Watch a recording of the event:
LIVE FROM STORYKNIFE
Recorded: August 16 | 6 PM – 7 PM AKDT
Via Zoom
Live from Storyknife is a monthly reading series featuring the guest residents of the Storyknife Writers Retreat.
Claudia Mauro is a poet, science writer, and the founding director of the nonprofit literary publisher, Whit Press. She is the recipient of two Seattle Arts Commission CityArtist Grants, and a Wyoming Arts Council Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry. She is a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle, PENAmerica, and The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. An alumna and former board member of Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, she has also served as a judge for the Lambda Book Awards and served on the Advisory Council for the University of Washington’s Whiteley Center. Her books include; ‘Stealing Fire’ and ‘Reading the River’ (Whiteaker Press 1999, 2004), both Lambda Book Award finalists. She was a presenter at the inaugural TEDxSeattle speaking on the importance of independent media. Claudia also has extensive experience as a back-country pilot in Alaska and was employed for over 20 years as a field science tech for the Alaska Dept. of Fish & Game, and for NOAA as Marine Science Tech crew on their research and survey vessels.
Leticia Del Toro is a Chicana poet and fiction writer from Crockett, California with roots in Jalisco, Mexico. Her work has appeared in Huizache, Zyzzyva, About Place Journal and more. Her fiction chapbook, Café Colima, was published as the 2017 Kore Press Fiction Prize. Additional awards include a Hedgebrook residency, a Rona Jaffe Award at Bread Loaf and a Story Knife residency. Leticia has also thrived at the VONA and Macondo conferences. Her poetry chapbook, All We Are Told Not to Touch, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She is finalizing a short story collection, Leaving Sugar City.
Maria Isabelle Carlos is a writer and editor from Missouri. A graduate of creative writing programs at Vanderbilt University (MFA ‘21) and UNC-Chapel Hill (BA ‘13), she was a 2021 Lambda Literary Fellow, winner of the 2021 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Poetry Contest, and winner of the 2020 Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award from the Center for Women Writers. Her work, which has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net, has appeared or is forthcoming in Poets.Org, Passages North, Pleiades, Four Way Review, VIDA Review, Hyphen Magazine, and elsewhere. Maria is the editor of Inch—a quarterly series of micro-chapbooks from Bull City Press—and the assistant nonfiction editor of Zone 3. She works at Haymarket Books in Chicago.
Kimberly Blaeser, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of In-Na-Po, Indigenous Nations Poets, is the author of five poetry collections including Copper Yearning (2019), Apprenticed to Justice (2007), and Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance (2020). An enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, a Professor Emeritus at UW–Milwaukee, and an MFA faculty member at Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. She lives in rural Wisconsin; and, for portions of each year, in a water-access cabin near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota.
Pik-Shuen Fung is the author of the debut novel Ghost Forest, which won the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. She has received fellowships and residencies from Kundiman, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Millay Arts, and Storyknife, and her writing has appeared in Guernica, LitHub, Poets & Writers, The Italian Review, and elsewhere. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver, Canada, she now lives in New York City with her husband and their rambunctious dog.
Elena Passarello is a Whiting Award-winning essayist and performer. Her most recent collection, Animals Strike Curious Poses, has been translated into five languages, and it made the “Best Books of 2017” lists in The New York Times, The Guardian, Publisher’s Weekly, and other publications. Elena directs the MFA program at Oregon State University and appears weekly on the PRX radio program Live Wire! She is currently writing a book about Elvis Presley.