The Jack Straw Writers Program

Natalie Pascale Boisseau is a bilingual Québec writer from Montréal, living near Seattle. She is writing the autofiction novel Exiles and Desire (4Culture Awards 2023) and a collection of essays, To Arrive Where My Mind Lives, of reflections on road trips through North America. Her work appears in Isele Magazine and Crab Creek Review and is anthologized in This Light Called Darkness (Raven Chronicles Press) and Unmuted: Stories of Courage and Resilience (GenPride Seattle). As a journalist, she was awarded the Best Specialized Articles in Quebec in 1990 on First Nations social and legal issues, and wrote extensively on the creative process of Cirque du Soleil. When not writing, she practices acupuncture north of Seattle, familiar with the embodiment of trauma and healing, and has saved a forest near her home.

2026 Writers Program

Kevin Dean (he/him) is a Seattle-based writer of poetry and fiction. Previously, he lived in Cairo, Egypt, where he worked as an editor and studied Arabic. Before all that, he was a kid with a library card in southwest Virginia.

His work has been published in The Common and The Rumpus. In addition to the Jack Straw Writers Program, he’s an alum of the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. He’s currently at work on a debut collection of poetry.

2026 Writers Program

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

Jean Ferruzola is a writer focused on stories for young adult readers. Her work often centers on family, memory, and the ways heritage shapes identity. As a first-generation Ecuadorian-American, she is drawn to narratives that explore how the past echoes across generations.

Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Brevity, The Offing, and ELLE Magazine, among other publications. She earned her MFA from the University of Washington and was a 2014–2015 Hugo House Fellow. In 2016, she received Artist Trust’s Grants for Artist Projects, and in 2021 she was honored as a YA Tin House Scholar.

She is currently at work on a young adult novel about a girl confronting long-buried secrets after her missing sister suddenly returns home, a project that continues her interest in resilience, memory, and the complicated bonds of family.

2026 Writers Program

Rasheena Fountain centers environmental advocacy and justice in her work. She has received fellowships and support from the Jack Straw Writers Program, National Audubon, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. Her film, Dropped Down Blues, debuted in the “How We Carry Water” 2024 exhibit at PRAx. In 2025, she released In the Aftermath, a blues guitar and poetry performance set. Fountain has a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an M.A.Ed. from Antioch University Seattle/IslandWood, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, where she studies blues and environment as a PhD candidate in English.

2026 Writers Program

Artist Support Program 2024: Dropped Down Blues, a speculative blues poetry audio-visual project and companion album

Gabriella Garcia is a writer from the Sonoran Desert. Her chamber opera, A Spring Like This, a collaboration with composer Nehemiah Jones, was developed and performed in 2025 with the support of the Seattle Opera’s Jane Lang Davis Creation Lab. She is a graduate of Wellesley College and lives in Seattle, WA, where she teaches poetry, sings, and takes lots of long walks with a camera in hand.

2026 Writers Program

Maiah A Merino, a first and second-generation Mexican-American/Chicana Poet, mixed-genre writer, teaching artist. and therapist, has poems in A New Season: Poems from a World in Flux Anthology; In Xóxitl, in cuícatl: Flor y Canto, Antología de poesía; I Sing the Salmon Home: Poems from Washington State; and Windblown I, and is a regular contributor and past co-editor of The Yellow Medicine Review Journal. A 2025 “Garden Poet,” a 2021 Writing the Land Poet, and a recipient of the 2021 Artist Trust GAP award, Maiah utilizes her training as a narrative therapist and writer in support of others reclaiming their own stories. She currently teaches Poetry through Path with Art and her private practice. She is a single mom who lives with 3 cats and is often hunted, as prey, daily.

2026 Writers Program

BeeLyn Naihiwet, mother to the moon, is a nonfiction writer and poet with roots in Tigray. She is the author of two poetry collections, Plenty. and Moonful (Finishing Line Press). Her work explores memory, wilderness, and the shaping of the self. BeeLyn is currently working on a collection of personal essays.

2026 Writers Program

Diane Nguyen is a transgender multi-genre, multi-talented artist based in Seattle. Identifying primarily as a musician, she briefly attended McNally Smith College of Music for guitar performance before transferring to complete her Bachelors of Music in piano performance and composition from Cornish College of the Arts.

Her creative work is informed by her Trans- and Queer-ness, growing up Vietnamese-Laotian in midwestern America, and the challenges of finding identity as a minority. Through narrative essay and autofiction, she seeks to challenge conventional stereotypes about trans women, queer relationships, and Asian Americans by plainly rendering scenes of everyday life.

Diane has performed with Marina DeMarco, Julian Finch, Payday, and other acts as guitarist, keyboardist, and cellist. Her writing has been previously published in Fruitslice. Diane currently teaches programming and video game design with youth arts organization Coyote Central. Away from work she spends most of her time on the couch with her cat Iroh and exploring Seattle’s food scene with her partner River.

2026 Writers Program

Alejandro Pérez-Cortés’s poems and short stories have been published in newspapers in his home state of Colima, Mexico since 1996.

In 2000 his work was included in the Anthology Cage of Verses / Jaula de Versos, published by the literary workshop Chessboard / Tablero, coordinated by the local poet Efrén Rodríguez. In 2002 his manuscript won first place in the XVI Literary Creation Contest of ITESM, Zacatecas, Mexico.

In 2018 Alejandro’s first English poems were included in the anthology Soundings from the Salish Sea, A Pacific Northwest Poetry Anthology (Edmonds, Washington). In 2021 his manuscript Ima and Coli are the tree that was never a seed won the Octavio Paz Poetry Prize organized by the National Poetry Series and the Miami Book Fair at Miami Dade College (Spanish – English bilingual edition). In 2024, his poem “Alejandra Pizarnik and her 4 sister dolls” won first place in the fifth poetry contest organized by DePaul University and the literary magazine Contratiempo in the city of Chicago.

The Colibrí publishing house will publish his new book of poetry in mid 2026. He currently teaches Spanish in Washington State.

2026 Writers Program

Sayantani Roy has placed work in several journals including Emerge Literary Journal, Grist (forthcoming), MAYDAY, TIMBER, West Trestle Review, and Wordgathering. She is an MFA candidate at the Rainier Writing Workshop, and her work has been supported by AWP.

2026 Writers Program

Ruth Marie Tomlinson utilizes repetitive processes to exercise her passion for systems, for cataloging and for restructuring. The work often touches simple quandaries we face daily: What changes? What remains? What is remembered? What is forgotten? Tomlinson spends summers in her Montana Studio, Two Dot Spot, and winters in Seattle, teaching at Cornish College of the Arts and longing for the Montana horizon.

2026 Writers Program

New Media Gallery 2012-13: Lost Long: A Landscape