2015 Jack Straw Writers Program

Linda Andrews’s poetry and stories have been featured in numerous journals and reviews including Calyx, Nimrod, Spindrift, Poetry Northwest, Crab Creek Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, CutBank, Willow Springs, Midwest Quarterly, Gadfly, and Seattle Review. A book of her poems, Escape of the Bird Women, was published by Blue Begonia Press and received a Washington State Book Award. She is the recipient of a Ucross Foundation Fellowship residency, an Artist Trust fellowship grant, a Vernon M. Spence Poetry Prize, and an Academy of American Poets Prize through the University of Washington. She is currently on the faculty of Walla Walla Community College and is serving as a judge for the Washington State Book Awards.

2015 Writers Program

Emily Bedard grew up in Salt Lake City, got an MFA in Poetry from the University of Montana, and now lives in Seattle. She teaches for the Henry Art Gallery, the Hugo House, and Seattle Art & Lectures, through which she currently serves as the resident poet for the Roosevelt High School Roughriders. Her poems have appeared in The Indiana Review, Swivel, and elsewhere. She is at work on a collection of poems called “Cargo,” featuring inquiries into stuntmen, memory’s tricks, and the weirdness of sex ed.

2015 Writers Program

Laura Da’ is a poet and public school teacher. A lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest, Da’ studied creative writing at the University of Washington and The Institute of American Indian Arts. Da’ is an enrolled member of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma. Her first chapbook, The Tecumseh Motel, was published in Effigies II. The University of Arizona Press will publish her first full-length manuscript, Tributaries, in 2015. Da’ lives near Seattle with her husband and son.

2015 Writers Program

Bernard Grant is a recent winner of the 2015 Paper Nautilus Press Chapbook Debut Series Chapbook contest. His stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Stirring, Fiction Southeast, Compose, and other journals. He is the Associate Essays Editor for The Nervous Breakdown and is currently enrolled in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program.

2015 Writers Program

Clare Johnson is a writer and visual artist, published in Blithe House Quarterly, quiet Shorts, Frogmore Papers, 14 Magazine, Lumina, and Cranky. Solo exhibitions include Oxford’s North Wall, Bridport Arts Centre, Hugo House, Storefronts Seattle, and London’s Guy’s Hospital. She is a Michael S. Harper Poetry Prize recipient, and her ongoing Post-it Note Project (drawing a memory on a post-it each night) won a Seattle Magazine Best of 2011 for ‘Best New Take on the Memoir,’ also garnering a cover feature in Real Change. Recent honors include Artist Trust funding to expand her series of drawings inspired by favorite works of literature, and the publication of Roses, a book pairing her art with poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. Currently, she is designing interactive digital art backdrops for an upstate New York production of Our Town, and working on her book-length poetry and fiction project Will I live here when I grow up.

2015 Writers Program

Martha Kreiner holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from Michigan State University. Her work has appeared in Floating Bridge Review, ILK journal, and Hubbub. With her beloved partner Amy, she is writing a dystopian tween novella they hope to publish one day, under a name no one will recognize.

2015 Writers Program

Erin Malone is the author of  Site of Disappearance, finalist for the National Poetry Series, and Hover, as well as a chapbook, What Sound Does It Make. The recipient of grants from Washington’s Artist Trust, 4Culture, and the Colorado Council of the Arts, she’s taught writing at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and at the University of Washington Rome Center in Italy. She served as Editor of Poetry Northwest from 2016-2020 and now works as a bookseller on Bainbridge Island.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

“Out of the exquisitely-crafted poems in Site of Disappearance, Erin Malone has created both a page-turning mystery and a masterful investigation of memory, where symbol and metaphor merge with facts. The poems bend and stretch time and borrow breath and silence from white space. . . . This is a haunting, irresistible, utterly beautiful book.”
–Kathleen Flenniken

Investigation

Something moved in the grass—wind-roused
feathers—and with them fur
for a doll,

a dried-out cape. The soft pelt
I shouldn’t touch, my hand reaching to pet it

unbidden

          unbidden:

The boy’s clothes folded neatly
next to him

                    in the snow (red vest)

                    in the grove

                              of wild plums

2015 Writers Program

Ross McMeekin’s stories appear or are forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Redivider, PANK, and Tin House online. His nonfiction has appeared in Hunger Mountain, Green Mountains Review, and The Rumpus. He is a weekly columnist for the Ploughshares blog, where he reviews short stories. McMeekin holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and was a 2013-2014 Made at Hugo House Fellow.

2015 Writers Program

L. J. Morin (Lisa Carcia) has been making her way northward along the West Coast since she was born, migrating from San Diego to San Francisco to Seattle (with detours to Texas, Minnesota, and Japan along the way). Her recent credits include an honorable mention for the 2015 James Hearst Poetry Prize (North American Review), publication on a bus shelter and online as part of the 2014-2015 King County Metro Poetry on Buses program, and poems in Floating Bridge Review and Connecticut Review. She will enter the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in the summer of 2015. When she’s not writing poetry, she writes software requirements documentation, which is a surprisingly congenial day job for a poet. “Venezuela, 1800” was inspired by a 2005 broadcast of NPR’s Talk of the Nation Science Friday program, featuring a discussion with sculptor Rachel Berwick about her installation may-por-é.

2015 Writers Program

Matthew Schnirman earned his MFA from the University of Arizona. Before Jack Straw, he was a 2013-2014 Made fellow at the Richard Hugo House. His poetry appears in fabulous journals like Phantom Limb, Whiskey Island and CutBank.

2015 Writers Program

Anca L. Szilágyi’s fiction has appeared in Gastronomica, Fairy Tale Review, Cicada, Monkeybicycle, and The Massachusetts Review, among others. Her nonfiction appears on the Ploughshares blog. She was awarded an inaugural Made at Hugo House fellowship for her story collection More Like Home Than Home and a 4Culture grant for her novel-in-progress, Paralegal. The Stranger recognized Anca as one of the “fresh new faces in Seattle fiction.”

2015 Writers Program

Jeanine Walker is the author of The Two of Them Might Outlast Me (GPP, 2022). She has received fellowships from Artist Trust, Jack Straw Cultural Center, and Wonju, UNESCO City of Literature. Her poems, essays, and translations have found homes in Poetry, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, HAD, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

“Jeanine Walker’s poems pluck images from a past to tumble them like stones. . . . In this dazzling and haunting collection [The Two of Them Might Outlast Me], a history of trauma and grief reminds us where we have been, but also where we can turn. . . . These poems balance clarity with enigma in ways that are wholly Walker’s own genius.”
—Claudia Rankine

The World Became Heat

The heat sank into us and became us.
Heat wrapped its hands around us. Heat has strong hands.
The world was on fire; the world became heat.
It sank into us and became us.

*

A world on fire burns as ferociously as a tiger’s snarl.
I’m sorry. It is the best I can come up with. I am heat now; I am fire.

The world, a fist of fire, burns within me and I speak.
The world is a fist of fire: our dictionaries reflect this.

*

What burns will not be what remains. The future is always uncertain,
but it is hot. What remains will be the fact of burning.

Future people will watch the burning from their windows
and know it is the world.

They will be burning. Inside of them will be fire, but not fists.

2015 Writers Program