2009 Jack Straw Writers Program

Lana Hechtman Ayers, MFA, has shepherded over a hundred poetry volumes into print in her role as managing editor for three small presses. Her work appears in Rattle, The London Reader, Peregrine, and elsewhere. Lana’s ninth collection, The Autobiography of Rain, was published by Fernwood Press.

Lana is a Hedgebrook alum and holds an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University, as well as degrees in Poetry, Psychology, and Mathematics.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

“[In The Autobiography of Rain], Lana Hechtman Ayers delves into the complex interplay of beauty and grief in the natural world. These engaging poems underscore the restorative power of art and nature, urging readers to cherish life’s simple pleasures . . . This is a captivating and poignant collection . . . a must-read . . . I could not put this gorgeous collection down.”
—Kelli Russell Agodon

After you hung up on me,

I gave the moon my cold shoulder, trembling it was,
bared that spring night I waited in shadows.

Outlines of maple leaves lifted in the breeze
like a swarm of bats.

Air scented sweet with jasmine blooming from forced
pots. I wish I had something to do with my lips, even a
cigarette,

though I failed at nicotine many times.
And wouldn’t it be a perfect metaphor to blow smoke
rings

around your absence?
I refused to go inside because if you ever did arrive,

I wanted you to see me in my beautiful new red dress,
backless and bold,

the tears in my eyes nothing more than stars.

2009 Writers Program

Anna Bálint is the author of Horse Thief, a collection of short fiction spanning cultures and continents that was a finalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Award. Two earlier books of poetry are Out of the Box and spread them crimson sleeves like wings. Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in various journals and magazines; also as part of a sound installation in the Beacon Hill branch of Seattle Public Library. A novel, rooted in the Roma (Gypsy) experience of the Holocaust, is close to completion (she hopes). Anna is an alumna of Hedgebrook Writers Retreat, the Jack Straw Writers Program, and has received awards from the Seattle Arts Commission. She has taught creative writing for many years and in many places, including in prisons, community centers, Antioch University and Richard Hugo House. In 2001 she received a Leading Voice award in recognition of her creative work with urban youth at El Centro de la Raza. Currently she teaches at Recovery Cáfe in Seattle, where she leads Safe Place, a weekly writing circle for people in recovery.

Artist Support Program 2015: Words from the Café, a book/CD of ten emerging voices from Seattle’s Recovery Café.

2009 Writers Program

2005 Writers Program

2009 Writers Program

Alma García is the winner of the 2007 Narrative Prize, the 2007 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Dana Award in Short Fiction for 2004. She holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. A former journalist and occasional teacher, García grew up in West Texas and has lived most of her life in New Mexico. She lives with her husband in Seattle.

2009 Writers Program

For twenty years, Laura Hirschfield has been an editor and writer of elementary school curriculum materials and non-fiction books for children. She is currently earning an MFA in poetry from Pacific University in Oregon.

2009 Writers Program

Kim-An Lieberman is a writer of Vietnamese and Jewish American descent, born in Rhode Island and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She studied interdisciplinary humanities at the University of Washington before earning a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Her debut collection of poetry, Breaking the Map, was published in 2008 by Blue Begonia Press. Her poems and essays have also appeared in Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, ZYZZYVA, CALYX, Threepenny Review, and the anthology Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace.

A recipient of awards from the Jack Straw Writers Program and the Mellon Foundation for the Humanities, as well as a finalist for the 2009 Stranger Genius Awards, Kim-An has been a featured reader at venues including Richard Hugo House, Seattle Public Libraries, Skagit River Poetry Festival, Portland’s Wordstock Festival, the San Francisco International Poetry Festival, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York. She has also spent many years in the classroom, teaching writing and literature at every level from kindergarten through college.

2009 Writers Program

Priscilla Long is a writer of poetry, essays, creative nonfictions, fictions, science, and history. She has an MFA degree from the University of Washington and teaches writing.

Her guide to writing is The Writer’s Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life. Her book of poems is Crossing Over: Poems (University of New Mexico Press, 2015). Her collection of linked literary nonfictions is Fire and Stone: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (University of Georgia Press). Her handbook for artists of all kinds is Minding the Muse: A Handbook for Painters, Composers, Writers, and Other Creators. Her scholarly history book is Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry. Long’s essays, literary non-fiction works, and poems have been widely published and have garnered several awards, including a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing.

She wrote an every-Wednesday column at The American Scholar website titled Science Frictions. The complete set of 92 pieces on everything from Saturn to salt may be found here.

Priscilla serves as Founding and Consulting Editor of HistoryLink.org, the online encyclopedia of Washington state history.

2023 Writers Program (Curator)

2009 Writers Program

Michael Magee is a poet, freelance writer, reviewer of film and drama, and playwright. He has two recent poetry collections, Budapest After Dark, 2024 and Terra Firma: Sacred Ground, 2022. Magee’s plays and poetry have been produced and published in the U.S., England, and Greece. His chapbooks include: Ireland’s Eye, A Trip to Jerusalem, and the recently published Dementia: Love is a Blur and Vanishing Points (Beaux Arts Press, 2017). His play Shank’s Mare was produced at Northwest Actor’s Studio and later became a movie which won a best actor award at the Bare Bones, Script to Screen Film Festival in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A Night in Reading Gaol With Oscar Wilde was produced here and in Derby, England. He was co-editor of 2020 Tacoma: In Images and Verse and is editor and publisher of Beaux Arts Press. Recent work has been published in Cirque and Journal of Wild Culture.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

Budapest After Dark is a rotogravure of Budapest, 2023, taking us through the Hungarian National Museum and Art Gallery, Liszt Recital Hall, Varosliget Park, and Vajdahunyad and Buda Castles.  He touches both sides of the Duna (Danube)  from Pest to Buda, crossing the Chain, Margaret and Elizabeth Bridges where he explores the world of film noir as seen through art.

Budapest After Dark

At night I look out from my window
across the square, where Roma gather
to banter and dogs barking to the sound
of a harmonica as skateboards form a rhythm
section and people from the tavern are toasting
half-moon glasses while I am dry tonight here–

In the cell of my room more monkish than Kafka
although there are bars on our doors, I hear
singing and across the city I can see lights
from the Margit Bridge as a white halo appears
while above small lights appear in clusters
constellations in the hills of Buda, make
lovely ornaments for those of us in Pest.

2009 Writers Program

Angela Martinez Dy is a poet, spoken word and hip-hop artist who blends commentary, craft and analysis as she grapples with issues of family, community and social justice from the perspective of a second-generation American. Subject matter includes the immigrant experience, current events, and world history as told by a woman of color. Angela Martinez Dy is a founding member and current director of Youth Speaks Seattle.

2009 Writers Program

Kevin Simmonds is a musician and writer originally from New Orleans. He studied music at Vanderbilt University, Middle Tennessee State University and completed the Ph.D. at the University of South Carolina. He founded Tono International Arts Association, an international arts presenter in northern Japan (Iwate Prefecture).

Kevin received a Fulbright fellowship to Singapore where he started the first-ever poetry workshop in Changi Prison. He has published poems, essays and reviews in American Scholar, Bellevue Review, FIELD, jubilat, Kyoto Journal, Massachusetts Review, Poetry, RHINO and Salt Hill, and in the anthologies Beyond the Frontier, Ecopoetry, Gathering Ground, The Ringing Ear, To Be Left with the Body and War Diaries.

His books include the poetry collections Bend to it and Mad for Meat (Salmon Poetry, 2014 & 2011) and two edited works, Ota Benga Under My Mother’s Roof (University of South Carolina Press, 2012), the final work of the late writer Carrie Allen McCray, and the poetry anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2011).

As a composer and performer, he’s collaborated frequently with Kwame Dawes on several projects including Voices of Haiti: A Post-Quake Odyssey in Verse, I Saw Your Face, HOPE: Living & Loving with HIV in Jamaica and Wisteria: Twilight Songs of the Swamp Country. Wisteria was the subject of a 2007 BBC Radio documentary and HOPE received an Emmy Award in 2009. Most recently, he wrote the music (and co-wrote the text) for Emmett Till, a river, a Japanese noh-inspired oratorio that debuted at Theatre of Yugen in late 2013.

His music has been performed throughout the US, Japan, the UK and the Caribbean, and his films, such as Singing Whitman and feti(sh)ame, have been screened at SF Frameline Festival, MIX NYC, Provincetown International Festival, Hong Kong’s InDBlue Festival and Barcelona’s Mimi LGBT Short Film Festival.

Kevin has received awards, fellowships, commissions and grants from Atlantic Center for the Arts, Cave Canem, Creative Work Fund, Fulbright, Jack Straw, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, Squaw Valley and San Francisco Arts Commission.

2009 Writers Program

Storme Webber is a Two Spirit, Alutiiq/Black/Choctaw, internationally-nurtured poet, playwright, educator, and interdisciplinary artist. She creates blues-influenced, socially-engaged texts and images exploring identity, art activism, and the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, memory and spirit.

Storme’s poetry collections include Diaspora, Blues Divine, and the forthcoming Noirish Lesbiana. Her solo theatre works include Buddy Rabbit, Noirish Lesbiana: A Night at the Sub Room, and Wild Tales of Renegade Halfbreed Bulldagger. She has been highlighted in numerous anthologies, documentaries (including Venus Boyz, May Ayim: Hope in Heart, What’s Right with Gays These Days?, Living Two Spirit), and international performance tours.

She enjoys teaching Creative Writing to young people at the University of Washington and has served as featured faculty at Hedgebrook, Whidbey Island Writer’s Conference, Chuckanut Writer’s Conference, The University of Puget Sound, Seattle University, and Richard Hugo House.

Storme was honored to receive a 2015 James W. Ray Venture Project Award from the Artist Trust/Frye Art Museum Consortium. Storme’s work has also been supported & awarded by 4Culture, Hedgebrook, Richard Hugo House, Pride Foundation, Seattle Art Museum, CIRI Foundation, City of Seattle and Jack Straw Foundation.

Artist Support Program 2013: Blues Divine, a CD of spoken word and music, 21st century blues and freedom songs.

2009 Writers Program