2024-2025 Poet Roster

Samar Abulhassan

Samar Abulhassan holds an M.F.A. from Colorado State University and has worked in public school classrooms for 15 years, the last ten years for Seattle Arts & Lectures’ WITS program and the last five years for the Skagit River Poetry Project. Born to Lebanese immigrants and raised with multiple languages, she is a 2006 Hedgebrook alum and the author of six chapbooks, including Farah and Nocturnal Temple and what departs/which arrivals. She recently received a 2016 CityArtist grant to complete a novel-in-poems, reflecting on memory, longing and the Arabic alphabet. Click here for more on Samar at Lectures.org

Subhaga Crystal Bacon

Subhaga has nearly twenty years’ experience as a teaching artist working in elementary, middle, and high schools and over forty years teaching writing in community colleges. She’s the author of four collections of poetry including Surrender of Water in Hidden Places, a chapbook on the Wenatchee and Methow watersheds, forthcoming in the spring of 2023, and Transitory, a chronicle of murders of transgender and gender nonconforming people in 2020, recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry, forthcoming in the fall of 2023 from BOA Editions. Her work encompasses documentary poetry focused on social issues and environmental change. Learn more about Subhaga here.

Teaching Statement: Poetry is an effective means for processing and understanding the world we live in. What does it mean to be a human living in this particular time and place? I have found that students of all ages have thoughts and feelings about these questions as they apply to their individual lives. They respond well to both formal and free verse poetry prompts when they are designed to help them investigate something that’s happening or has happened to them or to the natural and human world. I’m a very flexible instructor who can work nearly any classroom content into poetry: poetry extracted from non-literary documents using erasure and found poems; poems as letters; poems in forms from the simple to the more complex depending on grade levels. My key takeaway for students is the idea that poetry is a living art form and one that they can both understand and create on their own. A successful residency is one in which students are deeply engaged with texts and produce writing that shows their ability to create something unique and Meaningful.

Janée J. Baugher

Janée J. Baugher, MFA is the author of the craft book, The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction, as well as two poetry collections. She’s performed spoken-word at Bumbershoot Arts Festival, the Moore Theatre, and Folklife Arts Festival and has been featured on Seattle Channel TV and at the Library of Congress. She’s taught poetry and prose writing at libraries across Washington, Sitka Fine Arts Camp (AK), Interlochen Center for the Arts (MI), and Lewis and Clark High School (Spokane), to name a few. Baugher is an assistant editor at Boulevard and the recipient of a 2024 CityArtist award from the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture. Learn more about Janée here.

Michael Dylan Welch

Michael Dylan Welch has published dozens of poetry books, anthologies, and translations from Japanese, including the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in 20+ languages in Hummingbird, Kyoto Journal, One Art, Rattle, Raven Chronicles, Writer’s Chronicle, Writer’s Digest, and elsewhere. Michael is president of the Redmond Association of Spokenword, curator of SoulFood Poetry Night, and was a Jack Straw Writer and poet laureate of Redmond, Washington. He founded or cofounded the Haiku North America conference, the American Haiku Archives, the Seabeck Haiku Getaway, the Tanka Society of America, and National Haiku Writing Month (www.nahaiwrimo.com). Visit www.graceguts.com.

Jessica Gigot

Jessica Gigot is a poet, farmer, and writing coach. Her second book of poems, Feeding Hour, was a finalist for the 2021 Washington State Book Award. Jessica’s writing and reviews appear in several publications such as The New York Times, Orion, Terrain.org, Ecotone, and Poetry Northwest. Her memoir, A Little Bit of Land, will be published by Oregon State University Press in 2022. Learn more about Jessica here.

Teaching Statement: I believe in building innovative relationships and interactions between students and their communities. During a Poets in Schools residency, I would emphasize interdisciplinary learning, self-reflection, development of craft, and exploration of diverse literary voices. For me, writing continues to deepen my relationship with place and the natural world. I write about complex internal and external landscapes and ask students of all ages to bring honesty, curiosity, and respect to our time together. A successful residency will engage all students, spark new ideas and collaborations, and inspire each individual to write and value their own creative voice.

Danielle Hayden

Danielle Hayden is a teaching artist, writer, and a writer-in-residence at the Seattle Public Library. She has received fellowships from the Jack Straw Cultural Center and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, a literary grant from Artist Trust, and a residency with Anaphora Arts. She is also the creator and organizer of two new, local outdoor reading series: Prose in the Park and Poetry in the Park. She has completed workshops with Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Yale, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Danielle also created the website 3pistolary.com, which encourages people to write and send three personal letters, and Words of Remembrance, where she writes pet obituaries and memorials.

Teaching Statement: I strive to help students to find their own voice as writers; I like them to be able to identify the rules but not be confined by them. I also try to find that “in” with each learner, that point of connection, that piece or poet or subject or style that speaks to them. I value breadth as well as depth of knowledge. To that end, I do not have a particular focus for the poetry residency as I am aiming to do something quite new and different each day. I would like students to realize that anyone can engage with poetry. I acknowledge the subjectivity of poetry as an art form and concede that not every poem we encounter in our lives will resonate with us, and may not even make sense to us. However, I believe that there is a poem out there for everyone. I want to talk to students about different poetic techniques, approaches, and form and hear what they think works and what doesn’t—and why. I want them to then glean from those discussions and examples to help them craft their own poems and (for students who feel comfortable) to share some of their work aloud. I would feel that my residency was successful if students learned some new things about poetry, if they have a greater appreciation for the genre (even if some of them say they don’t “get” poetry), and if they have some fun along the way.

Lorraine Healy

Lorraine Healy was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from New England College, NH, and a post MFA in teaching Creative Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. Lorraine was a high school teacher and college instructor in Argentina before coming to the U.S. almost 25 years ago. She has taught at Antioch University Seattle, LITFuse Poetry Festival, Skagit Valley Poetry Festival, and as a guest poet in many universities. A Hedgebrook alumna, and the author of two full-length collections and three chapbooks, Lorraine feels comfortable teaching in English or in Spanish, or combinations of both. Her latest full-length collection, Mostly Luck. Odes & Other Poems of Praise, draws on the tradition of Pablo Neruda’s Elementary Odes. An award-winning photographer who enjoys analog photography, she is also interested in combining poetry and photography in different ways. Lorraine teaches at the high school and college levels. Learn more about Lorraine here.

Teaching Statement: My approach to teaching students is to be over prepared, have many possible ways to approach a class, and once I get to know the class a little bit, tailor my exercises towards what I think will engage them. My focus is on:

1. students enjoying, loving, being surprised by poetry
2. students then wanting to write their own poems

I want students to take away from my residency a feeling that poetry is not a solemn boring boulder on the curriculum, that it is something that speaks to them where they are, today, and that it is a tool they can own and wield. (this might mean I might use poems with profanity or “bad words” with age-appropriate students)

From my point of view, a successful residency looks like this:

• with young students: they wrote lots and lots of words and pictures and colored them and laughed a lot and can I come back next week
• with upper middle school and high school students: to have as many students as possible write at least one piece that surprises them with its power, to see the ones with real writing potential and encourage them (they are usually shy and very private, and sometimes deemed weird), to develop a friendly relationship with the teacher whose class I am in.

David Lasky

David Lasky, Seattle artist, co-authored the graphic novel Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song, which won comics’ Eisner Award in 2013. He is the colorist of the Newberry Honor Book El Deafo. When not drawing comics, he likes to write poetry in his spare time, and sometimes combines art forms to make ‘poetry comics.’ David has been a graphic novel instructor for 15 years, teaching to all ages and skill levels. Learn more about David here.

Cypress Manning

Cypress Manning is a queer + trans writer, artist, and educator from Taos, New Mexico. They received their MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in 2019, and were a 2022-23 Hugo House Fellow. They are in a two-person cribbage league with their mom, and live in Seattle where they teach creative writing.

Teaching Statement:

I believe that creative writing is about exploring our vulnerability, finding our agency and place in the world, working through what it means to be a human, and investigating what it means to live within systems of oppression, and communities of care. My goals for teaching are to create, in tandem with my students, an environment that centers their identities and voices, provide them with literature that reflects their identities and voices, while also exposing them to diverse and unique perspectives, and make writing feel immediate, vital, and interesting by centering their joy, creativity, and lived experiences. I believe it is dangerous to ask youth for vulnerability without doing everything in my power as an educator to center their safety and care first. I am committed to anti-racist pedagogy, and to centering disability justice within the classroom. I believe in creating structure in my classroom, because I know that clear expectations make learning safe, while also acknowledging that my students are the authority when it comes to themselves and their creativity. A successful residency to me is one where students felt joy in the act of creating, and were able to build their creative skills working alone, and alongside their peers.

Sati Mookherjee

Jeffrey Morgan

Jeffrey Morgan is the author of two poetry collections, Crying Shame (BlazeVOX [Books], 2011) and The Last Note Becomes Its Listener (Conduit Books & Ephemera, 2019), winner of the Minds on Fire Open Book Prize. His poems appear in Copper Nickel, The Kenyon Review Online, Ninth Letter, Poetry Northwest, and Rattle. He lives with his wife, daughter, and brother in Bellingham, WA, and he works for the Skagit River Poetry Foundation as a Poet-in-the-schools.

Teaching Statement: I teach poetry to grades K-12. My goal is to meet students where they are in their writing ability, and over the course of our week together help them find their voices and love of writing. Students love to write, even if at first they’re unsure or they think they don’t. I believe in saying yes. Yes to ideas. Yes to humor. Yes to the wonders of imagination. I make it clear to the students that I want to see their imaginations at work, and anything that gets in the way of that (spelling or grammar, for example) is not our focus. Poetry is the Legos of language. I want the students to show me what they can build out of words. At the end of the week, the goal is for them to be more enthusiastic and confident about poetry and language and the possibilities of what they can create than they were at the beginning of the week.

Caitlin Scarano

Caitlin Scarano is a writer based in Bellingham, Washington. She holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her second full length collection of poems, The Necessity of Wildfire, was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the Wren Poetry Prize, won a 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award, and was a finalist for the WA State Book Award. Caitlin is a member of the Washington Wolf Advisory Group. She was selected as a participant in the NSF’s Antarctic Artists & Writers Program and spent November 2018 in McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Her work has appeared in Granta, Carve, Prairie Schooner, and Colorado Review. Find her at caitlinscarano.com.

Teaching Statement: My pedagogical approach is grounded in empathy, process, and advocacy. Regarding empathy, I encourage students to treat each other’s writing with care and respect through close reading. By process, I mean instilling an appreciation of the journey of learning and creating over the destination or final product. By advocacy, I encourage students to share their stories by writing from their personal histories and writing what matters to them. We approach each poem as a thing to be observed that we ask questions of: What is this thing? What are its parts? How do those parts come together or complicate each other? I view poetry as an ongoing act of creating a personal mythology—a lyrical system of meaning making. I believe poetry has social value, and I am drawn to work that is personal, political, visceral, accessible, and complex in ways that reflects the ambiguities of human nature. I view poetry as a space for both vulnerability and self-examination. What I want students to take away from this residency is greater curiosity (in their own perspectives, perspectives of others, and the world around them), an interest in creative experimenting, and a desire to continue their journey as writers, especially in community.

Ann Tweedy

Ann Tweedy’s first full-length book, The Body’s Alphabet, was published by Headmistress Press in 2016. It earned a Bisexual Book Award in Poetry and was also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and for a Golden Crown Literary Society Award.  Ann also has published three chapbooks, Beleaguered Oases, White Out, and A Registry of Survival. The most recent of her chapbooks, A Registry of Survival, explores her relationship with her mother during a time when her mother was homeless. Ann’s poems have appeared in Rattle, Literary Mama, Clackamas Literary Review, Naugatuck River Review, and has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and three Best of the Net Awards. A law professor by day, Ann has devoted her career to serving Native Tribes. She currently teaches at University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law, where she founded the Indian Law Certificate Program. In addition to teaching law students, Ann has volunteered to tutor students in Swinomish’s after-school program, has guest-lectured in undergraduate classes, and has served as a guest poet for the Upward Bound Program at Occidental College. She has also led or co-led poetry workshops for Seattle Bisexual Women’s Network and BookTree Bookshop. Ann earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Hamline University and a law degree from University of California, Berkeley Schol of Law. Learn More About Ann Here.

Jeremy Voigt

Jeremy Voigt has been teaching in public schools for thirteen years and has taught literature and creative writing the entire time. He has taught middle school, high school, and community college courses. Jeremy has been a visiting writer in elementary schools and taught at conferences such as the Port Townsend Writer’s conference. Learn More About Jeremy Here