2013 Jack Straw Writers Program

Daemond Arrindell is a poet, playwright, performer, and teaching artist. He has performed in venues across the country and has been repeatedly commissioned by both Seattle and Bellevue Art Museums. As teaching artist, he is a faculty member of Freehold Theatre and TAT Lab: the Washington State Teaching Artist Training Lab; Adjunct faculty at Seattle University and Tacoma’s School of the Arts; and Writer-In-Residence through Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools Program and Skagit River Poetry Foundation. As a writer, he is a 2013 Jack Straw Writer, a VONA Voices Writers’ Workshop fellow, and his work has been published by City Arts, Poetry NW, Specter, and Crosscut magazines. He recently co-adapted the novel Welcome To Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson into a play for Book-It Repertory Theater.

2018 Writers Program: Curator

2013 Writers Program

Kate Carroll de Gutes’s book, Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, won the 2016 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and a 2016 Lambda Literary Award in Memoir. A wry observer and writer who started her career as a journalist, Kate is a stickler for the serial comma, and also believes that there should always be two spaces between a period and the beginning of the next sentence.

Kate’s second book, The Authenticity Experiment: Lessons From the Best & Worst Year of My Life, based on her critically acclaimed blog, was released by Two Sylvias Press in September, 2017 and won an Independent Publishing Award medal in LGBTQ Nonfiction.

Kate has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Anderson Center, Artsmith, and Centrum. An authentic and humorous teacher, Kate has taught at Pacific Lutheran University, University of Idaho, University of Puget Sound, and Willamette University, as well as at the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference. She teaches on-going classes at the Attic Institute in Portland, Oregon.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Professional Writing from the University of Puget Sound and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.

2013 Writers Program

Dennis Caswell lives outside Woodinville and works as a software engineer in the aviation industry. He holds degrees in computer science from UC Berkeley and UCLA and spent the eighties and nineties designing and programming computer games and educational software in northern California, where he grew up. He moved to Washington with his family in 1997.

His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Rattle, Bluestem, Floating Bridge Review, Crab Creek Review, and assorted other journals and anthologies, and he was selected for the Jack Straw Writers Program in 2013. His first full-length collection, Phlogiston (FLOW-ji-stahn), was published in 2012 by Floating Bridge Press.

2013 Writers Program

Larry Crist is a performing poet with two books, Undertow Overtures and Alibi for the Scapegoat. He lived in Seattle 25 years before moving back to his hometown, Trinidad in Humboldt County where he writes, does theater and looks after his 91 year old mother. He has also lived in Chicago, Houston, London, and Philadelphia, where he received his MFA in theatre. He’s been widely published. Among some of his favorites are Pearl, Slipstream, Alimentum, Dos Passos Review, Floating Bridge Press, Evening Street Review, and Clover. He’s been nominated for 3 Pushcarts.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

Alibi for the Scapegoat is a collection of mostly republished work: 14 short stories, 57 poems, and one long poem, 16 pages: TV: the Lost Years, which Larry performed in 2023 @ The Exit Theatre in Arcata, Ca.

2013 Writers Program

Josephine Ensign is a writer and a nurse with a focus on health inequities for people marginalized by poverty and homelessness. Ensign is the author of Catching Homelessness: A Nurse’s Story of Falling Through the Safety Net, Soul Stories: Voices from the Margins, and most recently, Skid Road: On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in an American City, which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She has had writing residencies at Hedgebrook, Centrum, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Mesa Refuge.

Artist Support Program 2023: Skid Road/Way Home Oral Histories and Podcasts

Artist Support Program 2015: Produce a series of oral histories with Seattle-area homeless service providers and activists for a digital storytelling project on health and healing in the context of homelessness.

2013 Writers Program

Jeannine Hall Gailey is a poet with MS who served as Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She’s the author of six books of poetry, including Field Guide to the End of the World, winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and the SFPA’s Elgin Award, and her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions. Her work appeared in journals like The American Poetry Review, JAMA, Ploughshares, and Poetry. She’s also the author of PR for Poets: A Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. She has a B.S. in Biology and an M.A. in English from the University of Cincinnati, as well as an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Pacific University. Her poems have been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac and on Verse Daily; two were included in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. In 2007 she received a Washington State Artist Trust GAP Grant and in 2007 and 2011 a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

Against a constellation of solar weather events and evolving pandemic, Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Flare, Corona paints a self-portrait of the layered ways that we prevail and persevere through illness and natural disaster.

Calamity

Your family is coming over for Thanksgiving.
Even worse, it’s snowing.

Headless robots are playing soccer with your soul.
UFOs have been sighted overhead.

A meteor is definitely heading straight for you.
It might miss, but then again.

Tonight a city is being decimated by Godzilla,
or was it a bunch of genetically-engineered dinosaurs?

Either way, I hope you’re lizard-friendly.
Tonight you have to give a speech

and that girl who hated you in third grade
will be in the audience. What have I ever done

to deserve this? the prophet asks, tearing his robes
in the desert. God responds: How long you got?

A plague of egrets, of eaglets, of egress.
A black hole has just opened up and it is

already swallowing someone else’s sun.
Did you see the team play last night? A travesty.

Someone is always preaching about doomsday.
Who are you wearing? Because this night

your life will be required of you. Grab a bag,
a sword, a water bottle. Go out swinging.

2013 Writers Program

Jay McAleer is a poetry and fiction writer from Seattle. He has a BFA from DePaul University and a certificate in Literary Fiction from the University of Washington. He has previously published essays in the short-lived magazine The Austin Idealist and is currently at work on a novel.

2013 Writers Program

Peter Munro is a fisheries scientist who works in the Bering Sea, the Aleutian Islands, the Gulf of Alaska, and Seattle. He has had poems published here and there.

2013 Writers Program

Emily Pérez is the author of What Flies Want, winner of the Iowa Prize, as well as House of Sugar House of Stone. She co-edited The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. A CantoMundo fellow and Ledbury Critic, her work has been supported by Hedgebrook, Bread Loaf, and Jack Straw.

She graduated with honors from Stanford University and earned an MFA at the University of Houston, where she served as a poetry editor for Gulf Coast and taught with Writers in the Schools. Her poems have appeared in journals including POETRY, Diode, Bennington Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Calyx, Borderlands, and DIAGRAM. She teaches English in Denver where she lives with her husband and sons.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

In What Flies Want, disaster looms in domesticity: a family grapples with its members’ mental health, a marriage falters, and a child experiments with self-harm. With its backdrop of school lockdown drills, #MeToo, and increasing political polarization, the collection asks how these private and public tensions are interconnected.

Before I Learned to be a Girl

I used to howl around the eaves,
a wind unwound. I used to bridle
like a groom atop a stallion, cowing
pirates into spilling bullion. Never
buckled like a shoe, but shooed the
shorn beyond the barn so I could hoard
the golden fleece. I fleeced the flock,
a picky phoenix culling coppers
from their pockets. I pockmarked
concrete castles with a fist, I frisked
the guards and gunmen. I manned
the gunwale, gunned down the
siren song until I heard my sternum thrum.
Wound my way around the Capes
and through canals, threading narrow
courses like a needle, needling
all my naysayers and needing
nothing but my own fine fire.

2013 Writers Program

Judith Skillman is a poet, editor and translator. Her recent collection is Subterranean Address, New & Selected Poems, Deerbrook Editions 2023. Skillman is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, The King County Arts Commission, and the Washington State Arts Commission. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she has completed residencies at Centrum and Hedgebrook. Her poems have appeared in Commonweal, Threepenny Review, Zyzzyva,  and many other journals. An educator, editor, and translator, Judith lives with her husband in Kennydale, WA.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

“Judith Skillman’s devotion to both the nuances and deeper entailments that life and lineage present us is on show in Subterranean Address: New and Selected Poems 2014-2022.  Gathered from her seven most recent collections, with a winning group of new work, Skillman writes of her subjects with matchless clarity: aging (“To be a tenant of the body/ means one’s chores are never done”), infirmity, family, the natural world, the lives of artists (Kafka, Nabokov, Lucien Freud, et. al.), and history (immigrant destinies, the Shoah)—all with measured feeling, as if to imply a dignity in our imperfection. At her best—and here she is at her best—few poets I know can surpass her evocative powers.”
—David Rigsbee

All We Took

The rains begin to beat against the glass.
Summer flowers replaced by umber leaves.
All we took for granted in our ease.

A cycle, a circle—how else learn loss?
Plump cheeks, tanned legs, soft skin are but a sieve.
The rains begin to beat against the glass.

As metaphor the same four seasons pass.
Each childhood’s novel—what is there to grieve?
All we take for granted in our ease.

Monsoons come to loosen the rose, its green caress.
Branches held hostage—harsh winds moan through sleeves.
The rains begin to beat against the glass.

I feel my body turn back into moss.
A spell of blues deletes my will to live—
and all I took for granted in my ease.

It’s cold in the bedroom where I undress,
more difficult than ever to believe.
The rains begin to beat against the glass.
All’s taken for granted when at ease.

2010 Writers Program

2008 Writers Program

A graduate of the inaugural class of Artist’s Trust Edge program, Corry Venema-Weiss is a past recipient of a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation and a residency at the Whaletown Institute. A midwife by training, she currently works in HIV research. She lives on an urban farm in Everett, Washington with her husband, one cat, and four chickens. Her proudest achievement: being the parent of another emerging writer.

2013 Writers Program

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke is the author of Adventures in Property Management (Sibling Rivalry, 2017) and Thunder Lizard (H_NGM_N, 2016). She is co-founder and director of Till, a literary organization that offers an annual writing residency at Smoke Farm in Arlington, WA. She is outreach coordinator for Conium Review and was previously managing fiction editor at Pacifica Literary Review. She has received support from Jack Straw Cultural Center as a writing fellow, from Artist Trust as an EDGE participant, and from the Cornish College Arts Incubator. She’s received writing residencies from Vermont Studio Center and Ragdale Foundation. Werner-Jatzke has taught creative writing through Seattle Central Community College and served on the board of Lit Crawl Seattle. She received her MFA from Goddard College, during which she was editor-in-chief of Pitkin Review and founded Lit.mustest, a now-defunct reading series.

2013 Writers Program