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Judith Kitchen Founding Director, In Memoriam Biography Biography Judith Kitchen (1941-2014)  was the co-founder of the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program at PLU.  She is the author of four collections of essays, most recently The Circus Train (Ovenbird Books, 2014).  Her other collections are Half in Shade: Family, Photography, Fate and Distance and Direction (Coffeehouse Press) and Only the Dance (U. of South Carolina Press).  She is also the author of a novel, The House on Eccles Road

, The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice (coauthored with Martha Silano), Fire on Her Tongue: An Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry, and Demystifying the Manuscript: How to Create of Book of Poems (coauthored with Susan Rich). She lives in a sleepy seaside town where she is an avid paddleboarder and hiker. She teaches at Pacific Lutheran University’s low-res MFA program, the Rainier Writing Workshop. Kelli  is the cohost of the poetry series “Poems You Need” with Melissa

Jennifer Foerster Poetry Biography Biography Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of three books of poetry, Leaving Tulsa (2013), Bright Raft in the Afterweather (2018), and The Maybe-Bird (2022), and served as the Associate Editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. She is the recipient of a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, a Hermitage Artist Retreat Fellowship, and

Sherry Simpson Nonfiction Website: http://www.sherrysimpson.net/ Biography Biography Sherry Simpson is the author of Dominion of Bears: Living with Wildlife in Alaska, which received the 2015 John Burroughs Medal for a distinguished book of nature writing, and two collections of essays, The Accidental Explorer: Wayfinding in Alaska and The Way Winter Comes, which won the inaugural Chinook Literary Prize. She has also written four travel books, most recently Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska

April Ayers Lawson Fiction Biography Biography April Ayers Lawson is the author of Virgin and Other Stories, which was named a Best Book of the Year by The Irish Times and Vice, and a Best Foreign Book of the Year by Spain’s Qué Leer Magazine.  Virgin and Other Stories has been (or will be) translated into German, Spanish, Norwegian, and Italian.  She has received The Plimpton Prize for Fiction, as well as a writing fellowship from The Corporation of Yaddo.   Her fiction has appeared in The

classes in poetry. Statement:  “I encourage students to think of themselves not as isolated individuals, but as members of a learning community. For me, the writing workshop is a place where students improve their skills in reading, critical thinking, interpretation, and communication through engagement with their own texts and with those written by others.  To be members of a learning community, I teach my students that verbal and written communication are inextricable, neither can take place

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program.  She lives in Pittsburgh, PA. Mentor. Workshops and classes in poetry. Statement: If, as Muriel Rukeyser says, poems are “meeting-places,” I am ever-ready to meet you in those places and to help you to think through the difficult pleasures of creating such encounters. I am eager, too, to discuss how you situate your work

Aram Mrjoian Nonfiction, Fiction Biography Biography Aram Mrjoian is the editor-in-chief of The Rumpus and a 2022 Creative Armenia-AGBU Fellow. His debut novel, Waterline, is forthcoming with Harper Via in 2025. Aram has previously worked as an editor at the Chicago Review of Books, the Southeast Review, and TriQuarterly. He is the editor of the anthology We Are All Armenian: Voices from the Diaspora published by the University of Texas Press (March 2023). His writing has appeared in The

Stan Sanvel Rubin Founding Director Biography Biography Stan Sanvel Rubin is founding director of the Rainier Writing Workshop at PLU.  He served for over twenty years as Director of the Brockport Writers Forum and Videotape Library (SUNY), a multi-faceted literary arts program.  He holds the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.  His most recent book of poetry is There. Here. (Lost Horse Press, 2013).  Other books include The Post-Confessionals, a collection of his interviews

-hundred-year-old wheat farm in Nebraska, and the changing role of food, God, science, race and agriculture in society, and was a finalist for the Lukas Prize, awarded by Columbia and Harvard University’s Schools of Journalism.  She lives in San Francisco. Mentor. Workshops and classes in fiction and nonfiction. Statement:  I think of writing as intimately connected to seeing. I ask myself–and students–“What do you see that other people are missing?” As artists, we want to entertain and we want to be