2020 Jack Straw Writers Program

Rob Arnold’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, Hyphen, RED INK, Yes Poetry, and The Ocean State Review, among others. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has received support from the Somerville Arts Council and Artist Trust. He is a Program Director and Curator of Events at Hugo House.

2020 Writers Program

Ebo Barton is a Black and Filipino, Transgender and Non-Binary, poet and educator. Currently residing in Seattle, Washington by way of Los Angeles, California. For the past 12 years, they have participated in national and international poetry slam competitions as a representative of Seattle. Their most notable poetry slam accolade is placing 5th in the world in 2016. You may have seen Ebo’s work in Adrienne: A Poetry Journal by Sibling Rivalry Press, Thriving While Trans: A Love Manual, Natasha Marin’s Black Imagination, Write About Now, Button Poetry, and All Def Poetry. They and their work have been featured in Seattle Weekly, Seattle Gay News, Seattle Review of Books, and Crosscut. Their work touches on political issues from a personal point of view and often is birthed from the struggles of living in the identities that they are. Ebo believes in the power of language and art as a tool for revolution.

Watch: Ebo Barton live at Jack Straw

2021 Artist Support Program: Insubordinate audio book

2020 Writers Program

Jeffrey Lee Cheatham II is an author from Seattle, WA. Since 2014, he has self-published three children’s books—The Family Jones and The Eggs of Rex, Why is Jane so Mad?, and Hi Blue Sky—to increase positive representation of children of color in books. In 2016, Jeffrey created the Seattle Urban Book Expo, with the mission of providing a platform for fellow authors of color to showcasing their literary arts in the Pacific Northwest.

2020 Writers Program

Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American hybrid writer, community organizer, and teacher. They are author of The Heart’s Traffic (Arktoi/Red Hen Press) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press; winner of 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry), as well as the chapbooks how to make black paper sing (speCt! Books, 2019) and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs and a Finalist for the Leslie Scalapino Award). Chen is also co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 2011; AK Press 2016) and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets (Achiote Press, 2009). They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat and Imagining America and are part of Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities. They are currently Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Bothell.

New Media Gallery 2021-22 (with Cassie Mira): Breathing in a Time of Disaster

2020 Writers Program

Elaina Ellis is the author of Write about an Empty Birdcage (Write Bloody Publishing) and the recipient of fellowships from Lambda Literary, Tent, Vermont Studio Center, Mineral School, and Jack Straw, as well as an Artist Trust GAP Award. She is at work on a second collection, I’m Only Praying to Believe What’s True, which responds to the text and impulses of the biblical Book of Ezekiel. She earned her MFA at Antioch University Los Angeles, and works as an editor at Copper Canyon Press.

2020 Writers Program

Michelle Goodman is a journalist and creative nonfiction writer. Her personal and reported essays have appeared in the Washington Post, Seattle Times, Salon, Narratively, Magenta, Proto, and several anthologies. She is author of the books The Anti 9-to-5 Guide and My So-Called Freelance Life, both published by Seal Press. She has been a writer in residence at Artsmith, Hedgebrook, Playa, and Whiteley Center. Although she is most known for writing about work, in 2016 she turned her attention to writing about death, grief, and the decaying body.

2020 Writers Program

Maisha Banks Manson is a Queer, gender non-conforming, Black identified artist, activist, teacher and writer. They have devoted their personal journey to self healing through reclamation of personal history, knowledge and creating spaces for healing of others.

2020 Writers Program

Wryly T. McCutchen is a hybrid writer, community educator, and interdisciplinary performance artist. Their art centers on themes of body, loss, and spirit. They are trans, queer, and crazy; so too are all the glinting possibilities they slice into being. Wryly has lived most of their life on the unceded lands of the Puget Sound Salish peoples. Recipient of the Lil Elbe scholarship, Wryly attended LAMBDA Literary’s Emerging Writers Retreat as a Poetry Fellow in 2018. Their debut poetry collection My Ugly and Other Love Snarls, came out in 2017. Their work speaks directly (through the mouth) and moves abstractly (through the rest of the body and the spaces it inhabits). Wryly conjures multi-media, visceral experiences which challenge the harmful boundaries imposed by cisgender and heterosexual gatekeepers. This art resurrects trans ancestors and makes space for deep queer healing.

2020 Writers Program

Troy Osaki is a Filipino Japanese poet, community organizer, and attorney from Seattle, WA. A three-time grand slam poetry champion, he has received fellowships from Kundiman and the Jack Straw Cultural Center and is the recipient of an Artist Trust award. His work has appeared in the Bellingham Review, Drunk in a Midnight Choir, Moss: A Journal of the Pacific Northwest, and elsewhere.

2020 Writers Program

Helen K. Thomas is from Seattle, WA by way of Lagos, Nigeria. She writes Young Adult fiction that illuminates the interiority of black girls as they navigate joy and pain and love and loss while living in the Pacific Northwest. Recently, she was part of the inaugural Tin House YA Fiction Workshop and is thrilled to be a 2020 Jack Straw Writers Fellow.

Jose Trejo-Maya is a remnant of the Nahuatlacah oral tradition -a tonalpouhque mexica from the lowlands of a time and place that no longer exists. Published in UK, US, India, Spain, Australia, Argentina, Germany, and Venezuela. He is from Celaya, Guanajuato, Mexico, where he lived in the small rural pueblo of Tarimoró. His inspiration(s) include Netzahualcoyotl, Humberto Ak’abal, Ray A. Young Bear, and James Welch. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2015 and was awarded Tercer Premio from El Centro Canario Estudios Caribeños – El Atlántico – en el Certamen Internacional de Poesía “La calle que tú me das” 2016. He was a New Rivers Press Many Voices Project 2018 Finalist. While in ceremony with Chololo medicine men in the Tule River Reservation, all this came from a dream written in prophecy.

2020 Writers Program

Arianne True is a queer poet and folk artist from Seattle and from the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations. Arianne has taught and mentored with Writers in the Schools (WITS), YouthSpeaks Seattle, and the Richard Hugo House, and is a proud alum of Hedgebrook and the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She can be found playing banjo with her rats near the edge of the woods.

2020 Writers Program