time making wheel-thrown pottery, reading, and drinking whisky—her favorite is Jura 10 year. She lives in Seattle with her spouse and two dogs.

Michelle Peñaloza is the author of Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, winner of the 2018 Hillary Gravendyk National Poetry Prize (Inlandia Books, 2019). She is also the author of two chapbooks, landscape/heartbreak (Two Sylvias, 2015), and Last Night I Dreamt of Volcanoes (Organic Weapon Arts, 2015). The recipient of fellowships and awards from the University of Oregon and Kundiman, Michelle has also received support from Lemon Tree House, Caldera, 4Culture, Literary Arts, VONA/Voices, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, among others. The proud daughter of Filipino immigrants, Michelle was born in the suburbs of Detroit, MI and raised in Nashville, TN. She now lives in rural Northern California.

Paulette Perhach’s writing has been published in the New York Times, Vox, Elle, The Washington Post, Slate, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Marie Claire, Yoga Journal, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Hobart, and Vice. She’s the author of two million-reader viral essays.

Her book, Welcome to the Writer's Life, was selected as one of Poets & Writers' Best Books for Writers.

She blogs about a writer’s craft, business, personal finance, and joy at welcometothewriterslife.com and leads meditation and writing sessions through A Very Important Meeting.

She serves writers as a coach,

Hugo House awarded her the Made at Hugo House fellowship in 2013.

Jennifer (JP) Perrine is the author of four award-winning books of poetry: Again, The Body Is No Machine, In the Human Zoo, and No Confession, No Mass. Perrine’s recent poems, stories, and essays appear in The Missouri Review, New Letters, The Seventh Wave Magazine, Buckman Journal, and The Gay & Lesbian Review. A resident of Portland, Oregon, Perrine co-hosts the Incite: Queer Writers Read series, teaches creative writing to youth and adults, and serves as a wilderness guide.

Website: jenniferperrine.org

Heather is the a writer and producer of independent film and TV projects. She wrote and produced the TV pilot A Broad Abroad, winner of two 2024 Best Pilot awards, and produced the documentary The River, currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Describe your teaching style.

My teaching style is interactive and collaborative. I look forward to learning who is in the class, and what ideas and stories they will bring to the table. I want to encourage feedback among the students, and to give my own feedback on projects as well.

Daniel Pope is a writer and musician from Seattle. His work has been published in Narrative Magazine, the Bellevue Literary Review, MQR Mixtape, and Gulf Coast Journal.

Mary Lane Potter (PhD, University of Chicago; MFA, Warren Wilson) has deep experience writing, editing, and teaching fiction and creative nonfiction. She’s the author of the novel A Woman of Salt (Counterpoint), Strangers and Sojourners: Stories from the Lowcountry (Counterpoint), and the memoir Seeking God and Losing the Way. Her essays and stories have appeared in in Parabola, Witness, River Teeth, Still Point Arts Quarterly, The Ekphrastic Review, Minerva Rising, Women Studies Quarterly, Beloit Fiction Journal, North American Review, Tampa Review, Tiferet, SUFI Journal, Spiritus, Leaping Clear, and others. She’s received a Washington State Arts Commission/Artist Trust Fellowship and enjoyed writing residencies at MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Caldera, and the Collegeville Institute of Cultural and Ecumenical Studies. A dedicated and experienced teacher, she’s taught writing for years, most recently at Hugo House, The Loft Literary Center, and The Collegeville Institute. Website: http://members.authorsguild.net/marylapotter/.

Passionate about all aspects of writing, Potter is especially tuned in to voice, character development, and narrative structure—and to the challenges of writing women’s experiences, the body, and spirituality.

Favorite writers; John Keene, Audré Lorde, Clarice Lispector, Merce Rodoreda, Kazuo Ishiguro, Isaac Babel, James Welch, M. Scott Momaday, George Saunders, Leslie Marmon Silko, Barry Lopez. Octavia Butler, George Eliot.

Evan Ramzipoor (they/them) is a writer based in California. Their work has appeared in the North American Review, Slate: Future Tense, fractured lit, McSweeney’s, Salon, and Forbes. They have an MFA from Brooklyn College. The Ventriloquists is their first novel.

Describe your teaching style.

Since I'm a writer, my students and I are colleagues. We're learning and experimenting together.

Kate Raphael is a Lambda-nominated novelist, journalist, anarchafeminist and queer activist based in Seattle. Her prescient novel, The Midwife’s In Town, imagining a feminist underground in the South after Roe v. Wade has been overturned, came out in February 2022. Her Palestine mystery novels, Murder Under the Bridge and Murder Under the Fig Tree, won the Independent Publishers Book Award (IPPY) and Foreword INDIEs Award. Kate received a 2011 Hedgebrook residency. She is a producer of KPFA radio Women’s Magazine, where one of her joys is interviewing authors. Kate has taught workshops in social justice fiction and writing for radio for seven years. She is pursuing an MFA in Writing at Goddard College. Connect with her at www.kateraphael.com or on Facebook and check out the Radical Fiction Facebook Group.

Midge Raymond is the author of the novel My Last Continent and the award-winning short-story collection Forgetting English. Her writing has appeared in TriQuarterly, American Literary Review, Bellevue Literary Review, the Los Angeles Times magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, and many other publications. Midge worked in publishing in New York before moving to Boston, where she taught communication writing at Boston University for six years. She has taught creative writing at Boston’s Grub Street Writers, Seattle’s Richard Hugo House, and San Diego Writers, Ink, and she is co-founder of the boutique publisher Ashland Creek Press.

Anastacia-Reneé (She/They) is a queer writer, educator, interdisciplinary artist, speaker and podcaster. She is the author of (v.) (Black Ocean) and Forget It (Black Radish) and, Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere and Sidenotes from the Archivist, forthcoming from Amistad (an imprint of HarperCollins). They were selected by NBC News as part of the list of “Queer Artist of Color Dominate 2021’s Must See LGBTQ Art Shows.” Anastacia-Renee was former Seattle Civic Poet (2017-2019), Hugo House Poet-in-Residence (2015-2017), Arc Artist Fellow (2020) and Jack Straw Curator (2020). Her work has been anthologized in: Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature, Home is Where You Queer Your Heart, Furious Flower Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, Afrofuturism, Black Comics, And Superhero Poetry, Joy Has a Sound, Spirited Stone: Lessons from Kubota’s Garden, and Seismic: Seattle City of Literature. Her work has appeared in, Hobart, Foglifter, Auburn Avenue, Catapult, Alta, Torch, Poetry Northwest, A-Line, Cascadia Magazine, Hennepin Review, Ms. Magazine and others. Renee has received fellowships and residencies from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, VONA, Ragdale, Mineral School, and The New Orleans Writers Residency.

Minda Honey's essays have been featured by Longreads, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Teen Vogue, and elsewhere, including the anthologies Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger and A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South. www.mindahoney.com

Ingrid Ricks is an NYT-bestselling memoir author, writing coach, and inspirational speaker who is passionate about leveraging personal storytelling to foster healing, awareness, empathy, and change. Over the past decade, she has helped thousands of students of every age find healing and empowerment by writing the deeply personal stories they needed to tell, and has produced eight anthologies in partnership with high schools and non-profits. Ingrid, who views personal storytelling as the key to healing and unity in today’s divided world, regularly presents her Healing Through Personal Storytelling workshops in partnership with organizations throughout the region and has delivered keynote talks on the subject to educators and social workers nationwide. Ingrid’s books include the coming-of-age memoir, Hippie Boy: A Girl’s Story, and Focus, a memoir about her journey with the blinding eye disease Retinitis Pigmentosa. She has also ghostwritten several memoirs and has shared stories from her childhood on Salon and NPR.

Ines Rodrigues holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia University, and published her first novel, Days of Bossa Nova, in 2017. Her stories appears in The Plentitudes Journal, Tint Journal, 650 Where Writers Read Anthology, and Columbia Anthology 2023.

Lola Rogers translates novels, short stories, poems, essays, comics, and children’s books. She was recently awarded a 2024 Foreword INDIES Silver Prize for her translation of Fishing for the Little Pike, by Juhani Karila.