2014 Jack Straw Writers Program

Albina is a Canadian born, Palestinian-American writer and union organizer. Her writing is deeply influenced by her parents’ respective emigrations to Canada as a result of conflict and war. She is a 2011 alumnus of Hedgebrook and is currently attending The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University. Her poetry has been published in Grey Sparrow Journal and Prairie Fire Magazine. She lives in Vancouver, BC with her partner and two young children.

2014 Writers Program

Claudia Castro Luna is an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate fellow (2019), WA State Poet Laureate (2018 – 2021) and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet (2015-2018). She is the author of Cipota Under the Moon, One River, A Thousand Voices, Killing Marias, and the chapbook This City . Her most recent non-fiction is in There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis. Born in El Salvador, Castro Luna arrived in the United States in 1981. Living in English and Spanish, she writes and teaches in Seattle on unceded Duwamish lands.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

“The pulsing heart of an entire people beats inside this beautiful and fierce poetry collection. In Cipota Under the Moon, Claudia Castro Luna finds moments of wonder and intimacy inside the great epic of war, revolution, exile, and hope that is Salvadoran history. This book is an essential addition to the canon of Central American literature in the U.S.”
–Héctor Toba

Visions of Gladness

I wish my grandmother’s ghost
would gladden every day my slumber

her stardust halo, her luminous face—
by now I know fear both cages and unbinds.

Sometimes I hear her laughter
spiraling toward me like a kindly twister.

Fall in, she says, become not the rosary,
one bead in front of the other—

girl, woman, wife, mother, widow—
become pomegranate seeds instead

each jewel bursting forth from her own papery case
whirling in her own blood, by her own light charged.

She says this, and this is why on my altar, as she taught me,
there is rue, incense, light, and water in a cup.

2014 Writers Program

Margot Kahn is the author of the biography Horses That Buck (University of Oklahoma Press). The book won the High Plains Book Award and was named by New West a best book of 2008. She is also co-editor, along with Kelly McMasters, of the anthology This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press/Hachette).

Margot’s essays and reviews have appeared in The Rumpus, Tablet, River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, High Desert Journal, The Los Angeles Review, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood and Publishers Weekly, among other places, and have been anthologized in You: An Anthology of Essays Devoted to the Second Person and Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze.

Margot holds an MFA from Columbia University and has received grants and residencies from the Ohioana Library Association, the Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture, 4Culture, Bread Loaf and the Jack Straw Writers Program. A former program manager for Richard Hugo House and Seattle Arts & Lectures, she lives in Seattle with her husband and son.

2014 Writers Program

Loreen Lilyn Lee grew up in three cultures: Chinese, American, and Hawaiian. Her memoir The Lava Never Sleeps: A Honolulu Memoir tells the stories “I’m not supposed to tell.” She weaves together family secrets; childhood trauma; cultural confusion; and Hawaiian history, geology, and mythology in a journey to discover her authentic self.

A Seattle resident since 1986, she graduated from the University of Washington in 1994 as a working adult and began writing her personal stories. Hedgebrook awarded her a fellowship, and Artist Trust accepted her into their EDGE Professional Development Program for Writers.

2014 Writers Program

Susan V. Meyers has lived and taught in Chile, Costa Rica, and Mexico. She earned an MFA from the University of Minnesota and a PhD from the University of Arizona, and she currently teaches creative writing at Seattle University. Her work has recently appeared in CALYX, Per Contra, Dogwood, Cold Mountain Review, and The Minnesota Review. She has been the recipient of a Squaw Valley Community of Writers scholarship, a Monique Wittig scholarship, a 4Culture grant, and a Fulbright fellowship. Her novel, Failing the Trapeze, won the 2013 Nilsen Award for a First Novel.

2014 Writers Program

John D. Mullen is a short story author and monologist. He has performed at On the Boards, Bumbershoot, New City Theater, Annex Theater and Park West – Chicago, Mercer Island Youth Theater, Richard Hugo House, The Rendezvous and Jack Straw Cultural Center. His writing has appeared in the L.A. Times, Drawn and Quarterly, Modern Odysseys, and I Can’t Tell You Anything (Penguin Press), among others. He was a 2014 Jack Straw Writer. He is currently working on the completion of a book of short stories. He lives in Seattle where he tries not get mad when people steal his tomatoes.

Artist Support Program 2015: Produce recordings of original stories.

Writers Program 2014

A proud daughter of immigrants, Michelle Peñaloza was born in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan and grew up in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee. She is author of landscape/heartbreak (Two Sylvias, 2015), Last Night I Dreamt of Volcanoes (Organic Weapon Arts, 2015), and Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, which recently won the 2018 Hillary Gravendyk National Poetry Prize. Her work can be found in New England Review, Pleiades, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Vinyl, and The Collagist, with poems forthcoming in The Normal School and Third Coast.

Michelle is the recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Richard Hugo House, awards from 4Culture and Artist Trust, recent residencies from Caldera and The Lemon Tree House, as well as scholarships from VONA Voices and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, among others. Michelle lives in rural Northern California.

2014 Writers Program

Gigi Rosenberg is an author, performer, artist coach and public speaking coach. Her essays and articles have been published by Psychology Today, Seal Press and Poets & Writers. She’s been a guest commentator on Oregon Public Broadcasting and performed her dramatic monologues at Seattle’s On The Boards. In 2010, she wrote The Artist’s Guide to Grant Writing (Watson-Guptill) to help artists navigate the world of funding. She’s Editor of Professional Artist, an award-winning business magazine for visual artists. And she coaches public speakers in how to show up as their full selves and connect with their audience.

2014 Writers Program

Raúl Sanchez is the former City of Redmond Poet Laureate 2019-2021. He teaches bilingual poetry. He runs the Poetry in the Park bi-weekly readings at Meadowbrook Pond in NE Seattle, as well as the neighborhood “Poetry Pole” in front of his house. His inaugural collection, All Our Brown-Skinned Angels, published by MoonPath Press, was nominated for the Washington State Book Award in Poetry for 2013. When There Were No Borders was published by Flower Song Press in 2021.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

“Sanchez writes borderless in borderless times. He breaks through the ancient Mexica figure of death and transformation, Coatlicue, to poems as pyramids to the Sea of the Salish in the Pacific Northwest and unto cool-rebel Pachuco dialect of the US-Mexico borderlands.”
–Juan Felipe Herrerra

My Tongue / Mi lengua

My tongue retains the roaring sound of rivers, of the earth after the rain
falling over leaves, branches and flowers.

My tongue is stained with the juice of sweet pitayas, red, delicious, grown
under Tonatiuh’s rays, our father sun.

My tongue reveres nature and all living beings, mountains, rivers,
oceans, night and day.
My tongue wears Quetzal feathers mystical birds from the Mayan paradise.

My tongue is impregnated with Calpulli, Tonalli, Xochitl, Xochipilli,
Mictlantecuhtli, Cuauthemoc, Moctezuma, Quetzalcoatl, Tomatl, Centeotl.

My tongue speaks of temples, demigods, copal, flowers, medicinal plants,
jade masks, golden pectorals, obsidian stones, volcanoes and blood.

My ancient tongue speaks Zapotec, Nahuatl, Purepecha, Tzotzil, Otomi,
Chamula, Mayan, Tarahumara.

My tongue is my identity—the connection to my people, my roots,
my culture.
My language is from the earth, from the heavens, from my soul.

My tongue speaks, my soul feels the breath of the earth,
the sound of the wind Ehecatl.

​My tongue, my language,
My culture and pride.

2014 Writers Program

Anastacia-Renee (She/They), former Jack Straw 2020 Curator and Seattle Civic Poet, is an award-winning writer, curator, interdisciplinary artist, and speaker. She is the author of Side Notes from the Archivist (HarperCollins/Amistad), selected as a New York Public Library Best Book of 2023 and feature of PBS.org’s, My Brief But Spectacular Life on Poetry and Legacy. She is also the author of (v.) (Black Ocean), and Forget It. (Black Radish). and Here In The (Middle) of Nowhere (HarperCollins /Amistad). Anastacia-Renee is the recipient of the James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award prize in literature and, she was selected by NBC News as part of the list of “Queer Artist of Color Dominate 2021’s Must See LGBTQ Art Shows,” for “(Don’t Be Absurd) Alice in Parts,” mixed media installation at the Frye Art Museum.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

Side Notes from the Archivist is a preservation of Black culture viewed through a feminist lens. The Archivist leads readers through poems that epitomize youthful renditions of a Black girl coming of age in Philadelphia’s pre-funk ’80s; episodic adventures of “the Black Girl” whose life is depicted through the white gaze; and selections of verse evincing affection for self and testimony to the magnificence within Black femme culture at-large.

The Black Woman as an Altar

1.
lay your white flowers on
her altar let them be thorny
& thick & full of insects to honor her life

1. a
let them (the flowers) be fragrantly overwhelmingly to represent
the way she blooms across a
hardwood floor & cannot be
contained even inside a flared
nostril

2.
place or put or pour a glass of room temperature water because the black woman is always seeking balance (ain’t she) a woman always told she’s too hot or too cold has to be excellent & never in between.

2.a
make the room temperature water all dreadlocked goldilocks & just right. if the water spills let it run down the length of the altar as a sign of continuous flow

3.
write a letter to womb    call it magical    call it home    call it hers   call it god (but hide this letter in case the government decides to step in)

3.a
draw a sketch of stretch marks & label each one a new constellation   make her navel a moon inside a moon inside a moon & call that moon alpha

4.
if she died by a mob or a man or murder pray she will be merciful that no one will be the weight of her own omega

2020 Writers Program (Curator)

2014 Writers Program

Jane Wong is the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Poems have appeared in CutBank, Mid-American Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Salt Hill, The Volta, Best New Poets 2012, The Arcadia Project, and others. Her most recent chapbook is Kudzu Does Not Stop. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently a Ph.D. candidate and Ingham Fellow at the University of Washington.

Writers Program 2014

Kristen Millares Young is a prize-winning journalist and writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, City Arts Magazine, Pacifica Literary Review, KUOW 94.9-FM, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Miami Herald, and TIME Magazine. Kristen was the researcher for the NYT Pulitzer Prize-winning story Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, which also won a Peabody and the Punch Sulzberger Award for Online Storytelling in 2013. Hailed by The Stranger as one of the “fresh new faces in Seattle fiction,” she is seeking representation for her debut novel about an ill-fated affair between an anthropologist and a hoarder’s son on the Makah Indian Reservation.

2014 Writers Program