Elissa Favero’s writing often centers visual arts and built and living worlds. Informed by her previous roles as an educator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and at the Seattle Art Museum as well as by her current work teaching visual arts histories at Cornish College of the Arts at Seattle University, Elissa situates her observations of and reflections on art adjacent to and in conversation with her place-based experiences and memories, bringing art criticism together with the more personal, expansive, and associative qualities of the essay. Her writing has appeared in Temporary Art Review, The Rumpus, Terrain.org, River Teeth Journal’s Beautiful Things series, and Ecotone, and she is the winner of the 2023 Newfound Prose Prize for writing that explores how place shapes identity, imagination, and understanding. Her winning chapbook, Children of Rivers and Trees: An Abecedarian, was published by Newfound in 2024. A graduate of the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program, where she focused on creative nonfiction and ekphrastic writing, Elissa volunteers as a nonfiction editor at the environmental literary magazine The Hopper and is currently at work on a full-length collection of essays, tentatively titled The Queen is Dead.  

2026 Writers Program