The 2013 Jack Straw Writers, selected by Curator Stephanie Kallos, are Daemond Arrindell, Kate Carroll de Gutes, Dennis Caswell, Larry Crist, Josephine Ensign, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Jay McAleer, Peter Munro, Emily Pérez, Judith Skillman, Corry Venema-Weiss, and Chelsea Werner-Jatzke.
Meet our 2013 Jack Straw Writers
Daemond Arrindell READ MORE >
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 READ MORE >
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 READ MORE >
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 READ MORE >
Poet Larry Cristhas lived in Seattle for the past 20 years and is originally from California, specifically Humboldt County (among other places). 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.
2013 Writers Program
Josephine Ensign READ MORE >
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 READ MORE >
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She is the author of five books of poetry: Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, which was a finalist for the 2012 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal and a winner of a Florida Publishers Association Presidential Award for Poetry, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and her latest, winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. 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.
2013 Writers Program
Jay McAleer READ MORE >
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 READ MORE >
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 READ MORE >
Emily Pérez is the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the poetry collection House of Sugar, House of Stone (Center for Literary Publishing) and the chapbook Backyard Migration Route, (Finishing Line Press) which explores literal and figurative borders from her childhood on the Texas/Mexico border.
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. A CantoMundo fellow, she has received recognition and funding from the Artist Trust, Jack Straw Writers, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, Summer Literary Seminars, and Inprint, Houston. 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.
2013 Writers Program
Judith Skillman READ MORE >
Judith Skillman is a poet, editor and translator. Her tenth book, Heat Lightning, New and Selected Poems 1986-2006, was published by Silverfish Review Press. The Carnival of All or Nothing was a finalist in the American Poetry Journal contest and is forthcoming from Cervéna Barva Press. 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 Poetry, FIELD, The Iowa Review, and many other journals. An educator, editor, and translator, Judith lives with her husband in Kennydale, WA.
2010 Writers Program
2008 Writers Program
Corry Venema-Weiss READ MORE >
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 READ MORE >
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
2013 Writers Program Curator
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2013 Writers Program Curator Stephanie Kallos spent twenty years in the theatre as an actress and teacher before turning her full time attention to writing. She was a resident in the Jack Straw Writers Program in 2001, while working on her first novel, Broken for You, which won the PNBA and Washington Book awards and was selected by Sue Monk Kidd for The Today Show book club. Her second novel, Sing Them Home, was chosen by Entertainment Weekly as one of the Top Ten Books of 2009. Her short fiction has received a Raymond Carver Short Story Award and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Stephanie lives in north Seattle with her husband and sons and is currently working on her third novel.
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