2002 Jack Straw Writers Program

Matt Briggs was born in Seattle at the University of Washington Hospital and raised in the Snoqualmie Valley. His first book, The Remains of River Names, was published by Black Heron Press in 1999 and he has two new books of fiction coming out in the next year or so. StringTown Press will publish a collection of very short stories, Misplaced Alice, in August. Clear Cut Press will release Shoot the Buffalo, a novel, in 2003. His writing has been awarded a King County Arts Commission Publication Grant, The Hugo House Gift Exchange Award, and a Seattle Arts Commission Individual Artist Award.

2002 Writers Program

Kathleen Flenniken began her career as a civil engineer and didn’t discover poetry until her early 30s. Her collection, Plume (University of Washington Press, 2012), a meditation on the Hanford Nuclear Site and her home town of Richland, Washington, won the Washington State Book Award and was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Pacific Northwest Book Awards. Her first book, Famous (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association.

Her other honors include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust. She was the 2012 – 2014 Washington State Poet Laureate.Kathleen teaches poetry in the schools through arts agencies like Writers in the Schools and Jack Straw, and Seattle University. For 13 years Flenniken was an editor at Floating Bridge Press, a nonprofit press dedicated to publishing Washington State poets. She currently serves on the board of Jack Straw, an audio arts studio and cultural center. Flenniken holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Pacific Lutheran University, as well as bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering.

2019 Writers Program (Curator)

2002 Writers Program

Laura Gamache reads, writes and teaches poetry. She has published work in journals, anthologies, on buses, on radio, in chapbooks, and on-line. She teaches through Seattle Arts & Lectures Writers in the Schools and other programs. She received an MFA from the University of Washington in 1993, and hasn’t written fiction since.

2002 Writers Program

1999 Writers Program

Doug, originally from Colorado, is currently in the creative writing program at the University of Washington. His stories and essays have appeared in Other Voices, Weber Studies, War Literature and the Arts, Powder Magazine, Reed Magazine, and the Beloit Fiction Journal.

2002 Writers Program

Gregory Hischak’s short plays Hygiene and Poor Shem have been produced as part of Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Apprentice/Intern Tens program and both were restaged as part of the Humana Festival of New American Plays (2010 and 2014, respectively). His full-length play, The Center of Gravity, won the 2009 Clauder Prize and premiered at Portland Stage Company (Portland, ME) in 2010, and was recently staged at the Cotuit Center for the Arts (Barnstable, MA) in 2014. His plays have also been staged by A Contemporary Theatre (Seattle, WA), A Theatre Under the Influence (Seattle, WA), City Theatre (Miami, FL), The Source Festival (Washington, D.C.), Salem Theatre Company (Salem, MA), The Pan Festival (San Francisco, CA), and the Boston Theater Marathon, among others. Hischak lives in Yarmouth, MA where he is the Associate Director of the Edward Gorey House.

2002 Writers Program

1998 Writers Program

Erin Leonard resides in Portland, Oregon with her husband, her two children, two dogs, two cats, two birds, in a house on a hill built on a double-city lot with a large sloping garden and her fictional twisting sentences that she has been working on for the last ten years in and out of workshop with Tom Spanbauer.

2002 Writers Program

Rebecca Loudon is a writer, violinist, and teacher. She is on the editorial board of the literary journal Literary Salt. Rebecca’s work has recently been published in Crab Orchard Review, The Portland Review, Pacific Review, and Pontoon 5, among other print and online journals. Rebecca was a winner of the 2000 Richard Hugo House writing competition on Disappearances: A Cultural Inquiry, and was chosen to attend the Key West Writing Workshop with Sharon Olds in February, 2002.

2002 Writers Program

Claudia Mauro is a poet, science writer, and the founding director of the nonprofit literary publisher, Whit Press. She is the recipient of two Seattle Arts Commission CityArtist Grants, and a Wyoming Arts Council Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry. She is a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle, PENAmerica, and The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. An alumna and former board member of Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, she has also served as a judge for the Lambda Book Awards and served on the Advisory Council for the University of Washington’s Whiteley Center.

Her books include Stealing Fire and Reading the River (Whiteaker Press 1999, 2004), both Lambda Book Award finalists. She was a presenter at the inaugural TEDxSeattle speaking on the importance of independent media.

Claudia also has extensive experience as a back-country pilot in Alaska and was employed for over 20 years as a field science tech for the Alaska Dept. of Fish & Game, and for NOAA as Marine Science Tech crew on their research and survey vessels.

2002 Writers Program

Arne Pihl lives in a large Northwestern city once famous the world over for fishing fleets, shipyards, and ripping off Alaskans, but it has since fallen into overgrown ruin: pavement, traffic, and gawkers thick as the blackberries once were. You’ve probably never even heard of the place. He’s been employed as a bartender, an agricultural laborer, and in the fishing industry: Siberia to Tierre Del Fuego. He is now a carpenter. He enjoys the work. It keeps him limber, and each of his grandfathers left him an eye for it. He has a BA in English Literature from Pacific Lutheran University. He’s written three books of poetry and short stories: Girls Girls Girls and an Army of Lab Boys, Deck Hand Arm, and Love Is Stronger than Prozac. They may be found under his desk, at the bottom of a waterproof bag, along with a flashlight, a pocketknife, and some odds and ends from Radio Shack. His poetry has also been published in the anthologies Vox Populi and Beautiful Lumber.

2002 Writers Program

Mary Lou Sanelli has published seven collections of poetry and three works of non-fiction, Among Friends, Falling Awake, and A Woman Writing. The Star Struck Dance Studio of Yucca Springs (Chatwin Books) is her first novel. Her newest collection of essays, Every Little Thing, has been nominated for a PNBA: Pacific Northwest Book Award and a Pushcart Prize. Her first children’s title, Bella Likes to Try, is forthcoming.

Her regular columns appear in Seattle’s Art Access magazine, The Queen Anne/Magnolia News, as well as Lilipoh magazine and Dance Teacher magazine. She has written for the Seattle Times, Seattle Metropolitan Magazine, Morning Edition, National Public Radio, Seattle’s NPR affiliate station KUOW FM, and many other publications and radio stations. Honorariums include an Artist Trust GAP Award, Poetry on the Buses, A Jack Straw Writers Award, A Seattle Bumbershoot Festival Book Award, The Skagit River Poetry Festival, A GoodReads Notable Book Award, and writing residencies in France, Costa Rica, and Spain.

2002 Writers Program

John Sangster is a native of Seattle, now living on Lopez Island. His poems have appeared in numerous literary publications and anthologies.

“I write to find out what’s inside. The trigger can be anything – an observation, something I overhear, a question that comes to mind. When it works, I’m sometimes startled by what appears on the monitor or the notebook’s blue line – a moment of receptivity. I’m drawn to the prose poem because it seems to provide me with the freedom and spontaneity that can lead to those moments. I like the look of a prose poem – a box of words – and I like working with a form that’s controversial, some claiming it’s not a form.”

2002 Writers Program

Samantha Storey was born in New York and raised in London, England. She has lived in Seattle since 1995 and works for a literary arts organization. Samantha started writing on her eighth birthday when she received a diary covered with glittered hearts and filled with rainbow-colored paper. (Being a child of the ’70s she had many rainbow things.) Since then she has always kept a journal (they‘re plainer looking now). In her writing she likes to explore the unexamined, from the way an old lady’s stocking fallen around her ankle looks absurdly sexy to the hundreds of different varieties of Cornflakes.

2002 Writers Program

Peggy Sturdivant writes short fiction and poetry. She has been the featured writer at the New Voices reading of the After Long Silence series. Over the last two years she has been involved in an oral history project interviewing first generation immigrants and now collected in Voices of Ballard. She is a member of an ongoing writer’s group facilitated by Pesha Gertler. Currently she does Educational Outreach for a research institute that studies infectious diseases of global importance. She lives with her daughter in Seattle.

2002 Writers Program

Craig Williams is a writer, performer, and choreographer. He has been writing his entire life, beginning with poetry while still in elementary school on the South Side of Chicago. In college he studied English Literature, where he came to believe that story is very important.

2002 Writers Program