2006 Jack Straw Writers Program

John Burgess grew up in upstate New York, worked on a survey crew in Montana, taught English in Japan, and since 1985 has lived in Seattle. A 2006 Jack Straw writer, he has six books of poetry from Ravenna Press. He’s a co-instigator with the Band of Poets.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

Punk Poems Complete collects together for the first time all 100 punk poems John Burgess wrote between 1999 and 2022. The new book has a new section, For the Record, which gathers his uncollected poems from 1999-2005, including “Homeland Security” and “Advice for the Next Generation of Punks.”

Punk Poem 92

It was your guitar
That first bit me
Before eating
My ears
Before I felt
Your tongue
Lick my mind
That chewed
10 times before
I was swallowed

2006 Writers Program

Marty Campbell started in Oakland, grew in the midwest, primarily Chicago area, Evanston. Out of college stopped growing in Indianapolis for his two-year stint as Conscientious Objector doing Alternative Service during the Vietnam War. Working in the research wing of IU Med Center putting dogs to sleep instead of people, a hard choice. He eventually moved to Seattle with an increasing contingent of households of friends who came to refer to themselves as the Indianapolis ghetto in Seattle. Marty there from ’73 through ”6. Writing all the way along, quite drivenly, but in four years in Seattle he never truly published or performed, as he had in Indianapolis, except to himself and very closest friends. That was his last stand in the city. Marty came fully into his own owning as a poet in his next home, St. Croix, USVI, 24 years, still the greater part of his adult life. Here he published, edited, performed, and facilitated readings. He also lived in the bush, made seed chains, taught math, swam distances in the oceans, and hiked. Every place he’s ever lived, he’s been closest to trees.

2006 Writers Program

Susan Casey is a poet and college instructor in Seattle. Her poems have appeared in local, regional, and national journals, including Many Mountains Moving, Crab Creek Review, StringTown and Bayou, as well as on Seattle’s buses. She has presented her poetry at the 2002 Washington Poets Association Conference and the 2004 Washington Technical and Community College Humanities Association Conference. She has been a featured reader in the Writers in the Gallery Reading Series at the University of West Florida and has given local readings at Ravenna Third Place Books, the Frye Art Museum, and Epilogue Books. Before moving to Seattle in 1999, she spent two years teaching English to junior high school students in Chiba City, Japan, and a year working inside the Space Mountain and Peter Pan rides at Disneyland Paris.

Susan’s poems take on a range of subjects, including the smokehouse in the Poconos where her Slovak grandfather made kolbasi sausages for sixty years, the breezy school hallways in Japan where she and her students chatted during cleaning time, and the intimate workings of a heart engaging with loved ones and the world. A few lines from Stanley Kunitz’s poem “Touch Me” sum up the feeling she hopes to capture in her own work:

What makes the machine go?/Desire, desire, desire.

2006 Writers Program

Jennifer Culkin, RN BSN CCRN, is an essayist and fiction writer. Born in Boston, MA, she graduated from Russell Sage College, Troy, NY, in 1979 and embarked on a bicoastal career in neonatal, pediatric and adult cardiac critical care, high-risk obstetrics and emergency flight nursing. Though long of tooth (and wattle) to be a student again, she is completing the MFA in Creative Writing at Pacific Lutheran University and is currently at work on a collection of personal essays infused by her experiences in critical care. When she is not in the ICU, she is at her desk in her Bainbridge Island, WA home, a testosterone-rich environment she shares with husband Howard and young adult sons, Kieran and Gabriel.

An emerging writer, she received both an honorable mention for fiction and third place for nonfiction in The Atlantic Student Writing Contest 2005, and has been in residence at Soapstone and Vermont Studio Center. In addition to The 2006 Jack Straw Writers Anthology, her essays have appeared in Stories with Grace, PLU Scene and The Georgia Review.

2006 Writers Program

Angela Jane Fountas writes, teaches, and runs WriteHabit.org, a website in support of new and emerging writers. She is also a volunteer at 826 Seattle. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in elimae, The Bitter Oleander, Diagram, Monkeybicycle, Pindeldyboz, Redivider, and Sentence, among others. Her story Lydia was nominated for a 2004 Pushcart Prize. Angela holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama. She is working on a short story collection and is the editor of the anthology Waking Up American (Seal Press, 2005).

2006 Writers Program

Allison Green has published a novel, Half-Moon Scar, and stories in Raven Chronicles, Willow Springs (1996 fiction contest winner), Evergreen Chronicles, and The Teacher’s Voice. Awards include a Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant and residencies at Hedgebrook and Soapstone. She teaches writing, literature, and women’s studies at Highline Community College, where she chairs the Arts and Humanities Division.

2006 Writers Program

Jourdan Imani Keith, a student of Sonia Sanchez, is a poet, naturalist, educator, and storyteller. Her work blends the textures of political, personal and natural landscapes to offer voices from the margins of American lives. She is the 2007 Poet Populist of Seattle. She received a grant from the City of Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs in 2004 for the writing and performance of her choreopoem The Uterine Files: Episode I, Voices Spitting Out Rainbows. She is a 2005 Seattle Arts and Lectures Writer-in-Residence. She has received a Hedgebrook residency and was a teaching artist for Book-It Repertory Theater, Powerful Schools, and the Nature Consortium. Her publication credits include magazines, newspapers, radio, television and video, including the anthology, Ma-Ka, Diasporic Juks.

She is the founder and director of Urban Wilderness Project, which provides storytelling, restoration, adventure and wilderness programming for youth and adult participants.

2017 Writers Program (Curator)

2006 Writers Program

Anne Liu Kellor was born in Seattle and now lives in Olympia, WA. Her essays have appeared in Waking Up American: Coming of Age Biculturally (Seal Press) and Thoughts Out of School (Peter Lang Publishing). After graduating from The Evergreen State College in 1999, Anne lived and traveled in China, Tibet, and Southeast Asia for three years. She is currently working on a collection of essays, Searching for the Heart Radical, which traces her inner and outer migrations between America and China, the birthplace of her mother.

2006 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

Frances McCue, an award-winning poet, inspiring speaker and self-described literary activist has become a local arts personality in the Northwest and national leader in the promotion of literature and creative writing since she co-founded Richard Hugo House in 1997. Under her leadership, Hugo House has become the literary heart of Seattle, bringing over 15,000 people each year into its theater performances, readings, classes, gallery shows, libraries and cafe. She left Hugo House in 2006, after serving ten years as director.

Frances McCue’s first book, The Stenographer’s Breakfast, was published by Beacon Press in 1992. Her poems have appeared in anthologies, literary journals and several larger magazines like MS Magazine, which published the long title poem from The Stenographer’s Breakfast. McCue has written reviews on books and visual arts for the New York Times Book Review, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, The Stranger, The Seattle Times, and others. She has also written essays and scholarly articles for Nest Magazine, Teachers College Record, and Seattle Social Justice. She has received grants and residencies from Centrum, Artist Trust, 4Culture and Hedgebrook.

For her work in bringing the arts into community life, Frances McCue was awarded an Echoing Green Fellowship from 1998-2002. The funding helped to start Richard Hugo House and to establish it as a crucial social justice enterprise. McCue is currently an adjunct professor of Education at Seattle University and a visiting lecturer who teaches in the Honors program at the University of Washington. Her doctorate is from Columbia University where she was a Klingenstein Fellow and her MFA is from the University of Washington.

2006 Writers Program

Marika Pineda was born in the South but was raised in Oregon, with stints in San Diego, Hawaii, and rural Maryland. After traveling to Tennessee (with banjo) to get reacquainted with her father at the age of 22, she returned to Portland and began studies at community college, going on to earn a B.A. in English at University of Oregon, where she graduated magna cum laude.

In 1989 she entered the MFA program in creative writing at University of Washington, focusing on the short story form with Lois Hudson as a mentor. While in graduate school she worked at a consulting firm and accidentally became a technical editor.

As an amateur naturalist she has hiked hundreds of miles in the Cascades. As an amateur historian she has cranked through miles of microfilm in search of her family roots. Her work has been published in Ambergris, Bellowing Ark, Bloomsbury Review, The Open Bone, The Drifter, KotaPress Anthology 2000, David’s Place-An AIDS Experience Journal, and Chrysanthemum. A recently completed historical essay is under review by the Journal of Mississippi History. She helps raise her stepdaughter and a vociferous cairn terrier in a household named The Home for Wayward Muses.

2006 Writers Program

Joan Swift is the author of four full-length books of poetry: This Element (Alan Swallow, 1965); Parts of Speech (Confluence Press 1978); The Dark Path of Our Names (Dragon Gate, 1985); and The Tiger Iris (BOA Editions Ltd. 1999.) The latter two were both winners of Washington State Governor’s Awards. In addition, in 1997 Chicory Blue Press brought out her chapbook, Intricate Moves: Poems About Rape. She is the recipient of two Washington State Governor’s Awards, one in 1986 for The Dark Path of Our Names and the other for The Tiger Iris in 2000. She has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships (1982, 1990, 1995) as well as a Washington State Artists grant, an award from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and a Pushcart Prize. Her poems also have received the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Josephine Miles Memorial Award from Blue Unicorn. Her work has appeared in more than 50 periodicals and anthologies.

She holds a B.A. in English from Duke University and an M.A. in English-Creative Writing from the University of Washington where she studied in Theodore Roethke’s last class. She lives with her husband and no cats (he’s allergic to them) in Edmonds, Washington. They have two grown daughters and two grandchildren.

2006 Writers Program