Merna Ann Hecht—
Merna Ann Hecht, poet, storyteller and arts and social justice educator received the National Storytelling Network 2008 Brimstone Award for Applied Storytelling, is a poet in residence for Seattle’s Writers in the Schools Program, and the recipient of national, state and local grants and awards. Her essays and poetry are published in numerous magazines and journals.

Holly Hughes—
Holly J. Hughes is the editor of the award-winning anthology Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease, published by Kent State University Press in 2009 as part of their Literature and Medicine Series. Her chapbook Boxing the Compass won the Floating Bridge chapbook contest in 2007. A recipient of residencies at Hedgebrook, Centrum, the Vermont Studio Center and the Whiteley Center, she is a graduate of the Pacific Lutheran University MFA program, Rainier Writing Workshop. She spends summers working as a naturalist in Southeast Alaska and winters teaching writing at Edmonds Community College, where she co-directs the Convergence Writers Series. She divides her time between Indianola and Chimacum, Washington.

Jourdan Keith—
Jourdan Keith, a Hedgebrook alumna, is the City of Seattle’s 2006-2007Seattle Poet Populist Emerita. Her awards include the City of Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs in 2010 for Coyote Autumn and 2004 for the play and solo performance of The Uterine Files.. An excerpt from her memoir Coyote Autumn is included in the anthology Something to Declare  (University of Wisconsin Press). She is the Founder and Director of Urban Wilderness Project, “restoring communities, culture and the environment” by leading storytelling, restoration and wilderness programs rooted in social change.

Cal Kinnear—
Cal Kinnear lives and writes on Vashon Island, Washington. In the course of his life he has been teacher, bookseller, modern dancer, waiter, carpenter, private school development director, and director of Washington Lawyers for the Arts. His poems have been published in various magazines around the country, and locally in Crab Creek Review, Point No Point, Pontoon and Fine Madness, and he was winner of Fine Madness’ 2003 Nelson Bentley prize. His book, A Walk in Bardo, was published in 2008 by Blue Begonia Press. Longhouse Books (Vermont) published in 2009 translations from the work of the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan. Raven Chronicles published a suite of poems, Heart Range, on line, in November of 2009.

Larry Matsuda, PhD—
Larry Matsuda was born in the Minidoka, Idaho War Relocation Center during World War II.  He and his family along with 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were held in ten concentration camps without a crime and without due process for approximately three years. Matsuda has a Ph.D. in education and was recently a visiting professor at Seattle University.

He studied poetry under the late Professor Nelson Bentley at the University of Washington and has participated in the Castilla Poetry Reading Series there.  He has read his poetry at numerous events in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho including the famous Kobo at Higo’s venue in Seattle’s International District with his mentor Tess Gallagher.

His poems appear in Poets Against the War website, The New Orleans Review, Floating Bridge Press, The Raven Chronicles, and the International Examiner Newspaper. He lives with his wife, Karen, and son, Matthew in Seattle and is a consultant presently helping to re-design schools as better physical learning environments.

(More ->)