Workshops

A writer of Uruguayan origins, Caro De Robertis is the author of So Many Stars: an Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color, as well as The Palace of Eros, which won the Golden Poppy Octavia E. Butler Award; The President and the Frog, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; Cantoras, winner of a Stonewall Book Award and a Reading Women Award, a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and a Lambda Literary Award, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice; The Gods of Tango, winner of a Stonewall Book Award; Perla; and the international bestseller The Invisible Mountain, which received Italy’s Rhegium Julii Prize. They are also an award-winning translator of Latin American literature, and editor of the anthology Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times. Their books have been translated into seventeen languages and have received numerous other honors, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, which they were the first openly nonbinary person to receive.  

Eric Tran is a queer Vietnamese writer and the author of Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke (Diode Editions, Spring 2022), which was awarded the Oregon Book Award and was a finalist for the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His other titles include The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer (Autumn House Press, 2020), as well as the chapbooks Revisions (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018) and Affairs with Men in Suits (Backbone Press, 2014). He is an Associate Editor for Orison Books. He is a psychiatrist in Portland, Oregon. He completed his fellowship in Addiction Psychiatry at OHSU, his residency at the Mountain Area Health Education Center, graduated from the UNC School of Medicine, and holds an MFA from UNC Wilmington.

KIMBERLY KING PARSONS is a National Book Award nominee and the bestselling author of We Were the Universe, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, winner of the Oregon Book Award, a finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award and the Texas Book Award, a Dakota Johnson Book Club pick ranked #2 on Time Magazine’s Best Books of 2024, and a best book of the year in Elle, Oprah Daily, Marie Claire, Marie Claire UK, and others. Parsons’s debut collection, Black Light, was a finalist for the Edmund White Award, the Story Prize, and the Texas Institute of Letters Award. Parsons teaches at Pacific University and writes the Substack First Breath. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Jessica E. Johnson (she/they) is the author of the book-length poem Metabolics (Acre Poetry Series), the chapbook In Absolutes We Seek Each Other (New Michigan Press), and the memoir Mettlework (Acre Books).

Jessica is a career community college instructor based in Portland, Oregon. They are interested in inclusive learning environments, knowledge production, radical care, and the relationships between art, friendship, community, and social change. They work to make spaces for thinking, feeling, and learning together.

She is a contributor to Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, and her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, The New Republic, Poetry Northwest, 32 Poems, Prairie Schooner, River Teeth, DIAGRAM, Annulet Poetics, Dream Pop, Terrain, The Southeast Review, and Sixth Finch, among others. She co-hosts the Constellation Reading Series.

Their honors include an Oregon Literary Fellowship, many Pushcart nominations, and a Best of the Net nomination. “The Ghost Road” (Southeast Review) was a Best American Essays notable. In Absolutes We Seek Each Other was a DIAGRAM chapbook contest winner and In Absolutes and Metabolics were finalists for the Oregon Book Award in poetry.

Lue Hughes is the author of A Shiver in the Leaves (BOA Editions, 2022). Her honors include the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Rosenberg Fellowship, the 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize, Cascade PBS’s Black Arts Legacies, and Most Influential by Seattle Magazine. She’s been featured in The Seattle Times, Forbes, Essence, KUOW Public Radio, and more. Lue lives in Seattle.

m. mick powell is a queer Black Cabo Verdean femme, poet, artist, Aries, and the author of DEAD GIRL CAMEO (Random House, 2025), listed as a Best Book of the Year by the New York Public Library and a Most Anticipated poetry collection by Ebony Magazine and USA Today. They have received fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Torch Literary Arts, Tin House, and Art Omi, and their chapbook “threesome in the last Toyota Celica & other circus tricks” won the 2023 Host Publications Chapbook Prize. Faculty of Creative Nonfiction Writing in Bay Path University’s Master of Fine Arts program, mick enjoys chasing waterfalls and being in love.

Michelle Tea is the author of over a dozen books of memoir, fiction, poetry and children's lit — including her latest, Knocking Myself Up. Her memoir Valencia won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction, even though it was obviously all true. It was also made into a sprawling, feature-length art film using nearly 20 different directors and different Michelles. Her recent-ish essay collection, Against Memoir, was awarded the PEN/America Diamonstein-Speilvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She is also the recipient of the legendary Rona Jaffe Awards, and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow.

Shruti Swamy is the author of A House Is a Body: Stories, and The Archer. Margret & Vishnu is forthcoming from Algonquin Books in 2027. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Elizabeth George Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Council, and Vassar College, and is a 2024 Rome Prize Fellow in Literature. Shruti’s work has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeny’s, AFAR Magazine, and The Believer, and twice won the O. Henry Prize. Her introduction to Ursula K Le Guin’s masterpiece Always Coming Home appears in the novel’s 2023 reissue. She teaches writing with the collective The Dream Side.

Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in the New Yorker, NY Times, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Story Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, and others. Among various honors, she received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. Blackburn’s second collection of stories is How to Wrestle a Girl, 2021, finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize and was a NYTimes editor’s choice. Her acclaimed debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is about the mania of grief, all of human history and a lesbian assassin at the end of the world. She is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities lacking access to professional instruction: livewriteworkshop.com. Her home town is Compton, California, and she is an Associate Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.