Gamut Reader Bios

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.

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.