2011 Jack Straw Writers Program

Nassim Assefi is a novelist and global women’s health specialist. Author of Aria (Harcourt and 5 foreign publishers) and forthcoming Say I Am You, medical advisor to ZocDoc, practicing physician at Country Doctor Community Health Clinics, TED Global Fellow and TEDxRainier curator, Assefi’s most accurate description may be that of thrillionaire. Past incarnations include: academic at UW Medical School, humanitarian aid worker (and underground salsa dance teacher) in Kabul, aspiring musician in Havana, and writer in Istanbul. She serves on advisory boards for Hedgebrook, Whit Press, and the Guttmacher Institute. She was recently honored by the Feminist Press as one of the top 40 feminists under 40.

2011 Writers Program

Donald Fels is a visual artist and writer. For the past twenty-five years he has followed the trade in commodities around the world. People have always exchanged goods, and in the process have forever swapped stories, traded hopes and ideas. He is currently at work on a graphic non-fiction book, Placing Color, which looks at the rather incredible history of the mordant alum. His book Water’s Edge, about a year he spent as artist in residence at a decommissioned steel plant in Southern Italy, is being readied for publication.

2011 Writers Program

2001/02 New Media Gallery: Plywood and Memory

Artist Support Program 1996

Debra Jarvis works as a per diem chaplain at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. She is the author of It’s Not about the Hair: And Other Certainties of Life & Cancer (Sasquatch, 2007), an account of her time with cancer as she continues to work as an oncology chaplain. Her book The Journey Through AIDS: A Guide For Loved Ones and Caregivers (Lion, 1992) has been used nation-wide as a training book for AIDS caregivers. It features interviews with caregivers, medical personnel and people living with AIDS. Her second book, HIV Positive, Living With AIDS (Lion, 1990), is written for those who are HIV positive and deals with the spiritual issues around AIDS. Her first book, Take It Again—From The Top (Lion, 1986) is a memoir of her faith journey. She lectures at the University of Washington medical school and Bastyr University on medicine and spirituality. She was ordained in the United Church of Christ in 1989.

2011 Writers Program

1999 Writers Program

Robert Lamirande is a writer and musician whose work has appeared in Flashquake, The Splinter Generation, Bricolage, and several others. He has performed with Seattle bands Randal Cobb and Sound of Bagheera, and his music has appeared in the full-length feature film, The Curse of Duncan Carbuncle. He is currently employed as a writer by Microsoft, for whom he scribes 140 characters at a time.

2011 Writers Program

Anne McDuffie writes poetry, essays and reviews. She was a 2011 Jack Straw fellow, and was awarded a 2012 Individual Artist Projects grant from 4Culture for Deep Geography, a series of poems written in collaboration with painter Ann Vandervelde.

From 2007 to 2015, Anne worked as literary assistant to the late poet Madeline DeFrees. She edited Ms. DeFrees’ collected essays, Subjective Geography: A Poet’s Thoughts on Life and Craft (Lynx House Press, 2018) and Where the Horse Takes Wing: The Uncollected Poems of Madeline DeFrees (forthcoming from Two Sylvias Press).

Anne is a graduate of Oberlin College and the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University, where she was fortunate to work with Lia Purpura, David Huddle, and Judith Kitchen. She lives with her family in Seattle, Washington.

2011 Writers Program

Larissa Min is a fiction and non-fiction writer, photographer, linguaphile and fallen urbanite. She’s currently working on Breaking English, a creative non-fiction account of her family’s migration from Korea to Brazil and later the US as a lens through which to examine the experiences of global migration, displacement and remembering.

She’s the recipient of a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil by the U.S. Department of State, a 2013 Fellowship to Instituto Sacatar in Brazil, 2012 Antarctic Artists and Writers Grant from the National Science Foundation, 2012 Radclyffe Hall fellowship and Writer-in-Residence from Hedgebrook Foundation, a 2012 SLS fellowship for Breaking English, a 2011 4Culture grant, a 2011 Jack Straw Foundation Writers Program fellowship, a 2010 GAP Grant from Artist Trust, a City Artist award from the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, the James Hall Prize for Fiction, a University Fellowship from Temple University, and the Phyllis Jones Memorial Award.

2011 Writers Program

Annette Spaulding-Convy is a poet and editor in the Seattle area. Her full length collection, In Broken Latin, is published by the University of Arkansas Press (Fall 2012) as a finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, In the Convent We Become Clouds, won the 2006 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was chosen for the 2011 Jack Straw Writer’s Program and is a recipient of the Artist Trust GAP Grant (2006) and the Artist Trust Fellowship (2014). Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review and in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, among others. She is co-founder and co-editor of Two Sylvias Press, with Kelli Russell Agodon. Two Sylvias has published the first eBook anthology of contemporary women’s poetry, Fire On Her Tongue. Annette is the past co-editor of the literary journal, Crab Creek Review and has recently co-founded Kingston Artist Tree: A Visual Art and Writing Collaborative. Originally from Northern California, Annette currently lives in a small community on Puget Sound.

2011 Writers Program

Harold Taw’s debut novel was Adventures of the Karaoke King; his writing has been featured on NPR, in a New York Times bestselling anthology, and in The Seattle Times; and his screenplay DOG PARK has received numerous accolades. He currently co-curates WordsWest Literary Series.

Harold (book) and Chris Jeffries (music and lyrics) co-wrote Persuasion, a musical adaptation of Jane Austen’s final novel, which had its world premiere at Taproot Theatre Company in summer 2017. Persuasion received a staged reading at The 5th Avenue Theatre in 2015, and a workshop reading at Texas Musical Theatre Workshop in 2016. Chris and Harold’s one-act musical The Missed Connections Club won Third Place in the 2015 Frostburg State University One-Act Competition, was a finalist in the Arts Club of Washington’s 2014 One-Act Play Competition, and was longlisted for the 2015 British Theatre Challenge.

Artist Support Program 2017 (with Chris Jeffries): Produce a cast album of the Taproot Theatre premiere production of a new musical adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion.

2011 Writers Program

Ann Teplick is a Seattle poet, playwright, and prose writer, with an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College. For eighteen years she’s written with youth in schools, juvenile detention centers, psychiatric hospitals and literary non-profits. Her work has appeared in Crab Creek Review, Drash, Chrysanthemum, Hunger Mountain, and others. Her plays have been showcased in Washington, Oregon, and Nova Scotia. In 2010 she received funding from Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs and 4Culture for a collection of poetry The Beauty of a Beet, Poems from the Bedside.

2011 Writers Program

Wendl is a writer and professor of architecture whose work (built and written) is influenced by the processes, products, history and discourse of the (silent) built and made things around us—particularly architecture. A native of Nebraska, she studied at Iowa State University and was 2005 Pearl Hogrefe Fellow in Creative Writing. She lives in Portland, Oregon and teaches at Portland State University Department of Architecture.

2011 Writers Program

Katharine Whitcomb is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, including Habitats, published by Poetry Northwest Editions in January 2024, and two chapbooks. She has been awarded many fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, MacDowell, FAWC, and others. She has had work published in many journals and anthologies, including Making Poems and Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos. She teaches at Central Washington University and divides her time between Washington State and Vermont.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

Habitats, Katharine Whitcomb’s robust new collection, is her best yet—a field guide to the pleasures and perils of adulthood, a reckoning with what is and what will never be. Moving through disappointment and joy, divorce and remarriage, the death of parents and a stare down with her own allotted time on Earth, Whitcomb seeks out or stumbles into rooms of reflection, landscapes that enlarge us, gardens and clearings where “lean and stubborn devotions” take root. These lush and rugged poems are alive to the “tug of memory / awake in everything,” those habitats of geography and mind that clarify and define what is most important—belonging to ourselves.

Sleepless Ode

o lost person
do you remember

reading a book in gray-green spring light
yr back flat on the cab window of a borrowed pick-up
eleven p.m. yr knees propping yr elbows
& how we always headed north
to Ontario to nearly vacant provincial
parks for aimless slow-houred weekends
& how a moose dripping w/ lake weed
dozing on his feet in the middle of the camp road
didn’t care about us (awestruck us)
I think of you now in spring
again & I just want to sit outside
in an old wild empty place
wrapped in yr coat—as poor
as we were poor then but there
w/ everything growing together awake
& away from death all the livelong night

2011 Writers Program

Maritess Zurbano has been a practicing magician for 19 years, has competed internationally and performed around the world. Her memoir-based play Rites of Enchantment has won entry into the New York International Fringe Festival and the NYC Ars Nova Theater Festival. Her short stories have been published in The Chicago Reader as well as the literary magazine Snowbound. She is a contributor to Magic Magazine and has been profiled by Newsday, Lifetime Television, The BBC News, Epoch Times, and The Village Voice providing commentary on magic and the occult. Her literary awards include a 2010 Washington State Artist Trust Grant and a 2011 Jack Straw Fellowship.

2011 Writers Program