2019 Jack Straw Writers Program

Samar Abulhassan holds an M.F.A. from Colorado State University and has worked as a teaching artist for ten years, for Seattle Arts and Lectures’ WITS Program, Jack Straw, and the Skagit River Poetry Foundation. Born to Lebanese immigrants and raised with multiple languages, she is a 2006 Hedgebrook alum and the author of multiple chapbooks, including Farah and Nocturnal Temple. She received a 2016 CityArtist grant to complete a novel-in-poems, reflecting on memory, longing, and the Arabic alphabet, ignited while exploring Pike Place Market and Seattle’s waterfront.

2019 Writers Program

Dianne Aprile is the author and editor of nonfiction books, including three book collaborations with visual artists and three gallery collaborations. She teaches Creative Nonfiction on the MFA faculty at Spalding University’s School of Creative and Professional Writing. Her current project is a family memoir, from which two excerpts have been nominated for Pushcart prizes. She can be heard reading her essay “Silence” at NPR’s This I Believe website, and she has an essay forthcoming in the Boom Project Anthology (Summer 2019). Her poems have appeared in journals, most recently The Raven Chronicles. Aprile received fellowships from Kentucky Arts Council and Artist Trust; grants from Kentucky Foundation for Women; a Hedgebrook Women Writers Residency and, as a journalist, she was part of a team at the Louisville Courier Journal that won a staff Pulitzer Prize.

2019 Writers Program

Josh Axelrad is a writer and performer from Seattle via New York via L.A. via Hays, Kansas. His memoir, Repeat Until Rich, was published by Penguin Press. A regular at The Moth, he’s hosted StorySlams, appeared on stage nationwide, and been featured on The Moth Radio Hour.

2019 Writers Program

Christianne Balk grew up in upstate New York, studied biology and art at Grinnell College, English and writing at the University of Iowa, taught at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, and now lives in Seattle. Her poems have appeared in Cirque, Poemoftheweek.org, Women Writing Nature, Floating Bridge Review, Nimrod, Terrain, and other publications. Christianne loves gardening, the Anglo-Saxon rhythms of everyday street talk, and open water swimming. Her most recent book is The Holding Hours (University of Washington Press Pacific Northwest Poetry Series).

2019 Writers Program

Gabrielle Bates works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium, cohosts the Poet Salon podcast, and edits for Poetry Northwest, Broadsided Press, and Bull City Press. Her poems and poetry comics have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, and New England Review, among other journals. She is originally from Birmingham, Alabama.

2019 Writers Program

Leanne Dunic is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, and writer. Her work has won several honors, including the Ema Saiko Poetry Fellowship and Alice Munro Short Story Award. Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Leanne is the Artistic Director of the Powell Street Festival Society and is the singer/guitarist of The Deep Cove. To Love the Coming End is her first book, and was named one of the best poetry books of 2017 by Entropy Magazine. Her most recent work is a book of lyric prose and photographs entitled Wet (Talonbooks 2024).

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

“One and Half of You is a stunning constellation of sibling love, childhood, heritage, place, and sexuality — language punctuating each star with inquisitive ache. Full of visceral imagery and narrative leaps, Dunic dives into the intimate depths of birthmarks, of mixed race identity, of whiteness, of what it means to remember when memory moves like ‘slow slow crumbs of earth.’ This is a book that is not afraid to ask: where do we go from here, in these messy spaces of division and connection? Dunic beautifully answers: ‘love is full of defiant compulsions. Inhale. Wear it like rubies.'”
–Jane Wong

Birthmarks: some have vanished, but then
again, nostalgia distorts.

Sometimes I forget that I’m Chinese.

That I’m not.

2019 Writers Program

Shankar Narayan explores identity, power, mythology, and technology in a world where the body is flung across borders yet possesses unrivaled power to transcend them. Shankar is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the 2017 Flyway Sweet Corn Poetry Prize, and has been a fellow at Kundiman, Hugo House, and now Jack Straw. He is a 4Culture grant recipient for Claiming Space, a project to lift the voices of writers of color, and his chapbook, Postcards from the New World, won the Paper Nautilus Debut Series chapbook prize. Shankar draws strength from his global upbringing and from his work as a civil rights attorney for the ACLU. In Seattle, he awakens to the wonders of Cascadia every day, but his heart yearns east to his other hometown, Delhi.

2019 Writers Program

Sylvia Byrne Pollack’s poems appear in The Stillwater Review, Crab Creek Review, Wild Roof, and many other print and online journals. She’s a two-time Pushcart nominee, 2019 Jack Straw Writer and 2021 Mineral School Resident. Her debut collection Risking It (2021) and her latest book, What Lasts (2023) are both from Red Mountain Press.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

What Lasts journeys from small-town childhood to the emergence of bipolar II disorder in midcareer to relative acceptance. A persona, Letitia, is used to explore the mood excursions that weave throughout the poet’s adult daily life. Pollack writes about family, a long marriage, mental illness with joy, humor, and compassion.

December Morning at Possession Point

We yearn to know what’s out there
but still distract ourselves with bowl games,

riffs on reindeer, miracles on 34th Street.
Our horizons are so limited but what I can see

on this December day is miracle enough for me.
Grey morning sky, cats’ paws on the water

while wind tiptoes the shore, sniffing at
salt-soaked logs, scratching itself

on barnacle-bedecked rocks. The barnacles,
distanced from us by evolution’s endless

experiments, are numerous as stars
Water, wind, gulls, herons and there

just 50 yards off-shore, a pod of orcas
black and white constellation worthy of a place

in the sky with Leo, Aries, Orion.
The orcas speak in clicks and whistles

beyond our atmosphere into –
through – star-speckled space.

2019 Writers Program

Rena Priest is a writer and Lummi tribal member. Her debut book, Patriarchy Blues, was released on MoonPath Press and garnered an American Book Award. Her most recent collection, Sublime Subliminal, was published by Floating Bridge Press in 2018. She has attended residencies at Mineral School, Underwater New York/Works on Water on Governors Island, and Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers. She is the recipient of a 2018 National Geographic Explorers Grant, and has taught various topics in writing, storytelling, and literature.

2019 Writers Program

Putsata Reang is a Cambodian-American memoirist and journalist. She has lived and worked globally in countries including Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Thailand, where she trained journalists in investigative reporting and advocated for freedom of expression. She is an alum of Hedgebrook and Mineral School residencies, and currently serves as an alum board member of the Mineral School Artist Residency. Her memoir Ma and Me (MacMillan, 2022) explores themes of debt, duty, and the double displacement experienced by gay refugees.

2019 Writers Program

Michael Schmeltzer was born and raised in Japan. He is the co-author of the nonfiction book A Single Throat Opens, a lyric exploration of addiction and family. His debut book Blood Song was a Washington State Book Award Finalist for Poetry. He is a member of Seattle7Writers and currently serves as the President of Floating Bridge Press.

2022 Writers Program (Curator)

2019 Writers Program

Suzanne Warren is a fiction writer and essayist whose work appears or is forthcoming in Narrative, Gulf Coast, The Cincinnati Review, Memorious, The Prague Revue, Versal, and Post Road, which selected her story “The Raspberry King” to appear in its Guest Folio. Her story “The Country of Husbands” won an Editor’s Reprint Award from Sequestrum. Other writing awards include residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Ucross Foundation. Warren lives in Seattle and is currently at work on her first book, a collection of short stories titled The Country of Husbands.

2019 Writers Program