1999 Jack Straw Writers Program

Kelli Russell Agodon (she/her) is a bi/queer poet and editor whose newest poetry book is Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press) was named a Finalist in the Washington State Book Awards and shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize in Poetry.

She is also the author of Demystifying the Manuscript: Essays & Interviews on Creating a Book of Poems. She is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press where she works as an editor and book cover designer. She teaches at Pacific Lutheran University’s low-res MFA program, the Rainier Writing Workshop. Kelli is currently part of a project between local land trusts and artists to help raise awareness for the preservation of land, ecosystems, and biodiversity called Writing the Land.

1999 Writers Program

Betsy Aoki is a poet, short story writer, and game producer. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, Asimov’s Magazine of Science Fiction, 580 Split, The Margins (Asian American Writers’ Workshop), and anthologized in Climbing Lightly Through Forests (a Ursula K. Le Guin tribute poetry anthology). In 2021 she won the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York, selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown. Her debut poetry collection, Breakpoint, is a 2019 National Poetry Series Finalist, and was published in 2022 after winning the Patricia Bibby First Book Award.

1999 Writers Program

Kent Chadwick is a West Coast poet and writer who lives on Bainbridge Island. His poetry has been published in Left Bank, Sojourners, Fishtrap Anthology, 1995, and the anthology Deep Down Things: Poems of the Inland Pacific Northwest. In July 1993 he exhibited the fiction painting installation “I Am A Man” with his brother Gregg Chadwick, a San Francisco painter, at Seattle’s Room 608. He served as the editor of the Northwest Ethnic News in 1990-91. He received his B.A. in Philosophy and International Relations from the University of California at Davis in 1980.

1999 Writers Program

Pamela Moore Dionne has published award-winning poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction in a number of publications, including Shenandoah, Pontoon, Snow Monkey, Vox Populi, Avatar Review, Author Magazine, and others. She founded the online art & literature journal Literary Salt, and served as its managing director.

In 1998, Pam was awarded a Centrum residency and an Artist Trust Gap Grant for her poetry. In 2001 she received the Jack Straw Artist’s Support Grant to record a CD of her Sabina Spielrein Ghazal series with composer Jim Knodle and pianist Lynette Westendorf. Her visual art has been published in Switched on Gutenberg and Raven Chronicles and presented in one-woman shows in the Seattle area.

She was the original founder of Discovery Bay Games, which in its heyday distributed product in 40 countries and 10 different languages.

She graduated from Goddard College on July 15, 2018 with an MFA in Creative Writing.

Watch: Jim Knodle, Pamela Moore Dionne, and Lynette Westendorf live at Jack Straw

Artist Support Program 2001: Recorded Keeping the Devil Out: Poems and Music for Sabina Spielrein, in collaboration with jazz musician Jim Knodle

1999 Writers Program

Laura Gamache reads, writes and teaches poetry. She has published work in journals, anthologies, on buses, on radio, in chapbooks, and on-line. She teaches through Seattle Arts & Lectures Writers in the Schools and other programs. She received an MFA from the University of Washington in 1993, and hasn’t written fiction since.

2002 Writers Program

1999 Writers Program

David Halpern holds a BA in writing from the University of Washington and a Masters from Brown University. He competed on the US Olympic kayaking team in 1984, and in twelve national championships for flatwater kayaking. He makes his living as a cartoonist, and has won several national awards for his cartooning. Halpern also has worked as a senior writer for a Washington D.C. political consulting firm, as press director for the US film center at the Cannes Film Festival, and as a humorous commentator for KPLU-FM. His work has been published in The Seattle Review, Spindrift, Ergo!, The Weekly, and Fishtrap Anthology, among others. He has received screenplay and short fiction awards from the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference.

1999 Writers Program

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

Bharti Kirchner has published four critically acclaimed novels: Shiva Dancing, Darjeeling, Sharmila’s Book, and her latest, Pastries: A Novel of Desserts and Discoveries. Her first novel, Shiva Dancing, was chosen by Seattle Weekly to be among the top 18 books by Seattle authors in the last 25 years. Kirchner’s novels have been translated into German, Dutch, Spanish, Thai and other foreign languages. She has won two Seattle Arts Commission literature grants and an Artist Trust GAP grant. An award-winning cook, Kirchner is also the author of four popular cookbooks, including The Bold Vegetarian. Her first, The Healthy Cuisine of India, was named by Food Arts magazine as one of the best cookbooks of 1992. Her second, Indian Inspired, was selected as one of the top ten cookbooks of 1993 by USA Today. Kirchner has also written numerous articles and essays for magazines and anthologies and book reviews for major newspapers. Prior to becoming a writer, Kirchner worked as a systems engineer for IBM and as a systems manager for Bank of America, San Francisco. She has also worked in Europe and other parts of the world as a computer systems consultant. She holds advanced degrees in Mathematics.

2005 Writers Program

1999 Writers Program

Larry Laurence was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to a Navy family and grew up believing normal life meant pulling up roots and moving every two years. He began writing in his twenties, earning an M.A., English, studying poetry under Philip Levine and Peter Everwine. He worked 12 years as a construction laborer and warehouse worker before earning a second M.A., this time in Rehabilitation Counseling, which he uses to work with disabled adults.

Larry Laurence’s books are a full-length volume of poems, Life Of The Bones To Come, Black Heron Press, Seattle, WA, chosen as a National Poetry Month selection by NACS, the National Association Of College Stores;  a chapbook, Scenes Beginning With The Footbridge At The Lake, Brooding Heron Press, Waldron Island, WA;  and an e-chapbook, Successions Of Words Are So, E-Ratio Editions, NY, NY.   Awards include grants from The Seattle Arts Commission (WA) and Artist Trust (WA), plus a Jack Straw Fellowship (WA) and residencies at Community Of Writers (CA) and Cummington Center For The Arts (MA).  Larry Laurence earned an M.A, English, California State University, Fresno, studying poetry under Philip Levine.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

“The poem ‘Despair/Experiments’ captures the theme of this collection. In fact, the combined meaning of those two terms portrays the alienation within the heart of our cities while playing within the waves and the roll of language where we are soaked by every instance of human contact. He brings in endearing memories stirred up by homely simple experience and imbues it all with what he refers to as the Ironic/ Post-Ironic wisdom of the poet.”
—Michael Daley

Inclusive of Hello and Goodbye
for J.W.

Three angels manifest themselves at a bar. They make it known to the mind of the bartender, This day is our birthday.

No. Three baleen whales, a gray, a blue, & a humpback,
swim into a bar. They sing in high-pitched vocalizations & clicks, This day is our birthday.

No. Three rocks, an igneous, a metamorphic, & a sedimentary, roll into a bar. In Morse code they knock against themselves to the bartender, Today is our birthday.

No. Three weeds, a sheep sorrel, a redstem filaree, & a Canada goldenrod, seed themselves at a bar. Utilizing the slight air currents available they rustle to the bartender, Today’s. . .

No. Three trees, a Jenny sycamore, a paw paw, & a blossoming pear. . . An anaconda, a coachwhip, & a Texas blind snake. . . OK, a swift, a chicken hawk, & a blue jay. . .

OK, OK. Three subnuclear particles appear & do not appear simultaneously in various unknowable interstices of realities themselves barely conceivable at the bar & outside the bar. They harmonize

in vibrations at once audible & inaudible to the bartender

in such a way to at last, at long last, prove senseless the dichotomy of
the observer & the observed, Today’s our birthday!

No matter, says the bartender. We, all of us, gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

The planets in their musical spheres,
In their deep dance of woe and words.

2006 Writers Program

1999 Writers Program

Rebecca Meredith is a poet, writer, and psychotherapist, as well as a cofounder of the Redmond Association of SPokenword (RASP), who served as its coordinator and president for years. Her work has been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, and performed in such venues as the Burning Word Poetry Festival, the Seattle Moon Viewing Festival, Redmond’s Arts in the Park, and on KUOW’s The Beat. Her novel, The Last of the Pascagoula, was published in 2011. She is a fellow of the Jack Straw Writers Program, an alumna of Hedgebrook Women Writers’ Colony, and served as the first Poet Laureate of the City of Redmond.

1999 Writers Program

Lisa Michaels is the author of Split: A Counterculture Childhood, selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Her work has appeared in Glamour, Salon, and the New York Times Magazine. She has been a contributing editor at The Threepenny Review and an associate faculty member at the low-residency MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles.

1999 Writers Program

From the 1999 Jack Straw Writers Anthology: “I grew up in Seattle, graduated from the University of Washington, then traveled around the country for the next 12 years. During that time I worked as a machinist, foundry worker, and garment worker. Throughout those years I was active in the trade union movement, on issues ranging from shop floor struggles over union contracts to support for  Central American refugees. The last ten years of my life have been shaped by a personal tragedy. Out of that event and my previous life experience, I’ve developed an abiding interest in the relationship between personal crisis and societal change. I’m currently exploring the subject through two separate projects: I am completing a Masters degree in Adult Education, and have begun an oral history project to collect the stories of a group of individuals whose lives reflect the intersection of personal and social change.”

1999 Writers Program

Diane Westergaard’s poems have appeared in The Written Arts, Bellingham Review, Three Rivers Poetry Review, Cape Rock, Fine Madness, Kansas Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Talus and Scree, Point No Point, and Crab Creek Review. With guitarist Garylee Johnson, she co-produced and co-wrote Ghost in the Garden, a chapbook and audiotape of poetry, music and song.

1999 Writers Program