2007 Jack Straw Writers Program

Laurie Blauner is the author of nine books of poetry, five novels, and a book of hybrid nonfiction called I Was One of My Memories. A new novel is available from Spuyten Duyvil Press. Her latest poetry book, Come Closer, won the 2022 Library of Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander Press.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

“Come Closer, Laurie Blauner’s new collection of delicately wrought fables invites the reader into a delirium  where unfamiliar and familiar realities combine. You can call these succinct yet lyrically sophisticated tales where it rains without raining, where birds open themselves like books. Possessing an unrivaled imagination . . . She is our storytelling Mary Shelley.”
–Stephanie Dickinson

How To Build Something of Use

Use a hammer, nails, glue, and any other available tools.

Get naked and let the dog watch, tilting its head in wonderment.

The anticipation of pain creates pain.

An unassembled chair might prefer to become a table.

Twist the knobs until they can’t go any further.

Measure everything with humor since nothing is forever.

The diagrams must overrun the inside of your head.

Don’t listen to friends, neighbors, or family.

Explain the long history of scrap metal.

Hide a small piece of yourself deeply inside.

2007 Writers Program

Anna Maria Hong earned a BA in philosophy at Yale University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers. Her poems have been published in many journals and anthologies, including 250 Poems: A Portable Anthology (2012) and The Best American Poetry 2013.

Hong served as a Bunting Fellow in Poetry at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2010-2011 and has received residencies from Yaddo, Djerassi, Fundación Valparaíso, and Kunstnarhuset Messen.

Hong is the editor of Growing Up Asian American (1995), an anthology of fiction and memoir. Her current work includes a collection of sonnets titled The Glass Age, and an ongoing collaboration with the Chicago-based composer Christopher Wendell Jones on a song series called The New Madrigals. A contributing editor at the Offing, She teaches creative writing at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and at Ursinus College.

2007 Writers Program

A writer and photographer, Susan Landgraf has published more than 300 poems in more than 150 journals, most recently in Nimrod, Kalliope, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, Riverwind, Interim, A Room of One’s Own, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Poetry Review, Calyx, Spoon River Quarterly, Sun Dog Review, and Paintbrush, among others, and been nominated twice for a Pushcart. Prentice Hall published her workbook, Student Reflection Journal for Student Success, in 2004.

2007 Writers Program

Doug Nufer is a specialist in literary constraints, a technique that applies certain conditions to or establishes a pattern within writing. Doug is the author of Negativeland (Autonomedia), Never Again (Four Walls Eight Windows/ Black Square), and On the Roast (Chiasmus), all of which came out in 2004, and of The Mudflat Man/ The River Boys (soultheft records, 2006), and his stories and poems have appeared in magazines and literary journals.

2007 Writers Program

2000 Artist Support Program

Charles Potts was the driving force underneath The Temple Bookstore, The Temple magazine, and The Temple School of Poetry. He received the Distinguished Professional Achievement Award in 1994 from the Alumni Association and the College of Arts and Sciences of Idaho State University. He founded Litmus Inc. in Seattle and Berkeley which published 18 first editions including Charles Bukowski’s Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8-Story Window in 1968.

Potts’s most recent books are The Portable Potts from West End Press and Kiot: Selected Early Poems 1963-1977 from Blue Begonia Press. He has been composing and publishing poetry since 1963.

2007 Writers Program

Howard W. Robertson is a poet and fiction writer from Eugene, Oregon. His poems have been published in many literary journals, including most recently in SLAB, Square Lake, The Emily Dickinson Awards Anthology, Hipfish, Nest, Literal Latte, Nimrod, Fireweed, and Ergo. A chapbook of his poems, to the fierce guard in the Assyrian Saloon, is available from Ahsahta Press; his poetry is included in their Ahsahta Anthology: Poetry of the American West, and in The Clear Cut Future, an anthology by Clear Cut Press. His newest book, The Bricolage of Kotegaeshi, was published in 2007 by The Backwaters Press, and his other book, Ode to certain interstates and Other Poems, was published by Clear Cut Press in 2004.

He was the winner of the 2006 Elizabeth R. Curry Prize for Poetry (SLAB of Slippery Rock University, PA) and the 2003 Robinson Jeffers Prize for Poetry (Tor House of Carmel, CA). He has been among the winners of various other poetry awards, including the Bumbershoot Award, the Emily Dickinson Award, the Intown Award, the Literal Latte Award, the Pablo Neruda Award, and the Pacifica Award.

2007 Writers Program

Willie Smith was born and raised in the District of Colombia metropolitan area. He graduated from Reed College in 1972. Moved from Portland, Oregon, four years later to Seattle, where he has more or less existed ever since. Smith is happily married without children.

As a poet and a novelist, Smith has had his writing published in various magazines and journals. His reputation for using obscenities and lewd content has gained him a devoted following. His book Oedipus Cadet was published by Black Heron press in 1990. It offers an intimate look into a seemingly normal 1950s American household.

2007 Writers Program

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir Wild, the New York Times bestsellers Tiny Beautiful Things and Brave Enough, and the novel Torch. Wild was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as her first selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. Strayed’s books have been translated into nearly forty languages around the world and have been adapted for both the screen and the stage.

Her award-winning stories and essays have appeared in more than a dozen magazines, including The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, and The Sun. Widely anthologized, her work has been selected for inclusion in The Best New American Voices 2003 and twice in The Best American Essays.

2007 Writers Program

Molly Tenenbaum is the author of five books of poems, including The Arborists (MoonPath, 2023); Mytheria (Two Sylvias, 2017); and The Cupboard Artist (Floating Bridge, 2012). Her first chapbook, Blue Willow, was published by Floating Bridge in 1998. Besides writing poetry, she likes drawing, gardening and playing the banjo.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

The Arborists studies the paper and sensory ephemera of life, mourning those passed on and studying how those remaining might make life matter. Branches crash down from trees while artists paint, flowers grow, cats leap and hunt, hummingbirds whirr for nectar, and people, as best they can, learn to love.

To an Aunt in Another City

You weren’t choosing a croissant
nor pressing peaches for their give and swell,
and though you’d tried two florists, on your stroll,
you hadn’t found a bright enough bouquet,
so not at bakery nor stall, but home,
crossing from bed to 911.
And though it wasn’t me you called,
you called, and who came
called the number on the wall.
There was no trick to lure the cat. We grabbed,
and she hid farther back.
We’ll take you later up the ridge.
For now, we light the incense sticks we found.
At the bakery, after we’d flown down,
emergency contacts hidden in our phones,
we looked like people eating scones.

2007 Writers Program

Kathryn Trueblood’s latest novel, The Baby Lottery, is published by The Permanent Press of New York. Her first book, The Sperm Donor’s Daughter, received a Special Mention for the Pushcart Prize 2000. Trueblood has co-edited two anthologies of multicultural literature, The Before Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology: Selections from the American Book Awards with Ishmael Reed and Shawn Wong (W.W. Norton, 1992); and Homeground, which won the Jurors’ Choice Award at Bumbershoot in 1996.

Her stories and articles have been published in Poets & Writers Magazine, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Publishers Weekly, Seattle Weekly, Glimmer Train, The Seattle Review, The Cimarron Review, Zyzzyva, and others.

Trueblood has worked in editorial for both mainstream and small press publishers, from the adult trade division at Random House to the West Coast’s first feminist press, Shameless Hussy. Her qualifications include a B.A. in English from U.C. Berkeley, a certificate from the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. She is an Associate Professor of English at Western Washington University.

2007 Writers Program

Dedicated to presenting poetic analyses of the everyday, the Vis-a-Vis Society is an outgrowth of the literary performance group the Typing Explosion and is the current home for artists Sierra Nelson and Rachel Kessler. Using collaboratively written texts as their base, these poetry-scientists have presented their research in multi-media shows at such venues as Seattle’s Bumbershoot Festival and Henry Art Gallery, the Wave Books National Poetry Bus Tour, and New York’s Galapagos Art Space.

2007 Writers Program

Corrina Wycoff’s first fiction collection, O Street was published by University of Illinois Press in 2007. Her fiction and essays have also appeared in Other Voices, New Letters, Coal City Review, The Oregon Quarterly, Brainchild, Out of Line, Golden Handcuffs, and the anthologies Best Essays Northwest and The Clear Cut Future. She holds and MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon, and an MA in English from the University of Illinois, Chicago. She is a single mother living with her teenage son in Seattle, WA, and teaches English and writing at Pierce College.

2007 Writers Program