The Jack Straw Writers Program

Amontaine Aurore is a storyteller, playwright, actor, director, producer, and performance artist. She is committed to presenting stories that illuminate multiple perspectives and deepen the understanding of human complexities. Amontaine’s plays have been produced in Seattle, New York, Maryland, and abroad. Her solo play, Free Desiree, was named one of the Best New Plays of the New York Fringe Festival by Indie Theater Now. Don’t Call it a Riot, her play about Seattle activism from the Seattle Black Panther Party to the WTO protests, was a finalist in the Bay Area Playwright’s Festival, and premiered in Seattle in 2018. Amontaine has received artist grants from Artist Trust, 4Culture, the Puffin Foundation, and the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture. She has had writers’ residencies at the Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat on Whidbey Island, and the Seattle Public Library. Amontaine is currently working on an autobiographical novel.

2024 Writers Program

E.J. Batiste is a professional writer, poet, artist and award-winning dramatist originally from Raeford, North Carolina. She has a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. E.J. ‘s work often reflects upon her life experiences as a Black woman from the South, a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, a social observer, and her knowledge of the psychological. She has worked in the literary community in several capacities, including as Art Director of Southern Review of Books, Co-Chair of the Queens University of Charlotte MFA in Creative Writing Professional Development Weekend, and Poetry Editor of Another Chicago Magazine. To date, she also has had one stage play produced and another forthcoming. Her writing and artwork have appeared in various literary publications in North America and Europe, such as I-70 Review, Storm Cellar, Indianapolis Review, Chapter House, and Southern Humanities Review.

2024 Writers Program

Catherine DeNardo studied killer whale behavior in the Norwegian Arctic and worked as a volunteer at the Center for Whale Research on San Juan Island, Washington. She is a former editor at Conservation magazine (now Anthropocene) and has worked as a freelance editor on several natural history books. Catherine’s writing on killer whales has been published in Outside Magazine’s Long Reads and Nautilus magazine. Her other work has been published in Outside magazine’s Travel Essays and Cordella Press, and she won Nowhere magazine’s spring 2021 travel writing award.

2024 Writers Program

Joshua E. Griffin (who goes by Josh) lives life learning love(d). Experiences through travel and letting go of self, have allowed him to walk a decolonization path of unlearning and healing. Quote: I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams – you are your ancestors’ collective reality. A biography cannot highlight nor summarize an existence. If you wish to know Josh’s story or who I am . . . speak to the people who know/knew him. His existence lives in all of the living creatures he has met. I am not a poet. I am not a Peace Corps volunteer. I am not my degree(s). I am not your negro. I am . . . me! The manifesting of creation. Known as poetry.

P.S. – The world is a better place because YOU are in it.

2024 Writers Program

Becca Rose Hall (she/her) writes novels, essays, and poems. She studied English at Stanford and holds a Master’s in Environmental Writing from the University of Montana. Her writing has been supported by Art Omi, Zvona i Nari, and Community of Writers, and she has attended Bread Loaf and Sewanee. She was also the Writers’ Lighthouse 2019 Emerging Fiction Fellow. Her work has appeared recently in Third Coast, Pacifica Literary Review, and Orion, where her essay made their Best of 2020. She is the founder and director of Frog Hollow School, a children’s writing program, and lives in her hometown of Seattle with her daughter and their dog. Her work circles around ideas of utopia and chosen family and is deeply steeped in the Pacific Northwest. She is currently seeking representation for a novel set in the music scene in Olympia in the 1990s.

2024 Writers Program

Elyse Hauser is an environmental writer from the Seattle area who studied creative nonfiction at the University of New Orleans. As an essayist, journalist, and speculative fiction author, she focuses on aquatic ecosystems, especially the deep sea and protecting the unknown. Elyse’s writing blends research and storytelling to explore human connections to underwater worlds. Her work has been supported by organizations including Bergen’s Center for Investigative Journalism, Syllble’s One Humanity Writing Collective, and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. She writes about deep sea mining at notesfromthedeep.substack.com.

2024 Writers Program

Stacy Nathaniel Jackson is a trans poet, playwright, and visual artist of African American and Filipina descent originally from Los Angeles, who began writing after a serendipitous corporate layoff. His artistic practice in multiple forms addresses gender, family history, and conflict emergence. His debut novel The Ephemera Collector is forthcoming from Liveright/W.W. Norton. His work has been published in Electric Literature, The Georgia Review, The Offing, and elsewhere, and has been supported by the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Cave Canem, Millay Arts, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, and the San Francisco Arts Commission.  He lives in Washington, DC after 30 years in the Bay Area, and is studying European Portuguese in preparation to make a grand escape to Madeira Island if DJT mounts a successful comeback to the White House.

2024 Writers Program

Allison Masangkay (she/they) is an entity—sick, disabled, trans, queer, femme, cultural worker, researcher, aswang, cyborg, and more—with ancestors from the archipelago referred to as the Philippines. They currently reside in Duwamish territory (Seattle, WA) and previously lived in Jamestown S’Klallam land (Sequim, WA) and Lenni-Lenape land (northern New Jersey). Her current work includes essays, speculative fiction, sound, and collage envisioning Filipinx/a/o and greater Black and non-Black Indigenous embodiment beyond anti-Blackness, colonialism, and white supremacy. This work highlights their experiences as an aswang (shape-shifting entity in Philippine folklore) and cyborg through the lenses of Philippine folklore, spirituality, and magic while engaging critical theories that unsettle colonial constructs of technology, race, gender, disability, sexuality, humanity, animality, and monstrosity. Their prose and other media have been published in manywor(l)ds, Disability Visibility Project, and others. Currently, Allison is a 2024 Jack Straw Writer and Seattle Public Library Eulalie and Carlo Scandiuzzi Writers’ Room Resident. They were a 2023 Emerge Fellow at the Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University.

2024 Writers Program

Gabriel Moseley is a writer from Seattle, Washington. He earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His short story, “A Man Stands Tall,” was awarded The Masters Review Anthology Prize in 2017, selected by Roxane Gay. He received the General Motors’ Future Fiction Scholarship to attend Aspen Summer Words in 2023. He has been selected for residencies at The Vermont Studio Center, the Centrum Artist Residency, and the Seattle Public Library’s Writers’ Room Residency. He has also been named as a finalist for LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction, the Made at Hugo House Writing Fellowship, and the Haleakalā National Park Artist in Residence Program. He has attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Disquiet International, among others. He works as a guest editor for The Masters Review and CRAFT Literary Magazine.

2024 Writers Program

Mary Pan is a writer and physician with a background in global health and narrative medicine. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, McSweeney’s, Intima, and elsewhere. She has been selected for workshops, retreats, and residencies with Tin House, Hedgebrook, Kenyon Review, and Centrum, and is a Harvard Media & Medicine alum. The recipient of a 2019 Artist Trust Grants for Artists’ Projects Literary Award, she was runner-up for AWP’s 2020 Kurt Brown Prize for Creative Nonfiction. She is currently working on a memoir in lyrical essays about caregiving, caretaking, and retrospective becoming.

2024 Writers Program

McKenna Princing (she/her) writes speculative fiction set in and inspired by the Pacific Northwest and Cascadia bioregion. She loves to stitch genres like fantasy, science fiction, and horror together and bring these hideous progeny to life in order to explore real-world themes of social justice, queerness, mental illness, human-nature relationships, and the breakdown of the “strong female character” archetype. She also loves retellings and reimaginings of classic works that highlight the ways society has (and hasn’t) changed. She has lived in western Washington her entire life and currently calls North Bend home, on land that is the ancestral and present-day territory of the Snoqualmie people. She is pursuing her MFA in fiction at Pacific University and is working on a novel. On weekdays, you can find her working her day job as a health and wellness writer for UW Medicine.

2024 Writers Program

Jarrett Ziemer is an MFA student in creative writing at Western Colorado University and an Assistant Poetry Editor for Terrain.org. Jarrett’s poem “A Fish-Tenkara” was awarded an honorable mention in Deep Wild Journal‘s 2023 graduate student writing contest, and his poem “A Bed as a Nest” was awarded an honorable mention in Dreamers Magazine’s 2023 “Dreamers Writing Contest.” Jarrett received an International Merit Award in the Atlanta Review 2023 International Poetry Competition, was the featured poet at the 33rd annual Headwaters Conference, and is beyond excited to be a 2024 Jack Straw Fellow. Jarrett’s work can be found in Belmont Story Review, Creative Nonfiction Magazine, and other publications. Jarrett can be found with his partner and two dogs somewhere camping in the wild places between the Pacific Northwest and Southern Colorado.

2024 Writers Program