2000 Jack Straw Writers Program

Suzanne Bottelli’s poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Scoundrel Time, The Collagist, and Prairie Schooner, among others. Her newest chapbook, American Grubble, is available from Ravenna Press’ Triples series. The Feltville Formation, her first chapbook, was with Finishing Line Press. Born and raised in New Jersey, Suzanne is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has received grants and awards from Artist Trust, The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Seattle Arts Commission, and Can Serrat, outside of Barcelona. She teaches English at Casa Latina in Seattle.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

In American Grubble, Suzanne Bottelli addresses remembered landscapes by way of archival research. Out of letters and memoirs from an early 20th century “utopian” community, photographs of post-industrial factory ruins, film clips of aging highways, and staggering examples of environmental devastation, her poems nonetheless confront and interrogate an elegiac impulse.

Letter to the Future
For Allison Hawthorne Deming

A carved-up birch tells us
lovers once embraced here –
the scarred bark the wound
their testament has made.

And young Chris the Eagle Scout
has moved some cannons into place –
the slab they stand on gifted
by the local concrete dealer.

But I am here to notice other markers:
the twin trunks of two blistered beeches
locked in a dance and dying together;
this iridescent oil sheen in a pocket of river mud.

How many browns and greens in the world?

The soft rain coming on makes them shine.
A barbed wire line this tree has grown around
speaks to the bargain we’ve made,
this stubborn ongoing with rust at the heart.

2000 Writers Program

Laynie Browne is a poet, prose writer, teacher and editor. She is author of fourteen collections of poems and four books of fiction. Recent publications include Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists (Wave Books, 2022) a book of poems, In Garments Worn by Lindens; a novel, Periodic Companions; and a book of short fiction, The Book of Moments. Her work has appeared in journals such as Conjunctions, A Public Space, New American Writing, The Brooklyn Rail, and in anthologies including The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press), The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, UK), and Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (W.W. Norton). Her poetry has been translated into French, Spanish, Chinese, and Catalan. She co-edited the anthology I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues Press, 2013) and edited the anthology A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on The Poet’s Novel (Nightboat, 2020). Honors and awards include a Pew Fellowship, the National Poetry Series Award for her collection The Scented Fox (Wave Books, 2007), and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award for her collection Drawing of a Swan Before Memory (University of Georgia, 2005). She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

2000 Writers Program

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of DMZ Colony, which won the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. Her other publications include Hardly War, The Morning News Is Exciting, and several chapbooks and pamphlets of poems and essays. She has received numerous fellowships and prizes: 2011 Whiting Award, 2016 Lannan Literary Fellowship, 2012 & 2019 Lucien Stryk Translation Prize, 2019 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship, 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize for her translation of Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon, 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, and 2021 MacArthur Fellowship. She was selected as one of the inaugural 2021 Royal Society of Literature International Writers. She was a 2021 Guest Picador Professor at Leipzig University, Germany.

She has translated several collections of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry, and has served as a translator for the International Women’s Network Against Militarism (IWNAM).

2000 Writers Program (with Deborah Woodard)

Deborah Woodard’s books include Plato’s Bad Horse (Bear Star, 2006), Borrowed Tales (Stockport Flats, 2012) and No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911 (Ravenna Press, 2018). She has translated Amelia Rosselli’s poetry in Hospital Series (New Directions, 2015), Obtuse Diary (Entre Rios Books, 2018) and The Dragonfly (Entre Rios Books, 2023).

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

The Dragonfly/La Libellula is Amelia Rosselli’s acknowledged first major work and contains all the elements of her mature vision: trilingual wordplay, musicality, and political engagement. With its vertiginous propulsion and rotational structure, this book-length poem hovers on the edge of the surreal where meaning continuously multiplies and then negates.

Find Ortensia: her mechanics is ejaculatory
solitude. Her solitude is ejaculatory
mechanics. Find the monstrous gestures of Ortensia:
her solitude is populated with specters, and
specters populate her with solitude. And her love
ruminates and can’t leave the house. And thus her
light vibrates between the walls, with light,
with specters, with love that never leaves the
house. With only the specter of love, with love’s
reflection, with disenchantment,
enchantment and frenzy. Seek Ortensia: seek
her vibrant humility that can’t find peace,
and that can’t find farewell for anyone, and that
always bids farewell and to no one, and tips to everyone
her little summer hat, with an uncommon show of
piety. Find Ortensia who in her solitude
populates the civilized world with savages. And the guitar’s
song no longer satisfies her. And the guitar’s
pardon no longer satisfies her! . . .

2000 Writers Program (with Don Mee Choi)

1998 Writers Program

Felicia R. Gonzalez is a poet and author who was born in Cuba and was profoundly influenced by growing up on an island and its relationship to language and writing. In both English and Spanish, her work is intended to be an exploration of cultural identity, family dynamics, what it means to be female within and between cultures, and queer identity. Her poetry celebrates the oral tradition of Cuba combined with percussive rhythms, African folk tales and bedtime stories. Her work has appeared in publications such as Metropolitan Living Magazine and Art Papers Magazine among others. In 2006 she was awarded an Individual Artist Grant from the Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs for her newly released chapbook entitled Recollection Graffiti. She was a 2000 Jack Straw Writer and 2014 Jack Straw Writers Program Curator.

2014 Writers Program (curator)

2000 Writers Program

Kip Robinson Greenthal has dedicated her career to the written word, storytelling, and literary endeavors. She holds a B.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied with Grace Paley. For eighteen years, she worked as a librarian in schools and public libraries. In 1993, she became the Education Director for Seattle Arts & Lectures, and founded and directed the Writers in the Schools program (WITS). Believing literacy empowers a person’s life, Kip collaborated with a vast number of authors—Tim O’Brien, Frank McCourt, and Marilynne Robinson among them— to work with teachers and students in the classroom. Under her guidance, WITS received the prestigious Golden Apple Award, which honors education, programs and schools in making a difference in Washington state education. She was selected for the 2000 Jack Straw Writers Program, and awarded a Hedgebrook residency. Her short story, “Tattoo Emporium,” was published in Secret Histories: Stories of Courage, Risk, and Revelation, edited by Brenda Peterson, Laura Foreman, and Meredith Bailey in 2013, and has appeared in Currents, an anthology published by the Lopez Writers Guild in 2004. In January 2007, Washington state Poet Laureate Elizabeth Austen selected her short story, “Stealing,” to air on KUOW’s On the Beat. Her first novel, Shoal Water, won the Landmark Prize for Fiction sponsored by Homebound Publications, and was published in October 2021. Homebound Publications nominated Shoal Water for the Pushcart Prize, and in May, 2022, Shoal Water received a silver medal from the Nautilus Book Awards.

2000 Writers Program

Cynthia Liu is a Chinese-American writer from upstate New York. She has a doctorate from University of California, Berkeley, and is in process of writing a novel called Song of the Grain-Threshing Bird.

2000 Writers Program

Susan Martinez is a native of Seattle, and is currently a student in the University of Washington Creative Writing Program. Susan is a poet, and also the co-owner of a Pike Place Market jewelry business.

2000 Writers Program

Kevin Miller taught in the public schools of Washington State for thirty-nine years. He taught in Blaine, Gig Harbor, and Olympia, Washington. In 1990-1991 Miller was a Fulbright Exchange teacher at Grenå Handelsskole, Grenå, Denmark. After retirement, he was a volunteer teacher for a year at St. Patrick’s School in Tacoma, Washington. Miller lives in Tacoma, Washington.

His first collection of poems, Light That Whispers Morning, from Blue Begonia Press received the Bumbershoot/ Weyerhaeuser Publication Award in 1994. Blue Begonia Press published his second collection, Everywhere Was Far, in 1998. Pleasure Boat Studio published Home & Away: The Old Town Poems in 2009. Tacoma Arts Commission awarded him support grants for the publication of Everywhere Was Far and Home & Away: The Old Town Poems. Miller’s fourth collection Vanish won the Wandering Aengus Press Publication Award in 2019. He was a member of the Jack Straw Writers program in 2000. Miller’s poems appeared in Heart of the Order, Persea’s Baseball Anthology in 2014, and Spitball 75, a collection of the best poems in the first seventy-five issues of Spitball.

(Photo and bio from MoonPath Press.)

2000 Writers Program

Ace Moore was born in Thornburg, Iowa (population 100). He is an active volunteer with various programs at Richard Hugo House, and he is the writer of strange fables and prose poems which have appeared in a variety of literary journals.

2000 Writers Program

Stephen Morrissey is currently undertaking surveys of endangered slugs, snails and mushrooms in the forests of the Northwest. He is a fiction writer.

2000 Writers Program

Suzanne Villegas was born in Califas, Texas. She writes in all genres and in describing her work says: “I like to say I get technical in English and emotional in Spanish.”

2000 Writers Program

Through poetry, artist books, installations, and mixed media, Carletta Carrington Wilson discovers answers to questions she did not know to ask. This artist finds each artistic endeavor to be an act of excavation and a revelation. Her work is described as “decorative with a message.”  Her poems continue to appear in local and national publications. Carletta’s mixed-media collages have been described as “decorative with a message.” Textiles, found objects, beads and paper revolve around a central iconic image. These elements serve the purpose of enhancing, highlighting, inferring and interrogating the image and the ideas it presents and portrays.

Her work can be found in the Book Art Collections of the Allen Library (University of Washington), Collins Memorial Library (University of Puget Sound) and in the Central District Forum for Arts and Ideas. She has exhibited at ArtXchange Gallery, Gallery 110, the Northwest African American Museum, Coalition Art Gallery, Gallery Rene, Columbia City Art Gallery, Onyx Fine Arts Exhibition, University of Puget Sound, Seward Park Audubon Center, Festival Sundiata, Harem, Aljoya and University House Wallingford.  In 2011, she was artist in residence at the James W. Washington Foundation. The exhibit book of the bound debuted at the Northwest African American Museum 2012-2013. letter to a laundress was featured at the Onyx Fine Arts Annual Exhibit of 2017.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

Poem of Stone & Bone:  The Iconography of James W. Washington Jr. in Fourteen Stanzas and Thirty-One Days documents four installations created on the grounds and studio of the artist in 2011. Using objects, land, and literature, Wilson created a nuanced perspective of the life and work of the noted sculptor.

Excerpt from “Poem of Stone & Bone”

Along civilization’s trail
Something went wrong
What to say
If they come in the morning
Kingsblood royal
Monkey on a string
Substance and shadow
The uncalled
Yesterday, today and forever
Bearing witness to the truth
The way of the wizard
Mystics and Zen masters
Journey into light
Souls on fire
Born to rebel

Note: This poem is composed of titles from books in the library of James W. Washington Jr.

Artist Support Program 2010: Record sunlight clenched like tiny roots and veins that migrate, a CD companion to the book Harvest of the Hoe.

2000 Writers Program