Teachers

Jos Charles is author of a Year & other poems (Milkweed Editions, 2022), feeld (Milkweed Editions, 2018), a Pulitzer-finalist and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series selected by Fady Joudah, and Safe Space (Ahsahta Press, 2016). She is the founding-editor of THEM, the first trans literary journal in the US, and engages in direct gender justice work with a variety of organizations and performers. Charles's poetry has appeared in Poetry, PEN, Washington Square Review, BLOOM, Denver Quarterly, Action Yes, The Feminist Wire, The Capilano Review, and elsewhere. Among her awards are the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a 2015 Monique Wittig Writer's Scholarship.

Richard (He/Him) has been involved in the performing arts since the age of 12. He started with school plays during his youth and moved on to performing skits in bars and parks, then became a central performer and producer of a Fantasy Rock Opera for over five years, and is currently a knighted member of a professional jousting troupe. With nearly two decades of experience in martial arts, dance, and stage acting, swinging swords for an appreciative audience at a Renaissance Faire feels like just another day to him, even six years later. Richard has also been playing and running tabletop RPGs for as long as he has been performing and has a regular gaming group that he runs every week.

Mayur Chauhan is an L.A-based immigrant, writer, actor, and comedian, originally from Delhi. Mayur is a Key West Literary Seminar and Bread Loaf scholar. His humor pieces have been published in McSweeney’s and many other publications.

Describe your teaching style.

My coaching is writer-centered and engaging. I encourage the participants to become more confident in their voice and their work while staying open to suggestions. If there's one thing I'd repeat at least 589 times in class is "You are the final decision maker."

I believe self-care and playfulness are as important as craft and marketplace. Also, I love to meet everyone's pets via Zoom.

j.chavez (they/them) is a Seattle-based playwright, educator, and all-around theatre maker. Through the power of RedBulls they earned a BA in Theatre from Western Washington University, concentrating in Directing, Dramatic Writing, and Education. They are the founder and artistic director of Haus of Hazard Theatre Productions which does free theatre in the PNW. They were crowned the unofficial title of Lil’ Miss Kennedy Center for their play how to clean your room (and remember all your trauma) which was awarded The KCACTF National Undergraduate Playwriting Award 2020 and the David Mark Cohen National Award in 2021. how to clean is featured in the Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays, a first of it’s kind anthology of Trans plays written by Trans playwrights for Trans people. It’s been over two decades and Jay is still chasing the knowledge of how wind works. They are a teaching artist at Seattle Children’s Theatre. When they aren’t working, they love to drink coffee, write bad adaptations of classic plays, and cook delicious meals their mother describes as "too spicy." They are excited to teach with Hugo House.

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, which won the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and the GLCA New Writers Award. Longlisted for the National Book Award, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and was named one of the best of 2017 by The Brooklyn Rail, Entropy, Library Journal, and others. About the collection, Stephanie Burt says,“As Chen’s younger self had to escape from constricting familial expectations (become a lawyer, marry a woman, buy a house), the adult writer has to escape from the constrictions of autobiography, into hyperbole, stand-up comedy, fairy tale, twisted pastoral. It’s easy to imagine a young reader seeing himself here as he had not seen himself in poems before.” He is also the author of two chapbooks, Set the Garden on Fire (Porkbelly Press, 2015) and Kissing the Sphinx (Two of Cups Press, 2016).

In an interview with NPR, Chen explained, ““I felt like I couldn’t be Chinese and American and gay all at the same time. I felt like the world I was in was telling me that these had to be very separate things.” As someone who was struggling with his sexuality and thinking about identity— with immigrant parents and wondering how to come out, “Poems were a way for those different experiences to come together, for them to be in the same room.”

His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry, Tin House, Poem-a-Day, The Best American Poetry, Bettering American Poetry, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Recently, his work has been translated into French, Greek, Spanish, and Russian. Poets & Writers Magazine featured him in their Inspiration Issue as one of “Ten Poets Who Will Change the World.” He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda Literary, and the Saltonstall Foundation.

Chen earned his MFA from Syracuse University and is pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing as an off-site Texas Tech University student. He lives in frequently snowy Rochester, NY with his partner, Jeff Gilbert and their pug dog, Mr. Rupert Giles.

Chen is the 2018-2020 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University.

Joyce Chen is a writer, editor, and community builder who draws inspiration from many coastal cities. She has covered entertainment and human interest stories for Rolling Stone, Architectural Digest, Elle, Refinery29, the New York Daily News, and People, among others, and her creative writing credits include Poets & Writers, Lit Hub, Narratively, and Slant’d, among others. She has contributed op-eds to Paste magazine, and writes book reviews for Orion and Hyphen magazines. In 2022, she co-edited the anthology Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times, a collection of poetry paired with essays and life lessons. She is a proud VONA alum and was a 2019-2020 Hugo House fellow. She is also the executive director of The Seventh Wave, an arts and literary nonprofit that champions art in the space of social issues.

Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry winner) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing (speCt! Books) and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 1st edition; AK Press, 2nd edition) and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets (Achiote Press). They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center and the Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. A community organizer, they have worked in Asian American communities in San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside, Boston, Milwaukee, Houston and Seattle and are currently a core member of the Massage Parlor Outreach Project. They currently teach at University of Washington Bothell in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics. www.chinginchen.com

Olivia Cheng is an MFA student in fiction at the University of Michigan. Her fiction has appeared in The Boston Review and The Georgia Review. Her other work has appeared in Electric Literature and Ploughshares Blog.

Richard Chiem is the author of You Private Person (Sorry House Classics, 2017), and the novel, King of Joy (Soft Skull, 2019), which was long listed for the 2020 PEN Open Book Award. He was named a 2019 Writer to Watch by the Los Angeles Times. He has taught at Hugo House and Catapult. He lives in Seattle.

Serena Chopra is a writer, dancer, filmmaker and a visual and performance artist. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Denver and is a MacDowell Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow, a RedLine Artist In-Residence and a Fulbright Scholar (Bangalore, India). Her third book, Dayawati, Of Mercy, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2026. She has two films, Dogana/Chapti (2019, Official Selection at Frameline43 and Seattle Queer Film Festival) and Mother Ghosting (2018). She was a featured artist in Harper's Bazaar (India), Revry, as well as in the Denver Westword’s “100 Colorado Creatives.” She has recent publications with The Academy of American Poets, Burrow Press Review, Sink, Foglifter, and the anthology Alone Together: Love, Grief and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19 (Washington State Book Award, 2021). She also has critical essays in Matters of Feminist Practice (Belladonna Collective, 2019), Rehearsing Racial Equity: A Critical Anthology on Anti-Racism and Repair in the Arts (Amherst College Press, forthcoming 2024) and in the republication of Judy Grahn’s The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition (Sinister Wisdom, Fall 2023). Serena is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Seattle University. You can find out more at SerenaChopra.com.

Aimee’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC Think, Poets & Writers, Atticus Review, Entropy, and more. She is a writing instructor and editor and the founder of Writing Personhood, a writing center for adoptees only. She is currently querying her memoir about adoption and identity. Find out more about Aimee at aimeechristian.net @thewriteaimee

HENRY ELIZABETH CHRISTOPHER is a trans writer from Akron, Ohio. His writing has been published in journals such as Witness, The Threepenny Review, Gordon Square Review, Delay Fiction, HASH, and Gigantic Sequins, and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Henry works at CRAFT Literary as the section editor for critical essays and interviews section and editorial feedback consultant. His debut novel, No One Dies in Palmyra Ohio, is available through What Books Press. He’s currently working toward his Master of Fine Arts at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Hon Lai Chu is one of Hong Kong's most prominent writers and the author of several novels, including Mending Bodies, Degravitation Zone, and A Dictionary of Two Cities, co-authored with Dorothy Tse, which won the Hong Kong Book Prize. Her most recent works are Half-Eclipse and Darkness under the Sun, two diaristic essay collections about Hong Kong. She has also received accolades from Taiwan's Unitas Literary Association, the Liang Shiu-chiu Literature Award, the Dream of the Red Chamber Award, and the Hong Kong Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature, among many others.

Ansley is the author of Bloodline (MoonPath Press 2024) and the chapbook Geography (dancing girl press 2015). Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Colorado Review, Bennington Review, and elsewhere. She is the director of the Writing Center at The Evergreen State College and teaches composition, rhetoric, and creative writing classes at various organizations around the Pacific Northwest. She currently lives in Olympia, Washington.