Visiting Writers

The MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics regularly hosts residencies with renowned writers. Visiting writers extend and enrich the MFA’s creative community.

Autumn 2024

Cedar Sigo is a poet and member of the Suquamish Nation. He studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the author of endless books and pamphlets of poetry, including All This Time (Wave Books, 2021), Stranger in Town (City Lights, 2010), Expensive Magic (House Press, 2008), two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003 and 2005) and most recently Siren of Atlantis (Wave Books, 2025). In 2022 he received a grants to artist’s award from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He has taught all over the country including The University of Washington, Bard College, Washington University, Naropa University and The Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Lofall, Washington.

Nisi Shawl (they/them) is the multiple award-winning author, co-author, and editor of over a dozen books of speculative fiction and related nonfiction, including the standard text on diverse representation, Writing the Other: A Practical Approach.  Shawl’s best-known fiction is the Nebula Award finalist novel Everfair.  Kinning, published in January 2024, is an Everfair sequel.  Additional recent books include the February 2023 Middle Grade historical fantasy novel Speculation, and the September 2024 Beat-era fantasy The Day and Night Books of Mardou Fox. Editing credits include the New Suns anthology series and, with Dr. Rebecca J. Holden, Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler.  They’ve spoken at Duke University, Spelman College, Sarah Lawrence College, and many other institutions.  For over two decades they have served on the boards of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and of the Carl Brandon Society, a nonprofit supporting the presence of people of color in fantastic literature.

Spring 2024

Nadine Antoinette Maestas

Nadine Antoinette Maestas is a poet’s poet and believes that the empire of the sentence is an extremely oppressive totalitarian regime. She prefers the company of poems so much that she would rather read a bad poem than a good novel, but when she is not doing poetry, Nadine loves mountain biking and trail running in dangerous and remote places in the Pacific Northwest. She holds an M.F.A. from University of Michigan’s Hellen Zell Writer’s Program where she was awarded the Faraar award for playwriting. Her hybrid poem play “Hellen on Wheels: A Play of Rhyme and Reason” was performed at California College of the Arts. She is the co-author with Karen Weiser of “Beneath the Bright Discus” (Potes & Poets Press, 2000), and is a co-editor for the poetry anthology Make It True: Poetry from Cascadia. You can find her poems published in Ofrenda Magazine, Snail Trail Press, Pageboy Magazine, Lyric &, The Germ, Poor Mojo’s Almana(k), Really Serious Literature Disappearing Chapbooks, and the bilingual anthology Make It True Meets Medusario. Her dissertation, Calling out the State: Postmodern American Anthropoetics landed her a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Her first solo book, Imperialism As Sweet As Insult, was published by Really Serious Literature Press in April 2021. She currently teaches at Cornish College of the Arts.

Richard Chiem

Richard Chiem is the author of You Private Person (Sorry House Classics, 2017), and the novel, King of Joy (Soft Skull, 2019), which was long listed for the 2020 PEN Open Book Award. He was named a 2019 Writer to Watch by the Los Angeles Times. He was also a judge for the 2023 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. He lives in Seattle.

Image credit: Bella Petro

Autumn 2023

Kristen Millares Young

Kristen Millares Young is a journalist, essayist, and author of the novel Subduction, a Paris Review staff pick called “whip-smart” by the Washington Post and “a brilliant debut” by the Seattle Times. Winner of Nautilus and IPPY awards, Subduction was a finalist for two International Latino Book Awards and Foreword Indies Book of the Year. She reviews books for the Washington Post. A former Hugo House Prose Writer-in-Residence, she is the editor of Seismic, a Washington State Book Award finalist. Kristen was the researcher for the New York Times team behind “Snow Fall,” which won a Pulitzer. She is Seattle University’s 2023 Distinguished Visiting Writer.

Image credit: Paulette Perhach

Cedar Sigo

Cedar Sigo was raised on the Suquamish Reservation in the Pacific Northwest and studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the author of ten books and pamphlets of poetry, including All This Time (Wave Books, 2021), Stranger in Town (City Lights, 2010), Expensive Magic (House Press, 2008), two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003 and 2005) and also the Bagley Wright Lecture Series book Guard the Mysteries (Wave Books, 2021). He has taught all over including St. Mary’s College, Naropa University and Bard University. He was a mentor in the low residency MFA program at The Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Lofall, Washington.

Image Credit: Christopher Felver

Spring 2023

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author, most recently, of The Freezer Door, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. She’s the author of three novels and three nonfiction titles (the latest forthcoming this year), as well as the editor of six nonfiction anthologies. Her memoir, The End of San Francisco, won a Lambda Literary Award, her novel Sketchtasy was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2018, and her anthology Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots was an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book. Sycamore’s latest anthology, Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis, was named one of BookRiot’s “100 Most Influential Queer Books of All Time.” Her next book, Touching the Art, will be published by Soft Skull in November 2023.

Image credit: Dorothy Edwards/Crosscut

Dao Strom

Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of the poetry-art collection, Instrument (Fonograf Editions), winner of the 2022 Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and its musical companion, Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, with song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint Press) and Grass Roof, Tin Roof (Mariner Books). Her work has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, NEA, and others. She is co-founder of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective project of Vietnamese diasporic women writers; and de-canon, a literary/social art project that centers works by writers of color. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Strom was born in Vietnam and lives in Portland, Oregon.

Image credit: Dao Strom

Winter 2023

Ruth Joffre

Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast, which was longlisted for The Story Prize. Her fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Wigleaf, the anthologies Best Microfiction 2021 & 2022, and elsewhere. Her interview series with the authors, editors, and curators of craft books and resources is freely available on Catapult’s Don’t Write Alone and the Kenyon Review blog. She earned her BA from Cornell University and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She served as the 2020-2022 Hugo House Prose Writer-in-Residence and co-organized the Fight for Our Lives performance series with D.A. Navoti.

Image credit: Scott Locklear

D.A. Navoti

D.A. Navoti (he/him) is a multidisciplinary storyteller, composer, and writer of the Gila River Indian Community. The author of essays, stories, and the forthcoming memoir One Pima Pilgrim, his artistic work spans across three “landscapes” — written, musical, visual — a hybrid form that explores what it means to be Indigenous in the 21st century. A recipient of the Artist Trust Fellowship award and an Artist Support Program residency with Jack Straw Cultural Center, both in 2022, he serves as the 2022-23 Native-Artist-in-Residence at Seattle Rep. From January 2020 to January 2021, he co-curated the Fight for Our Lives performance series with Ruth Joffre, advocating for communities targeted by divisive politics and systemic oppression. He was also a writer fellow with Jack Straw Cultural Center and Hugo House, and his literary work has appeared in Homology Lit, Spartan, Indian Country Today, Cloudthroat, and elsewhere.

Image Credit: D.A. Navoti

Spring 2022

Steven Dunn

A 2021 Whiting Award winner, and shortlisted for Granta’s “Best of Young American Novelists,” Steven Dunn is the author of two books from Tarpaulin Sky Press: water & power (2018) and Potted Meat, which was a co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and has been adapted for a short film entitled The Usual Route, from Foothills Productions. Steven was born and raised in West Virginia, and after 10 years in the Navy, he earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Denver, and an MFA from Stetson University. He teaches in the MFA programs at Regis University and Cornell College.

Winter 2021

Jenn Givhan

Jennifer Givhan, a Mexican-American writer and activist from the Southwestern desert, is the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently Rosa’s Einstein (Camino Del Sol Poetry Series), two chapbooks, and the novels Trinity Sight and Jubilee (Blackstone Publishing). Her work has appeared in The Best of the Net, Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, POETRY Magazine, The Rumpus, The New Republic, AGNI, TriQuarterly, The Nation, Crazyhorse, Witness, Southern Humanities Review, and Kenyon Review. She has received, among other honors, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices fellowship, and New Ohio Review’s Poetry Prize. Givhan holds a Master’s degree in English from California State University Fullerton and an MFA from Warren Wilson College.

Layli Long Soldier

Layli Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA with honors from Bard College. She is the author of the chapbook Chromosomory (2010) and the full-length collection Whereas (2017), which won the National Books Critics Circle award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been a contributing editor to Drunken Boat and poetry editor at Kore Press; in 2012, her participatory installation, Whereas We Respond, was featured on the Pine Ridge Reservation. In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. She was awarded a Whiting Writer’s Award in 2016. Long Soldier is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Spring 2020

Diana Nguyen

A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (Omnidawn 2018), which was selected by Terrance Hayes. In addition to winning the 92Y “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Contest, 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Colorado Book Award, she was also a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. A Kundiman fellow, she currently teaching in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and will be an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh starting Autumn 2020.

Winter 2019

Don Mee Choi

Don Mee Choi is the author of The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010) and Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), and chapbooks Petite Manifesto (Vagabond Press, 2014), Ahn Hak-sop #4 (The Green Violin, 2018), Sky Translation (Goodmorning Menagerie, 2019), and a pamphlet of essays Freely Frayed (Wave Pamphlet #9, 2014). She is currently a 2019 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program Fellow. She has translated several collections of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry, including Poor Love Machine (Action Books, 2016) and Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018).

Nisi Shawl

Nisi Shawl wrote the 2008 Tiptree Award-winning story collection Filter House, and the 2016 Nebula finalist and Tiptree Honor novel Everfair, an alternate history of the Congo. In 2005 she co-wrote Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, which has become the standard text on inclusive representation in the imaginative genres. Her stories have appeared in Analog and Asimov’s Magazines, among many other publications. She has edited and co-edited several fiction and nonfiction anthologies such as Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany; and Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler, both finalists for the Locus Award. Shawl is a founder of the Carl Brandon Society and a Clarion West board member.

Spring 2016

Rae Armantrout

Rae Armantrout is one of the founding members of the West Coast group of Language poets. She has published ten books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies. Armantrout currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego, where she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics.

Renee Gladman

Renee Gladman is an artist and writer preoccupied with lines, crossings, thresholds, geographies, and syntaxes as they play out in the interstices of poetry and fiction. She is the author of eight published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, Morelia, a novella, and Calamities, a collection of essays, forthcoming in 2016. A 2014-2015 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, she currently lives in Providence, RI.

Danielle Vogel

Danielle Vogel is an artist and cross-genre writer who grew up along the south shore of Long Island. Her visual works—which investigate the archives of memory stored within language—have been exhibited most recently at RISD Museum, The University of Arizona’s Poetry Center, Abecedarian Gallery, Temple and Pace Universities. As a writer, Danielle explores the bonds between language and presence, between a reader and a writer, and how a book, as an extended architecture of a body, might serve as a site of radical transformation. She is the author of Between Grammars (Noemi 2015), the artist book Narrative & Nest (Abecedarian Gallery 2012), and lit (Dancing Girl Press 2008). She teaches writing and book arts at Wesleyan University.

Spring 2015

Rae Armantrout

Rae Armantrout is one of the founding members of the West Coast group of Language poets. She has published ten books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies. Armantrout currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego, where she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics.

Dodie Bellamy

Dodi Bellamy is one of the originators in the New Narrative literary movement of the early and mid 1980s, which attempts to use the tools of experimental fiction and critical theory and apply them to narrative storytelling. Bellamy also directed the San Francisco writing lab, Small Press Traffic, and taught creative writing at the San Francisco Art Institute, Mills College, University of California, Santa Cruz, University of San Francisco, Naropa University, Antioch University Los Angeles, San Francisco State University, and the California Institute of the Arts.

Rikki Ducornet

The author of nine novels, three collections of short fiction, two books of essays and five books of poetry, Rikki Ducornet has received both a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award For Fiction. She has received the Bard College Arts and Letters award and, in 2008, an Academy Award in Literature.

Many nationally and internationally renown writers and artists participate in our annual Fall Convergence each year. Our series “From the Convergence Zone” hosts multiple readings, talks and performances.