2010 Jack Straw Writers Program

Roberto Ascalon is a poet, writer, arts educator, and spoken-word performance artist. Roberto uses his love for the craft of poetry to transform the world that surrounds him. He connects with audiences via universal narratives that encompass topics like racism, first kisses, love, family, and Spam. He has taught at Nova High School, participated in the Seattle Arts and Lectures Writers in the Schools program, and worked as a teaching artist and mentor for Arts Corps, Youth Speaks Seattle, and the Service Board.

2010 Writers Program

Barr is a photographer and writer living in West Seattle, Washington. A contributor to The New York Times, Tin House, Oxford American, Seattle Weekly, and others, he is currently at work on a photo series documenting Seattle’s diverse, working class neighborhoods White Center and South Park.

2010 Writers Program

Katherine Grace Bond has written or contributed to more than 20 books, including the bestselling Legend of the Valentine (Zonderkidz) and Peculiar Pilgrims: Stories from Left Hand of God, (ed. Linda Wendling, Hourglass Books) Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Gayle Brandeis’s Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperSanFrancisco), Arabesques, Beyond Magazine, and Margin: An Online Journal of Magical Realism. Her chapbook, Considering Flight (Brassweight Press), was the catalyst for her current project, an urban fantasy novel in verse in which a girl travels through time by means of Impressionist paintings. Katherine is the creator of Teen Write, an acting/writing camp modeled on the Hero’s Journey.

2010 Writers Program

Bill Carty lives in Seattle and is the author of We Sailed on the Lake (Bunny Presse/Fonograf Editions, 2023) and Huge Cloudy (Octopus Books, 2019), which was longlisted for The Believer Book Award. He holds degrees from Dartmouth College (BA) and University of North-Carolina-Wilmington (MFA), and he has received poetry fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Artist Trust, the Richard Hugo House, the Sorting Room, and Jack Straw. He was awarded the 2017 Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, and his poems have appeared in the Boston Review, Ploughshares, Pinwheel, Iowa Review, Conduit, Warscapes, and other journals.

He is a Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest and teaches at Edmonds College and the Hugo House. He teaches at Hugo House, the UW Robinson Center for Young Scholars, and Edmonds Community College.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

We Sailed on the Lake, Bill Carty’s second collection of poetry, consists of lyrics of spiraling awareness. As a signal lamp, unused, mirrors the sky, these poems reflect approaching storms, near-misses, and the violence inherent in nature, country, and economy.

Excerpt from “Outer Lands”

I’ll tell you the story. I was walking
the outer edge of the outer lands

where sporadic signs staked in dunes
warned to keep distant from the mammals;

in fact, there were critical acts in place
to enforce nonmolestation,

but between me and the sea a seal
appeared to be having a time of it,

rocked and moaned in a deepening birth,
as if trying to summon momentum

to roll down the beach toward water.
In short, it seemed stuck and — it’s never far off

in the imagination — dying. I thought
I should bring sea to the seal. I filled

a detergent bottle at the surf and called
the seal “buddy.” “You OK, buddy?”

as the tide went this way, then that,
with no sense of intention. An hour before,

I had encountered a friend on this beach,
both of us having walked through our pasts

to that moment. Now he was gone
and I was supposed to be in the mountains

but the mountains were on fire.

2010 Writers Program

Martha Clarkson manages corporate workplace design during the day and is a fiction and poetry writer. Her work can be found in Seattle Review, monkeybicycle, Nimrod, Portland Review, Opium, elimae, and others. She has story mentions as ‘Notable Readings’ in 2007 and 2009 Best Non-Required Reading.

2010 Writers Program

Amber Flame is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, activist and educator, whose work has garnered residencies with Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, and more. In her writing, Flame explores spirituality and sexuality, cross-woven with themes of grief and loss, motherhood and magic, and the interstitial joy in it all. As the singer-songwriter front of her band, Last of the RedHot Mamas, her original music is heavily influenced by both blues and choral music, often morphing from the comfortable into something new through the use of loops and electronically produced instrumentation and effects. A former church kid from the Southwest, Flame’s work is published in diverse arenas, including Def Jam Poetry, Nailed Magazine, Winter Tangerine, and Split This Rock, with her first full-length poetry collection, Ordinary Cruelty, published in 2017 through Write Bloody Press. Flame’s second book of poetry, apocrifa, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.

Watch: Last of the RedHot Mamas live at Jack Straw

Artist Support Program 2022 (with Last of the RedHot Mamas): Magick Black Woman Blues, an album of eight original blues songs documenting different aspects of the everyday life of contemporary Black queer women.

Atrium Gallery 2018-19: ::intrigue8::

Artist Support Program 2015: Produce an album of original songs made from the poems of various writers

2010 Writers Program

Artist Support Program 2008: Record Last of the RedHot Mamas, which explores African American mixed race and bi-cultural experiences with spoken word and new arrangements of blues and jazz standards.

Esther Altshul Helfgott is a non-fiction writer and poet with a Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington. She curates the It’s About Time Writers Reading Series at the Seattle Public Library and facilitates the women’s writing group Poeming the Silence. Her work appears in numerous journals, including Maggid: A Journal of Jewish Literature; American Imago: Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences; HistoryLink; and the Journal of Poetry Therapy. She writes a blog on Alzheimer’s for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

2010 Writers Program

Marjorie Manwaring lives in Seattle, where she is a freelance writer and an editor for the online poetry and art journal the DMQ Review. Her work has been published in Crab Orchard Review, Floating Bridge Review, Sentence, 5 AM, Crab Creek Review, and other journals, and her chapbook Magic Word was published in 2007. Marjorie is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and she has been awarded writing residencies through the Whiteley Center at Friday Harbor on San Juan Island and Artsmith on Orcas Island.

2010 Writers Program

Denise Calvetti Michaels was awarded the Crosscurrents Prize for Poetry by the Washington Community College Humanities Association for her prose poem Notes on New Orleans. Her work is in anthologies such as In Praise of Farmland (Whit Press), Mute Note Earthward (WPA), Between Sleeps (En Theos Press), and Beyond Forgetting (Kent State University Press). Polenta, a memoir, is included in The Milk of Almonds, Italian American Woman on Food and Culture (Feminist Press, 2002).

Denise’s 2024 poems are found in Ovunque Siamo, Paterson Literary Review, and Clamor. North Creek, published by Cave Moon, includes published poetry alongside poems by Joan McBride and Sue Selmer. Denise teaches for Cascadia College and recently completed the MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics from University of Washington, Bothell.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

“Collaboration is at the heart of North Creek. These poems speak to the conversation amongst three women poets witnessing their lives with deep loving attention and memory to landscape, history and family lineage. What a gift, as Denise Calvetti Michaels writes, ‘to closely observe ourselves’ and to find connection within the pages of the literary journals Wetland Review, Yours Truly, and Clamor, and the local literary ecosystem.”
—Ching-In Chen

Bare Roots
–February 24th, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine

Surrogate mothers give birth to sets of fraternal twins on bomb shelter
floors.

       House sparrows forage for bread crumbs between broken window
shards.

A makeshift table set for four with crocheted cloth is a verb.

       I come here to grieve but I remember tactile things, a scapular when
someone died.

I dig each hole with my hands to create a space to plant bare root trees.

       Grandson Luke scans for a spot to help plant perennials.

When he decides where the sorrel will go I listen to his reasoning.

       Your gentleness helps grow the garden, I say.

I’ll find you a four-leaf, he promises.

       Recurring nightmares of baby buggies abandoned at train stations in
Kiev.

Loss has no roadmap; each bare root an intention I discover planting
ninebark and

       serviceberry.  I situate these steep ledges to sow the edge of darkness.

2010 Writers Program

Tara Roth is a musician and writer who is originally from the Chicago area and now lives in Seattle. She has played, recorded, and performed in various projects with local musicians, including the duo The Apostrophes, a current project with her husband. She has a Master’s degree in English from Western Illinois University and is a lecturer in the English department at Seattle University, teaching seminars in writing.

2010 Writers Program

Louise Spiegler writes fiction for young adults, though she knows the future may bring change (travel brochures? blues epics? get-well cards?). Her first novel, The Amethyst Road, was published by Clarion in 2005 and was a finalist for the Andre Norton Award (Hugo-Nebula Awards Program). Her next novel, The Jewel and the Key, is also set to be published by Clarion. The Jack Straw program is providing support and encouragement for her new novel, The Lares, set in Ancient Rome. She teaches History and English at Cascadia Community College, and lives in Seattle with her husband and two sons.

2010 Writers Program

Michael Dylan Welch’s poems have been published in hundreds of publications, including two Norton anthologies, and translated into fourteen languages. Michael is currently the vice president of Haiku Society of America. He co-founded the Haiku North America conference in 1991, and the American Haiku Archives in 1996. Michael’s small press, Press Here, publishes haiku and tanka books, and he edits Tundra: The Journal of the Short Poem. Michael uses his MA in English as a technical writer and editor, and he’s edited 200+ trade books. He curates Redmond’s SoulFood Poetry Night near where he lives with his wife and two children in Sammamish.

2010 Writers Program