Faculty
Director
Joe Milutis
Joe Milutis, Associate Professor, is a writer and media artist. He is the author of Failure, A Writer’s Life; Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything, and “Bright Arrogance,” a column on experimental translation in Jacket 2 as well as numerous chapbooks, media-literary hybrid works, videos and sound pieces. His work has appeared in Fence, Gauss PDF, Cabinet, Tripple Canopy, Leonardo and Film Comment.
Faculty
Amaranth Borsuk
Amaranth Borsuk, Associate Director, is the author of the poetry collections Pomegranate Eater and Handiwork. She works at the intersection of print and digital media with an emphasis on artists’ books, installation and digital/ print hybrids. Her collaborative books include Abra, an artist’s book and iOS app created with Kate Durbin and Ian Hatcher; As We Know, an erasure collaboration with Andy Fitch; and Between Page and Screen, a book of augmented-reality poems, created with Brad Bouse. Her recently published volume The Book, from MIT Press, traces the interrelationship of form and content in the book’s development, bridging book history, book arts, and electronic literature to expand our definition of an object we thought we knew intimately.
Amaranth Borsuk’s faculty profile
Recommended reading
- Hong, Cathy Park. Dance Dance Revolution. New York: W.W. Northon, 2007. Print.
- Kearney, Douglas. Patter. Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2014. Print.
- Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1962. Print.
- Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms. New York: Claire Marie, 1914. Print.
- Strickland, Stephanie. V: WaveTercets / Losing L’una. Denver: SpringGun Press, 2014. Print and iOS app.
Ching-In Chen
Ching-In Chen, Assistant Professor, is a hybrid writer, community organizer and performer. They are author of The Heart’s Traffic: a novel in poems; recombinant, which won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry and to make black paper sing. Their forthcoming Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters was a finalist for the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Performance. Chen is also co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Callaloo, Can Serrat, Storyknife and Imagining America and are a member of Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation communities.
Ching-In Chen’s faculty profile
Recommended reading
- Lai, Larissa. Salt Fish Girl. Markham, ON: Thomas Allen Publishers, 2002. Print.
- Long Soldier, Layli. Whereas. Minneapolis: Greywolf Press, 2017. Print.
- Miranda, Deborah. Berkeley, CA: Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. Heyday, 2012. Print.
- Phillip, M. NourbeSe. Zong! Wesleyan, CT: Wesleyan Poetry Series, 2011. Print.
- Salah, Trish. Wanting in Arabic. Toronto: Mawenzi House/TSAR Publications, 2013. Print.
Jeanne Heuving
Jeanne Heuving, Founding Director of the MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics and Professor, won a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award for her cross-genre work Incapacity; more recently she published Transducer, a book of poetry. She has written widely on innovative and experimental writing, including her books Omissions Are Not Accidents: Gender in the Art of Marianne Moore and The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics. She is co-editing a forthcoming book of essays, Inciting Poetics: Thinking and Writing Poetry in an Expanded Field.
Jeanne Heuving’s faculty profile
Recommended reading
- Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Print.
- Dickinson, Emily. Ed. Cristanne Miller. Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them. Cambridge: Harvard U Press, 2016.
- Lispector, Clarice, and Giovanni Pontiero. Near to the Wild Heart. New York: New Directions, 1990. Print.
- Mackey, Nathaniel. Bedouin Hornbook. Lexington: U of Kentucky, 1986. Print.
- Williams Carlos William. Spring and All. New York: Contact Publishing Co. 1923. Print.
Affiliate Instructors
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
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
Nadine Antoniette Maestas
Nadine Antoinette Maestas is a poet’s poet, viewing the empire of the sentence as an oppressive regime. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where she received the Faraar Award for playwriting. Her hybrid poem-play Hellen on Wheels: A Play of Rhyme and Reason was performed at the California College of the Arts. Co-author of Beneath the Bright Discus (Potes & Poets Press, 2000) and co-editor of Make It True: Poetry from Cascadia, her work has been published in Ofrenda Magazine, Lyric &, and more. Her dissertation, Calling Out the State: Postmodern American Anthropoetics, earned her a Ph.D. from the University of Washington.
Evan Peterson
Evan J. Peterson’s first novel is Better Living Through Alchemy (Broken Eye Books), and his previous poetry collection is METAFLESH: Poems In the Voices of the Monster (ARUS). As a game writer, he’s also written Drag Star! (Choice of Games), the world’s first drag performer RPG, and The Road to Innsmouth: Arkham Horror. His writing has appeared in Weird Tales, PseudoPod, Queers Destroy Horror, Nightmare Magazine, and Best Gay Stories. Evanjpeterson.com can tell you more.
Kristina Lee Podesva
Kristina Lee Podesva is an artist, writer, teacher, and editor who works at the intersection of art making, writing, and publishing. She is currently the Editor & Publisher of B R U N A Press + Archive based in Bellingham, Washington. For ten years, she edited the contemporary art journal Fillip while exhibiting as a visual artist at Artspeak (Vancouver), Darling Foundry (Montreal), Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver), No Soul for Sale at the Tate (London), Dorsky Gallery (Long Island City), and the Power Plant (Toronto) among other venues. She has taught at the California College of the Arts, Emily Carr University, the Malmö Art Academy at Lund University, and Western Washington University.
Former Faculty
Abe Avnisan
Abraham has presented and exhibited his work at the Libraries at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, the Vild med ORD literary festival in Aarhus, Denmark, the &NOW Conference of Innovative Writing, the International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA), The Electronic Literature Organization conference, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s Word Weekend event. His work has been published in the ISEA Symposium Proceedings, Stonecutter, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Drunken Boat, New Delta Review, and others. He is the recipient of the Rosen and Edes Foundation Semi-Finalist Fellowship for Emerging Artists and The School of the Art Institute’s New Artists Society Merit Scholarship.
Aeron Bergman
Aeron Bergman works with Alejandra Salinas as an artist duo producing media, performance, internet, sound and sculptural works and objects in an interdisciplinary, conceptual yet socially engaged practice. Their work has been exhibited extensively internationally.
Rebecca Brown
Rebecca Brown has published over a dozen books in the U.S. and in translation. She has exhibited visual work in museums and has lectured, read, and performed widely. She collaborates frequently with actors, artists, dancers, and musicians and also curates events. Her books include American Romances, The Last Time I Saw You, The Dogs, The Gifts of the Body and The Terrible Girls. She writes regularly for The Stranger. Her work has been translated into Japanese, German, Dutch, Norwegian and Italian and has received The Boston Book Review Award, Lambda Literary Award, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, Washington State Book Award, and the Stranger Genius Award.
Ted Hiebert
Ted Hiebert is an interdisciplinary artist and theorist. His individual and collaborative art works have been shown in galleries around the world. Hiebert is the author of In Praise of Nonsense: Aesthetics, Uncertainty and Postmodern Identity, A formalized forum for informal inquiry, and a co-author of Ludic Dreaming: How to Listen Away from Contemporary Technoculture. His work has appeared in journals such as Performance Research, The Psychoanalytic Review, CTheory, and Technoetic Arts, among others. Hiebert is a founding member of Noxious Sector Arts Collective, a member of the experimental theory group The Occulture, and a member of the editorial board of the journal CTheory.
Sarah Dowling
Sarah Dowling is the author of Security Posture, winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Selections from her work Hinterland B appear in ‘I’ll Drown My Book’: Conceptual Writing by Women and other journals.
Alejandra Salinas
Alejandra Salinas works with Aeron Bergman as an artist duo producing media, performance, internet, sound and sculptural works and objects in an interdisciplinary, conceptual yet socially engaged practice. Their work has been exhibited extensively internationally.