2012 Jack Straw Writers Program

Kathleen Alcalá is the author of a short story collection, three novels set in 19th Century Mexico and the Southwest, and a collection of essays based on family history. Her work has received the Western States Book Award, the Governor’s Writers Award, and a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Award. She received her second Artist Trust Fellowship in 2008, and was honored by the national Latino writers group, Con Tinta, at the Associated Writing Programs Conference in 2014. She has been designated an Island Treasure in the Arts on Bainbridge Island.

Kathleen’s latest book is The Deepest Roots: Finding Food and Community on a Pacific Northwest Island, by the University of Washington Press. In it, she explores our relationship with food and the land through research and numerous interviews with the people who bring us our food on Bainbridge Island.

Kathleen has a B.A. in Linguistics from Stanford University, an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of New Orleans. Kathleen has a great affinity for the story-telling techniques of magic realism and science fiction, and has been both a student and instructor in the Clarion West Science Fiction Workshop.

Kathleen was a faculty member at the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts on Whidbey Island from 2008 to 2016. She continues to lecture and teach workshops in creative writing.

2012 Writers Program

2001 Writers Program

Stacey Bennetts is a mother, a writer, and a criminal defense attorney in Seattle, Washington. She married her Hastings College of the Law classmate – and landlord during her house arrest stint – Dennis Carroll. Stacey is editing her 330 page unpublished memoir, Trial By Error: Confessions of an Eight-Year-Old Drug Smuggler, while a student of the 2012 EDGE Professional Development Program for Writers and the Jack Straw Writers Program.

2012 Writers Program

Kaia Chessen is a writer and cellist living in Seattle, Washington. She holds a Bachelors Degree in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, where she was nominated for an Associated Writing Programs Intro Awards in 2005 and co-authored the short story Getting Undressed with novelist Shawn Wong in 2007.

2012 Writers Program

Gabriela Denise Frank is a transdisciplinary literary artist, editor, educator, and creative consultant whose work expands from the page into the sonic, the visual, and the experiential. In experimenting with formal expression, she seeks to expand the idea of what literary art can be and where people can encounter it. By placing literary art in the path of everyday life Gabriela celebrates storytelling as both a technology of survival and an evergreen source of wonder, pleasure, delight, and humanity.

An advocate for public art and artists, Gabriela serves as an arts commissioner for the City of Burien, on 4Culture’s arts advisory committee, and as creative nonfiction editor and managing editor of Crab Creek Review. Her creative practice is supported by 4Culture, Centrum, Civita Institute, Invoking the Pause, Jack Straw, Marble House, Mineral School, Seattle Public Library, Shunpike, Vermont Studio Center, and Willapa Bay AIR.

Artist Support Program 2023: Storefront and Sidewalk Poems

New Media Gallery 2014-2015: UGLY ME

2012 Writers Program

Poet and writer Sharon Hashimoto was born and raised in Seattle. She earned both her BA and MFA from the University of Washington. Her first collection of poetry, The Crane Wife (reprinted by Red Hen Press, 2021), won a Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Her second poetry collection, More American, won the 2021 Off the Grid Poetry Prize and the 2022 Washington State Book Award in Poetry. Her debut short story collection, Stealing Home, is forthcoming in May 2024 (Grid Books). Her poetry and fiction have appeared widely in journals such as the Rambler, Crab Orchard Review, and Shenandoah. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the King County Arts Commission, and Artist Trust. Hashimoto teaches writing at Highline Community College in Des Moines, Washington.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

Midnight,
The Spotted Hound Wanders
Through the Kobashi’s Farm

The triangle of his head cocked,
some strange sound catches
his ear, triggers the far-off call
to something not yet lost
in his blood.  Listening, he lowers
his jaw to the earth, then releases
the deep bell of his throat.
Again, his voice pursues the ravine,
but the open night closes in
faster.  Crouched down on his belly,
with his eyes closed, he can feel
the furrowed land like the echoes
of his howl ringing
the moon.

Writers Program 2012

Lacey Jane Henson grew up in Illinois, and spent a few years in New Mexico before landing in Seattle. She earned an MFA from the University of Washington in 2006 and currently organizes a popular local reading series called The Off Hours. In 2009, she won first-prize in the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction given by Nimrod International. Her stories have appeared in Nimrod, MAKE: A Chicago Literary Magazine, Vestal Review, Third Coast, and other literary journals.

Writers Program 2012

Carol Light received the Robert H. Winner award from the Poetry Society of America in 2013 and an award from Artist Trust in 2012. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Narrative Magazine, American Life in Poetry, 32 Poems, and elsewhere. She studied poetry in the University of Washington MFA program, where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. She lives with her family in Port Townsend, Washington.

2012 Writers Program

Sally Neumann, currently a proud resident of Seattle, is finishing her Bachelor’s degree in English and Psychology at the University of Washington. She’s fascinated by people, emotions, cults, the occult, relationships, and all the complexities they engender. Though she’ll never be able to understand any of them fully, there’s nothing she loves more than to unpack and explore.

2012 Writers Program

Claudia Rowe is a journalist, essayist, and writer of creative nonfiction. For seven years she was a regular contributor to The New York Times and several national magazines. In 2003, after a residency at Hedgebrook on Whidbey Island, she flew back to New York, packed up her car and hit the road for Seattle, where for six years she covered social issues at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. To blow off steam, she practices drumming to Led Zeppelin.

Writers Program 2012

Johanna Stoberock is the author of the novels Pigs (Forthcoming, Red Hen Press, September 2019) and City of Ghosts (W.W. Norton). Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Better: Culture & Lit, The Wilson Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Front Porch, and the 2014 Best of the Net Anthology. A 2012 Jack Straw Fellow and 2013 Artist Trust GAP awardee, Johanna has received residencies from the Corporation of Yaddo, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Millay Colony. She lives in Walla Walla, Washington with her husband and two children.

2012 Writers Program

Mitsu Sundvall is a writer from Berkeley, New York City, and Seattle. She has been a Harper & Row editor, an Artist Trust and Seattle Arts Commission awardee, and a Seattle Times book reviewer, and is a Hedgebrook and Edge programs alumna.

2012 Writers Program

Nick Wong is a writer and photographer who explores culture through the art of boxing. A Mary Gates Scholar, a Bonderman Fellow, and a VONA alum, he served as the assistant editor at the International Examiner from 2009-2010 and now freelances for online boxing websites. He is currently writing his first book about his journey through the boxing gyms of Latin America, and working towards his dream of building boxing gyms around the world.

2012 Writers Program

Artist Support Program 2011: Create an audio companion piece to The Wandering Pugilist, a photographic and literary documentary project.