Staff Bios

 

Helene Achanzar is a Filipina Canadian poet and educator. Her writing can be found in Oxford American, jubilat, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. Before joining the Poetry Northwest staff, she was the senior editor of Yalobusha Review. She works as the programs manager at the Chicago Poetry Center. More at heleneachanzar.com.

Kaitlyn Airy is a Korean American poet and fiction writer. Her work appears or is forthcoming in EcoTheo, Crab Creek Review, Moss, Post Road, Cream City Review, Poetry Northwest, and Narrative Magazine. She currently resides in Charlottesville, where she is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Virginia and where she serves as the associate poetry editor for Meridian

Brittany Amborn is the Publicist for Poetry Northwest Editions.
Katherine Anderson is the Business Manager of Poetry Northwest. She has work published in Vibrations, the literary magazine of Everett Community College which she has also worked on as an editor. Her poetry is forthcoming in the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society’s Nota Bene 2021 literary magazine.
Dawn Anderson is a Graphic Designer with Poetry Northwest.
Aaron Barrell is the Managing Editor of Poetry Northwest. He is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Washington, and teaches English and Creative Writing at Everett Community College.
Evan Bauer is a poet and translator working and living between Japanese and English. He holds a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and his poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Nashville Review, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere.
Akhim Cabey is an Editorial Assistant at Poetry Northwest.
Bill Carty is the author of Huge Cloudy (Octopus Books, 2019), which was long-listed for The Believer Book Award. He has received poetry fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Artist Trust, Hugo House, and Jack Straw. Originally from coastal Maine, Bill now lives in Seattle, and teaches at Hugo House, the UW Robinson Center for Young Scholars, and Edmonds College.
Xavier Cavazos is a trauma poet and the author of three award-winning poetry collections: Barbarian at the Gate (Poetry Society of America), Diamond Grove Slave Tree (Ice Cube Press), and The Devil’s Workshop, (forthcoming from Cleveland State University Poetry Center 2023).  Cavazos earned an MFA in Creative Writing and the Environment from Iowa State University.

Alyx Chandler (she/her) is a writer from the South who received her MFA in poetry at the University of Montana, where she taught composition and poetry. She is a publicist for Poetry Northwest, a reader for Electric Literature and former poetry editor for CutBank. Her poetry can be found or is forthcoming in Cordella Magazine, Greensboro Review, SWWIM, Anatolios Magazine, Sweet Tree Review and elsewhere. Learn more at alyxchandler.com.

Connor Colbert is an Editorial Assistant at Poetry Northwest. He is a poet and musician currently living in Seattle, WA.
Kevin Craft lives in the Greenwood neighborhood of Seattle, and coordinates the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College. He received a Bachelor of Arts in both English and French from the University of Maryland (1990), and a Master of Fine Arts in English from the University of Washington (1995). He also studied drama at the University of Sheffield, in Great Britain, and Romance languages at the Université de Perpignan, in France. His first book, Solar Prominence (2005), was selected by Vern Rutsala for the Gorsline Prize from Cloudbank Books. He has also edited and published five volumes of the anthology Mare Nostrum, an anthology of Mediterranean-inspired writing. His poems, reviews, and essays have appeared widely in such places as Poetry, AGNI, Verse, Ninth Letter, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, The Stranger, and West Branch. A Bread Loaf Scholar in 1996, he has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), the Camargo Foundation (France), 4Culture, and Artist Trust. Craft has been Executive Editor of Poetry Northwest since 2016, and was editor of the magazine from 2010 until 2016. He has also served as Director of the University of Washington’s Creative Writing in Rome Program since 2003. He believes that poems, like good travelers, live in the go-between.
J.A. Dela Cruz-Smith is an Editorial Assistant at Poetry Northwest.
Jennifer Elise Foerster received her PhD in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver and her MFA from the Vermont College of the Fine Arts, and is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, NM. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, a grant from the Aninstantia Foundation, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. Jennifer currently teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop and is the Literary Assistant to the U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. She is the author of two books of poetry, Leaving Tulsa (2013) and Bright Raft in the Afterweather (2018), both published by the University of Arizona Press, and served as the Associate Editor of the recently released When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through, A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. The daughter of an Air Force diplomat, Foerster grew up living internationally, is of European (German/Dutch) and Mvskoke descent, and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma. She lives in San Francisco.
Bianca Glinskas is an emerging poet and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee from the West Coast. She holds a Bachelors of Arts in English Education with emphasis in Creative Writing from California State University of Long Beach. Her poetry has appeared in print and online in literary journals such as Knock Your Socks Off and Glass Mountain, among others. Her poetry reviews and interviews have been featured on Poetry Foundation, The Adroit Journal, Seattle Arts & Lectures, and elsewhere. She has studied at Hugo House in Seattle and Lighthouse Writers in Denver. Bianca currently lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, where she works as a Creative Writing Coach on Fiverr, a Content Writer for Haikuists, and as a writing judge for NYC Midnight Writing competitions.
Jesse Gabriel González is a poet from New Jersey, by birth and by temperament. He holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a BA from Cornell University. He was a 2021 Anaphora Arts Fellow, and he currently lives in Seattle.
Gabrielle Graceffo is an Associate Editor at Poetry Northwest.

Constance Hansen is the Assistant Managing Editor of Poetry Northwest. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in: Four Way Review, Harvard Review Online, Southern Humanities Review, Cimarron Review, The Idaho Review, Vallum, On the Seawall, Northwest Review, EcoTheo Review, and elsewhere. She holds degrees from Middlebury College (BA Religion), the University of Washington (MFA Poetry), and Seattle University (Masters in Teaching). Constance lives in Seattle with her family.

Sean Hill is the author of Dangerous Goods, awarded the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry and published by Milkweed Editions, and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, published by UGA Press and named one of the Ten Books All Georgians Should Read by the Georgia Center for the Book. He’s received numerous awards including fellowships from Cave Canem, the Region 2 Arts Council, the Bush Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, The Jerome Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, the University of Wisconsin, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Hill’s poems have appeared in Callaloo, Harvard Review, The Oxford American, Poetry, Tin House, and numerous other journals, and in over a dozen anthologies including Black Nature and Villanelles. He is a consulting editor at Broadsided Press, has taught creative writing from Alaska to Georgia and parts in between, and has served as the director of the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference at Bemidji State University since 2012. Born and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, Sean is currently Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Montana.
nanya jhingran is a poet, scholar & teacher from Lucknow, India currently living by the coastal margin of the Salish Sea, on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish People (upon which the city of Seattle was built). She is an Associate Editor at Poetry Northwest where she edits the book reviews section. Her recent work can be found or is forthcoming in Moss Lit, Seventh Wave, Poetry Northwest, and Honey Literary, among others. You can find her online at www.nanyajhingran.com
Malvika Jolly (b. 1993, Rouen) is a writer and literary translator. Her poetry, essays, and criticism are featured or forthcoming in Canthius, Chicago magazine, Frontier Poetry, Liminal Transit Review, The Margins, MIZNA, Poetry Online, Poetry Northwest, Salt Hill Journal, South Side Weekly, Violet, Indigo, Blue, Etc, and Voicemail Poems. She has received fellowships and support from Brooklyn Poets, Threewalls, the Dara Shikoh Literary Festival, and the Davis Projects for Peace Foundation. She is a Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest and a 2022 Visiting Artist-in-Residence at Compound Yellow. She curates the New Third World, a reading series inspired by the Non-Aligned Movement.
Carrie Purcell Kahler’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, Image, Denver Quarterly, Postcard Poems and Prose, District Lit, Hobart, and others. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington and lives in Seattle with her cat. carriepurcellkahler.com
Keetje Kuipers is the author of three collections of poetry: Beautiful in the Mouth, The Keys to the Jail, and All Its Charms, which includes poems published in both The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Keetje has been a Stegner Fellow, Bread Loaf Fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. She lives with her wife and children in Montana, where she is Editor of Poetry Northwest and a board member at the National Book Critics Circle.
Jaimie Z. Li is a writing workshop instructor at Hugo House, an MFA candidate at Goddard College, and the recipient of the 2019 Goddard/PEN North American Centers Scholarship. In 2011, she received her BA in Law at Balliol College, Oxford University and worked in the legal sector in the UK and US for a time. To learn more, please visit jaimiezongli.com or follow @jaimiezongli on Instagram.
Xu Li is a writer and educator born in Beijing and raised in southeast Michigan. She recently completed her MFA degree in poetry at Arizona State University (‘23) and currently lives and writes in Tempe, AZ.

Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. Currently she is a writing resident at Cité internationale, Paris. She was a 2020 Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a 2017–19 Wallace Stegner Fellow, and author of The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2017 PSA Chapbook Fellowship. In addition she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers they face in the literary community.

Alexa Luborsky is an Editorial Assistant at Poetry Northwest. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Consequence and JuxtaProse. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago and works in the financial services industry. She was born in Toronto, Canada and was raised in Rhode Island.
John Paul Martinez is a Filipino Canadian-American poet writing out of the Midwest. Their work can be found in Poetry Northwest, Ninth Letter, Third Coast, Nashville Review, The Margins, The Slowdown podcast, and elsewhere. He holds a BA in Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. They can be further found at johnpaulmartinez.com.

Malia Maxwell is an Editorial Assistant at Poetry Northwest. Originally from Seattle, WA, she is currently pursuing a B.A. in English Literature with an emphasis in Creative Writing at Stanford University. 

Robin Myers is a poet and translator (Spanish to English) of both poetry and prose. You can find her at robinepmyers.com.

Brittany Padgett is a writer in the Pacific Northwest. She was a lead editor and designer for Manastash Student Literary Journal. For ten years she worked as a program manager for student leadership programs at Everett Community College. She received a B. A. in Professional and Creative Writing from Central Washington University.

Abi Pollokoff is the Managing Editor of Poetry Northwest Editions.
Tamara Raidt is an Editorial Assistant at Poetry Northwest.

 

Gaia Rajan is the author of the chapbooks Moth Funerals (Glass Poetry Press 2020) and Killing It (Black Lawrence Press 2022). Their work is published or forthcoming in Best New Poets 2022, the 2022 Best of the Net anthology, The Kenyon Review, THRUSH, Split Lip Magazine, diode, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere. They live in Pittsburgh, and you can find them at @gaiarajan on Twitter or Instagram.

Amy Sailer is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Utah and a teacher at Interlochen Summer Arts Camp. Her poetry can be found in Cincinnati Review, Hotel Amerika, New South, Meridian, and Sycamore Review, where it won the 2020 Wabash Poetry Prize.

Zach Simon is an MFA Poetry Candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest and Cutthroat Journal of the Arts. He is also an editorial assistant at Ninth Letter. He grew up fishing and writing in the Pacific Northwest.

Shriram Sivaramakrishnan graduated from Boise State University’s MFA program in Spring 2022. His recent works have appeared in DIAGRAM, Threadcount, Rivulet, among others. Shriram tweets at @shriiram.
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Kate Van Petten manages social media at Poetry Northwest.
Jeanine Walker is an Editorial Assistant at Poetry Northwest.
Haines Whitacre is an Editorial Assistant at Poetry Northwest.
Nance Van Winckel is a Contributing Editor with Poetry Northwest.
A longtime resident of Seattle, Kary Wayson works as a freelance editor, poetry teacher, and associate editor for Poetry Northwest. Kary’s work has won several awards, including the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize, the Crazyhorse/Linda Hull Memorial Prize, the Charles B. Wheeler Prize for her first book, American Husband, and the Burnside Review Prize for her second book, The Slip. She has received fellowships and grants from Artist Trust, The Washington State Arts Commission, Allied Arts, and 4Culture. Her poems have appeared widely online and in print journals and anthologies, including the Best American Poetry series and The Pushcart Prize anthology. You can find out more about her work at https://www.karywayson.com/