2008 Jack Straw Writers Program

Wendy Call (she/her) wrote the award-winning nonfiction book No Word for Welcome, co-edited Telling True Stories and Best Literary Translations, and translated three collections of trilingual poetry by Indigenous Mexican women. She lives on Duwamish land (Southeast Seattle) and Mixtec/Zapotec land (Oaxaca City) and teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems, by Mikeas Sánchez, co-translated from Spanish and Zoque by Wendy Call and Shook, includes selections from six books by the only woman to have published a book of poetry in Zoque. Called a “groundbreaking and deeply passionate poetry collection that celebrates language and feminine power” by Library Journal, this trilingual book received a Booklist starred review and glowing coverage in the New York Times Book Review.

How to Be a Good Savage

My grandfather Simón wanted to be a good savage,

he learned Spanish,

and all the saints’ names.

He danced before the altar

and was baptized with a smile.

My grandfather had the force of Red Thunder

and his nagual was a tiger.

My grandfather was a poet

who healed with words.

But he wanted to be a good savage,

learned to eat with a spoon,

and the Nhkirawa’s electric lamps impressed him.

My grandfather was a powerful shaman

who spoke the gods’ language.

He wanted to be a good savage,

but he never quite learned how.

Artist Support Program 2011 (with Irma Pineda): A trilingual (Zapotec-Spanish-English) audio collection of poems.

2008 Writers Program

Janna Cawrse Esarey was born in 1971 in San Diego, California. She is the author of the Indie-bestselling travel memoir, The Motion of the Ocean: 1 Small Boat, 2 Average Lovers, and a Woman’s Search for the Meaning of Wife (Simon & Schuster), the humorous story of a woman who sails across the Pacific with her true love, only to find their relationship on the rocks. Janna writes for sailing magazines and travel anthologies, and was selected as a 2008 Jack Straw Writer. She blogs about work-life-love balance for the Seattle P-I at “Happily Even After.”

2008 Writers Program

Kevin Craft lives in Seattle and directs the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College. His books include Traverse (Lynx House Press, 2024), Vagrants & Accidentals (UW Press, 2017), and Solar Prominence (Cloudbank Books, 2005). He recently served as a Writer in Residence at the UW Rome Center, as well as for Olympic National Park. Editor of Poetry Northwest from 2009 – 2016, he is currently Executive Editor of Poetry NW Editions.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

Traverse explores the hidden forces and quirks of circumstance that constitute a human life, and shape us into the people we become. It’s a book of family origins and discovery, an adoptee’s journey toward self-knowledge, a son’s journey toward becoming (and losing) a parent. Navigating the crosscurrents of estrangement and acceptance, ecological peril and ambiguous loss, Traverse finds love in the geological record, underlying an expansive vision of familial belonging.

Prodigal

There was a time when not fitting in

meant wandering the backwoods kicking up leaves

to press into the genealogy

of any book you carried into fall.

I sifted through each page

a baleful disposition, lavish without

hope tossing stones into a stream,

a trick of luck to make me someone’s son.

There was a time. Blue begat bloom

begat blood from a stone arcing in thin air—

stone I threw at my brother’s keeper

singing its way back to the cliff it fell from

dissembling. There was a time before

there was a time it was impossible to tell

memory from summer, summer from a scab

on the knee. As sunburn is my witness,

​as long as the day is lonesome, no one to lift

me from the bicycle bent against the tree.

Every myth happened to someone once

before the alibi intervenes. On the trail

you can be anything you read about—

one son abiding, the other wandering

far from his inheritance—mile after sinkhole mile

to mark who had gone before.

2015 Writers Program (curator)

2008 Writers Program

Sharon Cumberland is an Associate Professor of English at Seattle University and will direct the Creative Writing Program starting in 2008-09. She has published two chapbooks, The Arithmetic of Mourning (Green Rock Press), and Sharon Cumberland: Greatest Hits 1985-2000 (Pudding House Press) as well as poems in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kalliope, Verse, The Midwest Quarterly and Image, among many others. Twice nominated for Pushcart Prizes, she has won Kalliope’s Sue Saniel Elkind Award, Writer’s Haven Bright Side competition, and the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association 2007 Zola Award for Poetry. She is a frequent artist-in-residence at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY. She has recently turned to writing fiction and has completed her first novel.

Writers Program 2008

Waverly Fitzgerald was a writer and teacher, reader and student, author and publisher, passionate researcher and urban naturalist. She collaborated with her friend, Curt Colbert, on a series of humorous mystery novels about a talking Chihuahua. In 2007, Waverly published Slow Time: Reclaiming the Natural Rhythms of Life, which helps readers shift their relationship with time.

Waverly taught writing since the publication of her first novel. She taught writing classes online for Creative Nonfiction and throughout the Seattle area for organizations like Richard Hugo House. She presented at international, national and regional conferences, including the Sam Miguel de Allende Writing Conference, AWP, PNWA, Chuckanut, and Write on the Sound.

2010 Artist Support Program: Record an audio book of original essays.

2008 Writers Program

Merna Ann Hecht is a nationally known storyteller, social justice educator and published poet and essayist. She has over twenty five years of experience as a teaching artist in diverse settings through the Washington State Arts Commission, the Tacoma Public Schools and the Seattle Arts and Lectures Writers in the Schools Program. For five years she was the Co-Director of the Richard Hugo House School Alliance Program. Her work as a poet with young people who have experienced trauma, loss, or difficult transitions includes residencies in King County and Seattle Juvenile Detention Centers, in the Orion Center for Homeless Teens and at the Fred Hutch Cancer Research School.

In 2008, Merna received a National Storytelling Network Brimstone Award for Applied Storytelling, through which she worked in a pilot program as a poet and storyteller at BRIDGES: A Center for Grieving Children in Tacoma. Based on that experience she went on to establish her work with young refugees and immigrants as founder and co-director of the Stories of Arrival: Refugee and Immigrant Youth Voices Poetry Project. Years of experience working with young people in major life transitions are reflected in Merna’s writing and teaching which focus on the necessity of bringing creative arts to settings for youth who have experienced trauma and loss. As a teaching artist, writer, conference and workshop presenter, Merna emphasizes the complex beauty and vulnerability that come forth when people are given the space for telling their stories. A recent mentor for the Afghan Women’s writing project she is honored to help Afghani women find and express their voices.

Merna also teaches Creative Writing, Poetry and Humanities for the University of WA, Tacoma including a course titled Art in Time of War, which explores the consequences of war on civilians through the art, literature and poetry created about and by young people living through violent conflict and forced migrations.

As a longtime passionate organic gardener and cook, Merna is honored to work with young refugees and immigrants and witness their thoughtful connections to the food and gardens of their homelands and their deep sense of knowing the importance of care-taking the earth and each other.

2008 Writers Program

Rebecca Hoogs is the author of a chapbook, Grenade (2005) and her poems have appeared in Poetry, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Zyzzyva, The Journal, Poetry Northwest, The Florida Review, and others. She is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony (2004) and Artist Trust of Washington State (2005). She is the Director of Education Programs and the curator and host for the Poetry Series for Seattle Arts & Lectures.

2008 Writers Program

Born in Queens, NY, Brian McGuigan is a poet, performer and raconteur, living in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle. His chapbook More Than I Left Behind, was published by Spankstra Press (2006), and he is currently at work on a full-length manuscript of poetry entitled Eat the Rich. His poems have appeared in Filter, Rivet Magazine, Nerve Cowboy, and LOCUSPOINT, among others, and he has performed at Bumbershoot, the Seattle Public Library, Seattle Poetry Festival, Burning Word, Annex Theater and many other venues. Brian works in marketing and programs at Richard Hugo House and is the co-founder and curator of Cheap Wine and Poetry Seattle’s ever-cool reading series.

2008 Writers Program

Jennifer D. Munro is a freelance editor who loves to help writers achieve their writing and publishing goals. As a writer; she won First Place in the National Society of Newspaper Columnists blog contest (under 100k monthly visitors category). She was a Top Ten Finalist in the Erma Bombeck Global Humor writing contest and is a regular contributor to Full Grown People. Her essays and stories have been published in numerous publications, including Salon; Brain, Child; Best American Erotica; Literary Mama; and Seal press anthologies like The Bigger the Better the Tighter the Sweater: 21 Funny Women on Beauty and Body Image. Whether fiction or nonfiction, J.D. offers a candid, often humorous exploration of sex and the sexes, with a quirky take on women’s issues such as body image, infertility, gender roles, motherhood, and marriage.

J.D. grew up in Hawaii as a fourth-generation islander but now lives in Seattle. Although her grandfather slept through the bombing of Pearl Harbor not far from his bedroom window, she’s an insomniac who writes when she can’t sleep.

2008 Writers Program

Ghida Sinno was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon. She earned a B.A. in English Literature from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. She has received grants from Artist Trust and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She was a writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook and most recently at Casa Libre in Tucson, AZ. Her work has appeared in the Seattle Review, Many Mountains Moving, and Westwind Review.

2008 Writers Program

Judith Skillman is a poet, editor and translator. Her recent collection is Subterranean Address, New & Selected Poems, Deerbrook Editions 2023. Skillman is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, The King County Arts Commission, and the Washington State Arts Commission. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she has completed residencies at Centrum and Hedgebrook. Her poems have appeared in Commonweal, Threepenny Review, Zyzzyva,  and many other journals. An educator, editor, and translator, Judith lives with her husband in Kennydale, WA.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

“Judith Skillman’s devotion to both the nuances and deeper entailments that life and lineage present us is on show in Subterranean Address: New and Selected Poems 2014-2022.  Gathered from her seven most recent collections, with a winning group of new work, Skillman writes of her subjects with matchless clarity: aging (“To be a tenant of the body/ means one’s chores are never done”), infirmity, family, the natural world, the lives of artists (Kafka, Nabokov, Lucien Freud, et. al.), and history (immigrant destinies, the Shoah)—all with measured feeling, as if to imply a dignity in our imperfection. At her best—and here she is at her best—few poets I know can surpass her evocative powers.”
—David Rigsbee

All We Took

The rains begin to beat against the glass.
Summer flowers replaced by umber leaves.
All we took for granted in our ease.

A cycle, a circle—how else learn loss?
Plump cheeks, tanned legs, soft skin are but a sieve.
The rains begin to beat against the glass.

As metaphor the same four seasons pass.
Each childhood’s novel—what is there to grieve?
All we take for granted in our ease.

Monsoons come to loosen the rose, its green caress.
Branches held hostage—harsh winds moan through sleeves.
The rains begin to beat against the glass.

I feel my body turn back into moss.
A spell of blues deletes my will to live—
and all I took for granted in my ease.

It’s cold in the bedroom where I undress,
more difficult than ever to believe.
The rains begin to beat against the glass.
All’s taken for granted when at ease.

2010 Writers Program

2008 Writers Program

Michael Spence’s poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Antioch Review, Yale Review, Georgia Review, and Southern Review. He has published two poetry collections, The Spine (Purdue University Press) and Adam Chooses (Rose Alley Press), and has been included in the anthologies Poetry Comes Up Where It Can (University of Utah Press) and Limbs of the Pine, Peaks of the Range (Rose Alley Press). He lives in Tukwila, WA, with his wife, writer and teacher Sharon Hashimoto.

2008 Writers Program