Anastacia-Reneé is a writer, TEDx Speaker, Deep End Podcast co-host and interdisciplinary artist. The recipient of the 2018 James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award for Washington Artist (Literary), Seattle Civic Poet (2017-2019), and Poet-in-Residence at Hugo House (2015-2017), she has received fellowships and residencies from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, VONA, Artist Trust, Jack Straw, Ragdale, Mineral School, Hypatia in the Woods and The New Orleans Writers Residency. Anastacia-Reneé's work has been published in Foglifter, Cascadia Magazine, Pinwheel, The Fight and the Fiddle, Glow, The A-Line, Ms. Magazine and a host of others.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of three novels and a memoir, and the editor of five nonfiction anthologies. Her memoir, The End of San Francisco, won a Lambda Literary Award, and her anthology, Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, was an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book. Her novel Sketchtasy was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2018. She is currently at work on a new anthology, Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing up with the AIDS Crisis, and her latest book, The Freezer Door, a lyric essay on desire and its impossibility, is out now. Learn more at mattildabernsteinsycamore.com.

Claudia Castro Luna is Washington’s State Poet Laureate (2018 – 2021), an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet (2015-2017). She is the author the collection Killing Marías (Two Sylvias) finalist for the Washington State Book Award 2018, the chapbook This City (Floating Bridge) and One River, a Thousand Voices, from Chin Music Press. Castro Luna has an MA in Urban Planning, a K-12 teaching certificate and an MFA in Poetry. Born in El Salvador she came to the United States in 1981. Living in English and Spanish, Claudia writes and teaches in Seattle where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.

Timothy Egan is the author of nine books. His book on the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time, won the 2006 National Book Award for nonfiction. His Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher was awarded the Carnegie Medal as the best nonfiction book of 2012. The Immortal Irishman was New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith. Egan writes a biweekly opinion piece for The New York Times. As a Times correspondent, he shares a Pulitzer Prize. A third-generation Westerner and father of two, Mr. Egan lives in Seattle.

Dr. Charles Johnson, University of Washington professor emeritus and the author of 25 books, is a novelist, philosopher, essayist, literary scholar, short-story writer, cartoonist and illustrator, an author of children’s literature, and a screen-and-teleplay writer. A MacArthur fellow, Johnson has received a 2002 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, a 1990 National Book Award for his novel Middle Passage, a 1985 Writers Guild award for his PBS teleplay “Booker,” the 2016 W.E.B. Du Bois Award at the National Black Writers Conference, and many other awards. The Charles Johnson Society at the American Literature Association was founded in 2003. In February 2020, Lifeline Theater in Chicago debuted its play adaptation of Middle Passage. Dr. Johnson’s most recent publications are The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling, and his fourth short story collection, Night Hawks, which was nominated for a 2019 Washington State Book Award.

The City of Seattle's 2019 -2021 Civic Poet, Jourdan Imani Keith is a storyteller, essayist, playwright, naturalist and activist. A student of Sonia Sanchez, her TEDx Talk, "Your Body of Water," the theme for King County's 2016-2018 Poetry on Buses program won an Americans for the Arts award. Her poetry is largely anthologized and was long listed by Danez Smith for Cosmonauts Avenue poetry prize. Keith's Orion Magazine essays, "Desegregating Wilderness" and " At Risk" were selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing Anthology (Houghton Mifflin). She has been awarded fellowships from Hedgebrook, Wildbranch, Santa Fe Science Writing workshop, VONA, and Jack Straw. Her memoir in essays, Tugging at the Web, is forthcoming from University of Washington Press.

Wei-Wei Lee recently graduated from Nathan Hale High School and served as the 2019/2020 Youth Poet Laureate of Seattle. She was born in the States, but grew up in Taiwan, and has only been Stateside for four years. Seattle is the first city in the US she has ever known and loved. Though she first started writing around age eight, she only began writing poetry at fourteen—but she’s since fallen in love with it and hasn’t stopped. Poetry, for her, is largely based on pure feeling and imagery. In her work, she hopes to pay tribute to both Taiwan and American and do them proud.

Mita Mahato is a Seattle-based cut paper, collage, and comix artist and educator whose work focuses on lost, discarded, and disappeared animals and objects. Her book of comix poetry, In Between, is listed in The Best American Comics: The Notable Comics of 2019 and her silent comic book “Sea” received the award for “Best Comic Book of 2017” from Cartoonists Northwest. Her work is published in ANMLY, Coast/No Coast, Shenandoah, Illustrated PEN, MUTHA, Drunken Boat, and Seattle Weekly and has been exhibited widely (including at SOIL Gallery, Seattle; Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago; Schnitzer Art Museum, Pullman; and Antenna Gallery, New Orleans). Mita is Associate Curator of Public and Youth Programs at the Henry Art Gallery, serves on the organizing board for the arts organization Short Run Seattle, and teaches community art workshops to all ages.

Kristen Millares Young is the author of Subduction (Red Hen Press), called an “utterly unique and important first novel” by Ms. Magazine and a “lyrical and atmospheric debut” by Kirkus Reviews. A prize-winning journalist and essayist, Kristen served as Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House. Her reviews, essays and investigations appear in the Washington Post, the Guardian, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere, as well as the anthologies Pie & Whiskey, a New York Times New & Notable Book, Latina Outsiders: Remaking Latina Identity and Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. She was the researcher for the New York Times team that produced “Snow Fall,” which won a Pulitzer Prize. From 2016 to 2019, she served as board chair of InvestigateWest, a nonprofit newsroom she co-founded to protect vulnerable peoples and places of the Pacific Northwest.

Rena Priest is a Poet and a member of the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) Nation. Her literary debut, Patriarchy Blues, was honored with a 2018 American Book Award. Her most recent collection, Sublime Subliminal, was selected as the finalist for the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. Priest’s work can be found in literary journals and anthologies including: For Love of Orcas, Cosmonauts Avenue, Poetry Northwest, Diagram, and Verse Daily. She has attended residencies at Hawthornden Castle, Hedgebrook, and Mineral School. She is a National Geographic Explorer and a Jack Straw Writer (2019). She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.

Dujie Tahat is a Filipino-Jordanian immigrant living in Washington state. He is the author of Here I Am O My God, selected by Fady Joudah for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, and SALAT, selected by Cornelius Eady as winner of the Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Award. Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in POETRY, Sugar House Review, The Journal, The Southeast Review, ZYZZVA, Southern Indiana Review, Asian American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Dujie has earned fellowships from Hugo House, Jack Straw Writing Program, and the Poetry Foundation, as well as a work-study scholarship from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. They serve as a poetry editor for Moss and Homology Lit and cohost The Poet Salon podcast.

Ken Workman is the Great-Great-Great-Great Grandson of Chief Seattle. He is a retired Systems and Data Analyst from Boeing’s Flight Operations Engineering Department, he is a former Duwamish Tribal Council member as well as a former Duwamish Tribal Services 501(c)(3) President. Ken is a member of the Duwamish Tribe, the first people of Seattle, and a current board member of two non-profit organizations, the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition and the Southwest Seattle Historical Society. Today Ken enjoys retired life living on a river in the mountains east of Seattle.