The Jack Straw Writers Program

Hillary Behrman’s award winning short stories have been described as deeply humane and unsettling and have been published in journals, magazines, short story dispensers and an anthology. Lake Effect, her debut collection of stories was chosen by Lauren Groff as the winner of the 2024 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction and will be published by Sarabande Books in 2026. Groff praised Lake Effect as a book of “great moral power and heart” by “an author of extraordinary grace.” Hillary is a recipient of the Chris O’Malley Prize in Fiction from The Madison Review. She has an MFA in fiction from Pacific University and was a participant in fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She’s been a writer in residence at the National Willa Cather Center and an artist in residence at the Vashon Artist Residency. Hillary lives and writes in Seattle where she raised two kids and worked as a children’s civil rights lawyer and public defender. She’s excited to be a part of the Jack Straw Writers Program and is working on her first novel.

2025 Writers Program

Mateo Bracken is a poet, librettist, and actor who splits his time between Auburn and Seattle, Washington. He was the 2023-2024 Seattle Youth Poet Laureate and currently serves as the 2024-2026 Auburn Poet Laureate. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in the Gay & Lesbian Review, EchoX, The Washington State Queer Poetry Anthology, Abya Yala: Indigenous Connections in Latin America, Creative Colloquy, Bird Brains: A Lyrical Guide to the Birds of Washington State, and more. As a librettist in the Seattle Opera Creation Lab, he developed the twenty-minute chamber opera Blood Dawn of the Inti Sun in collaboration with composer Mina Pariseau. His first chapbook, Dear Spanish, was published in 2024 through Poetry Northwest and explores the languages of identity, heritage, and belonging. He is currently working on a manuscript about the settler colonial history of Auburn in verse.

2025 Writers Program

Asha Dore is a writer and illustrator working on a book about fawning. Bylines include The New York Times, The Cut, and Slate. She hosts “Totally Biased Reviews,” a literary interview podcast. Her work can be found at www.AshaDore.net or on Instagram @adjsbb

2025 Writers Program

Makayla Danielle Gay hails from Southeastern Kentucky. Her work has appeared in Adroit, Prairie Schooner, and American Literary Review, among others. Her debut collection, Hackles (Girl Noise Press 2025) is available now.

2025 Writers Program

Bill Hollands was born and raised in Miami, Florida, graduated from Williams College, and received his MA in English as a Dr. Herchel Smith Fellow at Cambridge University. He worked for the New York Public Library and Microsoft before becoming a high school English teacher. He lives in Seattle with his husband and their son. He has returned to poetry after a long hiatus, and his recent poems have appeared in such journals as The Adroit Journal, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, Rattle, The Florida Review, DIAGRAM, Boulevard, and Plume, as well as on The Slowdown podcast. A multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee, he has been a finalist for North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize, Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize in Poetry, Smartish Pace’s Erskine J. Poetry Prize, and New Ohio Review’s NORward Prize. He reads submissions for Poetry Northwest. His debut poetry collection Mangrove (ELJ Editions) will be published in 2025.

2025 Writers Program

Sigrun Susan Lane is a poet from Seattle Washington. After a successful career in business, she returned to her initial passion: to be a writer. She began writing poetry with Nelson and Beth Bentley and publishing poems in regional and national journals such as the Crab Creek Review and The Seattle Review. She’s won prizes for her poems from the Seattle Arts Commission and the King County Arts Commission.

Lane has published three chapbooks; Little Bones and SALT from Goldfish Press and Drive  from Finishing Line  Press.  SALT won the Josehine Miles award “for excellence in poetry” in 2020. Sigrun Susan is of  Icelandic descent and often draws on her family’s history in her poems, stories of immigrants and of the “old country” and of its history.

2025 Writers Program

Jenny Harrington Lill is a writer, researcher, and advocate living on Mercer Island. She is an MFA candidate in nonfiction and literature at the Bennington Writing Seminars. Jenny is currently working on her debut collection of essays on love, loss, and mothering.

2025 Writers Program

Nhatt Nichols (she/her) is a multidisciplinary journalist, poet, and artist whose work focuses on the intersections of humans, animals, and their environment.

A graduate of The Royal Drawing School in London, she uses words and images to cover food and environmental issues using solutions journalism practices for High Country News, Edible Magazine, Civil Eats, Modern Farmer, and The Daily Yonder. She is the founder and editor of The Jefferson County Beacon, a rural weekly news outlet.

Nhatt is a 2024 Blue Sky Community Action Fellow and a 2023 Artist Trust Literary Gap grant recipient for her project documenting the history of human/animal dependency and the current refugee crisis in Białowieża, Europe’s oldest forest. Her first museum show, Nhatt Nichols: The Willapa Oyster and its Environs, was on display at The Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum in 2025.

Her first book, This Party of the Soft Things (Bored Wolves 2022), a heavily researched graphic poem, is now awaiting its third printing. Her first novella, Burn Morels, is forthcoming from Bored Wolves this summer.

2025 Writers Program

Monique Ouk is a Cambodian-American writer. Her poetry appears in Diode Poetry Journal, The Margins, and The Seventh Wave.

2025 Writers Program

Jason Prokowiew received the PEN America/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History for War Boys, a braided memoir about his Russian father’s adoption by Nazis during World War II and the trauma he carried into parenthood. He earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from George Mason University. His writing has appeared in The North American Review, The Guardian, The Hooghly Review, Salon, WBUR’s Cognoscenti, and on WORLD Channel’s Stories from the Stage. His Stories from the Stage piece, “Sing,” is the most viewed in the show’s history. He’s received support from Bread Loaf, Tin House, Ragdale, and the Mass Cultural Council. He lives on a lake in Massachusetts with his husband Dave and their greyhound Champ.

2025 Writers Program

Mia Tong is a writer of YA, AAPI, and immigrant fiction. Her debut novel is part of a duology that is inspired by her East Asian heritage, her interests in pan-Asian philosophies and mythologies, and the visual and cultural art of Asia. Her stories appear in The South Shore Review, Bright Flash Literary Review, The Weather Where You Are, and Bending Genres. In 2024, she was a Writer-in-Residence at Porter Square Books, where she was a conversation partner for YA writers. Her work has received fellowship support from the Key West Literary Seminar, was selected for Storyknife Writers Retreat, and has received recognition as a finalist for several residencies and awards. In 2025, she is a fellow of the Jack Straw Cultural Center. She holds a master’s degree in creative writing from Harvard and is an alumna of Yale Writers’ Workshop. In the moments between writing and thinking about writing, she is also a certified ikebanist. She has traveled near and far but still calls the Boston area home.

2025 Writers Program

Connor Watkins-Xu holds a BA in Professional Writing from Baylor University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland, where he taught creative and academic writing. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, North American Review, Redivider, Columbia Journal, Gargoyle, The Hong Kong Review, Salvation South, and elsewhere. His manuscript has been named a semifinalist for the Berkshire Prize and The Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, scholarships to the Southampton Writers Conference and New York State Summer Writers Institute, and a 2025 Best of the Net nomination. Originally from Alabama, he lives with his wife in Seattle.

2025 Writers Program