Spring 2021
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Sky O’Brien is a writer from Perth, Western Australia / Noongar Boodja. He currently lives in Seattle / Duwamish Land where he is a student in the MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell. In his creative work he plays with place, land, and ecosystems. He writes for Dispatches Magazine.
Chris Ryan Lauer is an author, artist, and academic in practicum at the University of Washington, with interests in the New York School literary movement, modernism, postmodernism, assemblage, montage, film d’auteur, visual culture, and intersection points between film, literature, and painting. He is recognized for his confessional style of writing & poetry.
Jessica Hagy (MFA, 2018) is the artist and writer best known for her Webby award-winning webcomic, Indexed. She is the author of the nonfiction books The Humanist’s Devotional (Freethought House), The Art of War Visualized (Workman), How to Be Interesting (Workman), and Indexed (Viking), the novel One Morning (Tartarus), and the poetry collection Here in Line for Security (Ribbon Pig). How to be Fearless (Sasquatch Books), will be published in 2021 and AETUI: Pentagram Poems (Inside the Castle), will be released in 2022. She has contributed essays, cartoons, and illustrations to more than 20 other books.
Jessica has been prolifically illustrating, consulting, exhibiting, and speaking internationally since 2006. Her work has been described as “deceptively simple,” “undeniably brilliant,” and “our favorite reason for the Internet to exist.” She received her MBA in 2007 and her MFA in 2018. Her work has been flatteringly featured in Wired, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Publisher’s Weekly and Forbes, among many others. It has also been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Rebecca Brown, Senior Artist in Residence, has published over a dozen books in the U.S. and in translation. She has exhibited visual work in museums and has lectured, read, and performed widely. She collaborates frequently with actors, artists, dancers, and musicians and also curates events. Her most recent book is Not Heaven, Somewhere Else (Tarpaulin Sky, 2018); other books include American Romances, The Last Time I Saw You, The Dogs, The Gifts of the Body and The Terrible Girls. She wrote regularly for The Stranger. Her work has been translated into Japanese, German, Dutch, Norwegian and Italian and has received The Boston Book Review Award, Lambda Literary Award, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, Washington State Book Award, and the Stranger Genius Award.
Winter 2021
A. Bunney is an interdisciplinary artist from the Pacific Northwest. Her work focuses on memory and how it intertwines with imagination, history, and the environment. She is currently completing her MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at UW Bothell where her thesis includes long exposure, uncertain perceptions of reality, and Edgar Allan Poe. She has been published in Clamor (2020) and The Journal of Occurrences (2018) and is scheduled to publish in the CROW in 2021.
Tricia Fuentes is a first-year student in the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at University of Washington Bothell. A life-long Seattleite, her writing largely centers on everyday relationships within families, communities, and land. Her art explores the beauty and perseverance that comes from pain and loss. As the daughter of a refugee and descendant of a long line of strong women (and the world’s most caring dad), she draws strength and inspiration from her family, those still with her on earth and those (including her father) who have moved to the great beyond. In her free time Tricia enjoys complaining to her three kids about her lack of free time.
Siolo Thompson is a Seattle-based illustrator and writer who works in the realm of the magical, horrific, and fantastical. Her work has been published and exhibited worldwide and her client list includes McSweenys, Victoria’s Secret, Facebook, Astrology.com, and many others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics from the University of Washington Bothell.
Living on South Beacon Hill, Simon Wolf is inspired by urban space as much as he is by woods and plants. He sees words as the surface of communication, where much is said but much falls through the gaps. Currently working on his MFA in Creative Writing at UW Bothell and working in land restoration, Simon’s poems have been published with Leveler Poetry and Seattle’s Poetry on Buses, he is the Co-Founder of Stay Happy arts Collective.
Fall 2020
G Buck is a writer making a home in Olympia, Washington while they complete their Master’s thesis at UW Bothell. Currently G is interning as an Editorial Assistant with Essay Press while pursuing their creative work which draws on words, reworks physical materials, and leaves marks at the nexus of varied languages, concrete images, and schematic abstractions. In the springtime G will be found in their garden while most evenings are spent advancing their skills in the kitchen.
Alec Owen Gabin is an impulsive, desperate sort of person. As treatment, he strives to find the spiritual in everything, including his writing and artwork. A second year MFA student, Alec recently discovered his love for trees. He has a six-year-old son named Oskar. He lives in Olympia, WA.
Liezel Moraleja Hackett is a writer and choreographer with occasional culinary tendencies. She teaches Filipino Folk dance, inspiring a lot of her work that dwells in the space between dance and illness, culture and captivity, movement and limitation. Liezel has an MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from the University of Washington Bothell, and her work can be found in Clamor Literary Journal, UOG Press’ Storyboard: A Journal of Pacific Imagery, and Ponyak Press’ The Friday Haiku.
Joe Milutis is a media artist and writer whose interdisciplinary work includes experimental sound and radio; video works; new media; experimental narrative and poetics; theoretical writings; and various media/literature hybrids. Since the early 90s, after having produced a number of radio art broadcasts, his work has focused on new genres and media that have uncertain status and value. He was an early proponent of digital multimedia essays, and continues to work in the intersections between new media and contemporary writing. In recent years, he has been exploring experimental translation, in tandem with a creative project utilizing Michael Maier’s seventeenth-century alchemical emblem book, Atalanta Fugiens, as his source material. Current interests also include live video performance collaborations; internet poetry and related image-text experiments; nineteenth-century French poetry; and new Gothic writing.
Spring 2020
Cliff Watson will graduate in June 2021 with an MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics from the University of Washington Bothell. He has a BS from Brown University and a MS from UW Seattle in Applied Mathematics. Cliff writes prose, poetry, and lyrics, and enjoys experimenting with multi-media and live performance. Cliff has been a program manager, software engineer, opera soloist, professional chorister, musical theatre actor, olde-tyme commercial reenactor, and circus set builder. He is currently an Assistant Career Advisor in UW Bothell’s Career Services department. Cliff grew up in Eastern Washington and Hong Kong, and lives in Bellevue, Washington with his family.
Sanika Nalgirkar has a Bachelors in Science and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics at University of Washington Bothell. She and her friend have collaborated and contributed poems, articles and book reviews to an online blog during her time as an undergraduate.
Reed Lowell is a poet and editor whose work focuses on whichever wild hare it decides to chase on a given day. He received his MFA from the University of Washington Bothell, sleeps far less than he probably should, and will read most anything you send him. His writing can be found in Clamor, Literary and Arts Journal.
A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (Omnidawn 2018), which was selected by Terrance Hayes. In addition to winning the 92Y "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Contest, 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Colorado Book Award, she was also a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. A Kundiman fellow, she currently teaching in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and will be an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh starting in the fall.
Jeanne Heuving is the author of Mood Indigo (selva oscura press) and the co-editor, along with Tyrone Williams, of Inciting Poetics: Thinking and Writing Poetry (University of New Mexico Press, 2019). She recently published The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics in the Modern and Contemporary Poetics series (University of Alabama Press, 2016). Her cross genre book Incapacity (Chiasmus Press) won a 2004 Book of the Year Award from Small Press Traffic. Other books include Transducer (Chax 2008), an edited essay collection on Nathaniel Mackey, “Ground Gone Under: Essays on the Work of Nathaniel Mackey” (currently under review at the University of Iowa Press), and Omissions Are Not Accidents: Gender in the Art of Marianne Moore (Wayne State U Press 1992). Heuving is Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell and founding director of the UW Bothell MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics.
Winter 2020
Scott M Bentley is a first year student in the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington, Bothell. He currently lives in Seattle. His poetry and prose have appeared in Pacific Review, Albion Review and Otherwhere Approach.
Ted Hiebert is a visual artist and theorist and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell. His work examines the relationships between art, technology and speculative culture with a particular focus on the absurd, the paradoxical and the imaginary. Hiebert is the author of In Praise of Nonsense: Aesthetics, Uncertainty and Postmodern Identity (McGill Queens, 2012), A formalized forum for informal inquiry (Noxious Sector Press, 2015) and co-author (with David Cecchetto, Marc Couroux and Eldritch Priest) of Ludic Dreaming: How to Listen Away from Contemporary Technoculture (Bloomsbury, 2017). www.tedhiebert.net
Troy Landrum Jr. is a native of Indianapolis, IN and has lived in Seattle WA, for 6 years. His passion for youth work led him to the city but his even deeper passion for writing and literature has kept him here. He developed a passion for reading and writing later in life at the age of 27 during a process of self rediscovery surrounding self identity, faith, his culture and his families migration stories from Jim Crow South. A process that will continue to be at the helm of his human experience as a African American male. His work in community and literary work hopes to reimagine and uncover the stories of histories past that have often disappeared with the lives who have transitioned in communities of color. He is currently working toward his Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Washington Bothell Campus.
Matt Porter is a writer, musician, and etc. artist currently living in a basement with hordes of baby spiders. Their work has appeared in material reality and has covered such topics as fluid-reality, post-humanism, gender performance, and socio-economic politics. High-falutin subject labels aside, they are a life-long lover of all things music and the work they will be reading from tonight focuses on the center of this obsession: The Beatles. Through poetry, essay, and complete fabrications, they hope to get at the essence of the Beatles: that which has made them the most influential group in the history of recorded music.
Natalie Singer is the author of the lyric memoir California Calling: A Self-Interrogation. Her writing has been published in journals, magazines, and newspapers, including Proximity, Entropy, Hypertext, Literary Mama, The Washington Post, Largehearted Boy, The Nervous Breakdown, and the anthology Love and Profanity. Natalie has been the recipient of several awards, including the Pacific Northwest Writers Association nonfiction prize. She's taught writing inside Washington State’s psychiatric facility for youth and Seattle’s juvenile detention center, has worked as a journalist around the West, and is currently a storyteller for a technology company. Natalie holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from the University of Washington.