2016 Jack Straw Writers Program

Anis Gisele lives in Seattle, by way of Manila, Philippines. She is a queer immigrant writer of color whose work is celebrated as much as it is minimized and/or blindly consumed. Her writing draws together personal narrative, intergenerational pain, and identity politics. She has decided to stop writing her bios like resumes.

2016 Writers Program

Ramon Isao is a recipient of the Tim McGinnis Award for Fiction, and his stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, Hobart, and The American Reader. His screenplay credits include Dead Body, Zombies of Mass Destruction, and Junk (in which he co-stars). He has an MFA from Columbia University, and he teaches creative writing at Hugo House.

2016 Writers Program

E. J. Koh has appeared in World Literature Today, TriQuarterly, Southeast Review, Pleiades, Columbia Review, and elsewhere. She has been featured in Flavorwire’s “23 People Who Will Make You Care about Poetry” and Culture Trip’s 10 Americans Changing the Face of Poetry. She accepted fellowships at Kundiman, The MacDowell Colony, Napa Valley’s Writers’ Conference, Vermont Studio Center, Hannah J. Caldwell Excellence Award, and the Nadya Aisenberg Grant. She earned her MFA at Columbia University in New York for Creative Writing and Literary Translation in Korean and Japanese. In addition to lecturing at the Richard Hugo House, she has been a visiting scholar at the University of Washington, Seattle University, Portland Community College, and a panelist for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs.

2021 Writers Program Curator

2016 Writers Program

Robert Lashley has had poems published in such journals as Feminete, No Regrets, Drunk in a Midnight Choir, and The Cascadia Review. His work was also featured in Many Trails to the Summit, an anthology of Northwest form and Lyric poetry. His full length book The Homeboy Songs was published by Small Doggies press in April 2014.

2016 Writers Program

Casandra Lopez is a Chicana, Cahuilla, Tongva and Luiseno writer who currently lives in Seattle. She has an MFA from the University of New Mexico and has been selected for residencies with the Santa Fe Art Institute, School of Advanced Research and Hedgebrook. Her poetry chapbook Where Bullet Breaks was published by the Sequoyah National Research Center.  She is a CantoMundo, Jack Straw fellow and a founding editor of As/Us: A Space for Women of the World.

2016 Writers Program

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of two collections of short fiction, This Life She’s Chosen and Swimming with Strangers (both published by Chronicle Books). Her stories have been published in One Story, The American Scholar, Willow Springs, and other journals. She has been the recipient of a PEN/O. Henry Prize and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers Conference and the MacDowell Colony. Kirsten teaches at the Attic Learning Community in Woodinville and at the Hugo House.

2016 Writers Program

Corinne Manning is the founding editor of The James Franco Review, an online journal dedicated to the visibility of underrepresented artists. Her short fiction has appeared in Story Quarterly, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Moss, The Bellingham Review, The Southern Humanities Review, and as a chapbook through alice blue review’s Shotgun Wedding Series. Corinne has received grants and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Artist Trust, and The Hub City Writers Project.

2016 Writers Program

Ruby Hansen Murray is a citizen of the Osage Nation living in the lower Columbia River estuary. She is a writer and photographer, whose prose appears on Oregon Public Radio and in Wild in the Willamette, Oregon Humanities Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, American Ghost: Poets on Life after Industry, Tribal College Journal, Salal, and North Coast Squid. Her poetry appears in The Lake Rises, Tribal College Journal,and the Black Earth Institute’s About Place. She teaches creative writing in varied rural and tribal settings. A VONA fellow, she’s been awarded residencies at the Sitka Island Institute, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Brush Creek, Jentel, Playa and Hypatia-in-the-Woods. She began study with Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers and is completing an MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

2016 Writers Program

Shin Yu Pai is the creator and host of Ten Thousand Things, an award-winning podcast on Asian American stories that she produced from 2022 to 2024 for KUOW/NPR. The show was recognized by the Asian American Podcasters Association, The Signal Awards, and won a regional Edward R. Murrow Award. In 2023, Ten Thousand Things was named as one of the best podcasts of the year by Mashable. The show is now being independently produced by Wonder Media Network and is supported by the Common Counsel Foundation. In addition to her work as a podcast host, Shin Yu is a poet and received the 2024 Shelley Memorial Award for poetic genius from the Poetry Society of America and a Poets Laureate fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She served as the fourth Civic Poet of Seattle from 2023 to 2024, and was Poet Laureate of The City of Redmond from 2015 to 2017. Named as a Trailblazing Woman and one of Seattle’s Most Influential by Seattle Magazine, her literary archives are held at Yale University’s Beinecke Library.

Photo credit: Arzente Fine Art

2025 Artist Support Program: Production of Ten Thousand Things, an award-winning podcast on Asian American stories told through the lens of stories about artifacts owned by Asian Americans

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

In a collection that is deeply occupied with the notion of voice and who gets to have it, Shin Yu Pai’s No Neutral reaches toward a more authentic and natural voice to represent the poet’s perspective in all its range and concerns.

Monuments for Men (Memory’s Vault), Fort Worden

I can’t deny that beauty is
here, when bullied by design

to turn my back to the bay
and enthrone myself beneath

the shelter, to face a single pale
stone, enshrined within a slab

mausoleum – the permanence
of rock is as persistent as the force

of men, it’s evident in the words
etched onto stone steles, hostile

architectures crafted by those
who saw themselves like gods

who coerced the eyes upward
to poles planted at the site,

that old trope of the man, &
his lover the sea, patiently waiting

for his return, I think why
not turn the gaze back on her

right now – the sea – we have
already seen all there is to see

2016 Writers Program

Artist Support Program 2015: Heirloom, a site-specific installation in Piper’s Orchard that includes an audio recording of a poem mixed with field recordings of the Orchard.

Alison Stagner’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in journals such as Mid-American Review, The Southeast Review, and H_NGM_N; she is the recipient of the 2015-2016 James Wright Poetry Award. She holds an M.F.A in Poetry from the University of Washington and works as the Events Coordinator for Seattle Arts & Lectures.

2016 Writers Program

Shontina Vernon is a writer/musician/performer/educator. Her interdisciplinary work fuses live music, poetic narrative, and multi-media to tell the diverse stories of underrepresented communities. She is a Hedgebrook writer, a National Performance Network touring artist, a recipient of 4Culture’s Artist Grant and a nominated playwright on the Kilroy’s List. Her work has been produced by the Hip Hop Theatre Festival NYC, ACT Theatre in collaboration with The Hansberry Project, and WoWiWo in Denmark. She is currently at work on HER BLACK BODY POLITIC, a new piece that will premiere as part of the 2016 On the Boards Northwest New Works Festival. In addition, she is serving her second year as a Mentor Artist for Creative Justice, an arts as an alternative to incarceration program for young people in King County.

2016 Writers Program

Carolyne Wright’s latest books are Masquerade: a Memoir in Poetry (Lost Horse Press, 2021) and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse, 2017), whose title poem received a Pushcart Prize and appeared in The Best American Poetry. Wright is a Seattle native who has lived and taught on fellowships in Chile, Brazil, India and Bangladesh, for Seattle’s Richard Hugo House, and for colleges and universities around the country.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

Masquerade is a jazz-inflected, lyric-narrative “memoir in poetry,” a love story in verse, set principally in pre-Katrina New Orleans and in Seattle, involving an interracial couple, artists and writers, trying to find a place together in racist America. Masquerade is unique in telling this story from the female protagonist’s perspective.

One Afternoon on Royal Street

You are reading Les Nègres. I am writing
To César. The sun gleams like a gold doubloon
Over the levee and the early winter bloom
Of camellias, the blue flame trembling

In the wall heater. Sun is blooming
With a cool flame, and you are talking
Over César and the early news. I am writing
And camellias are listening past you

To the voice of César blooming like a dark sun.
Your voice is a blue flame gleaming
On the pages of Les Nègres. The levees are trembling
Winter’s darkest gold. Listen: I am talking to you.

                                               After Kelly Cherry

2016 Writers Program