Our instructors

Tara Campbell (she/her) is an award-winning writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse, and graduate of American University’s MFA in Creative Writing.

Her publication credits include Masters Review, Wigleaf, Electric Literature, CRAFT Literary, Uncharted Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Escape Pod/Artemis Rising. She’s the author of the eco sci-fi novel TreeVolution, two hybrid collections of poetry and prose, and two short story collections from feminist sci-fi publisher Aqueduct Press. Her sixth book, City of Dancing Gargoyles (SFWP), was one of Reactor Magazine’s “Best Books of 2024.”

She teaches creative writing at venues such as Johns Hopkins University, Clarion West, The Writer’s Center, and Hugo House. Find her at www.taracampbell.com

J.C. Geiger (he/him) survived an earthquake on the Mouth of Hell volcano in Nicaragua, learned to drive stick shift on a bookmobile, and once ate the beating heart of a snake. He also writes fiction.

Geiger’s first novel, Wildman (Disney-Hyperion) was named a Best YA Book of the Year by Amazon and Bank Street. He is a GrandSLAM storytelling champion with The Moth, and his most recent novel, The Great Big One (Little, Brown) was selected as a finalist for an Oregon Book Award.

Learn more at jcgeiger.com

Erica Goss (she/her) served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, CA from 2013-2016. In 2019, she won the Zocalo Poetry Prize. She is the author of Night Court, winner of the 2016 Lyrebird Award; Wild Place; and Vibrant Words: Ideas and Inspirations for Poets.

Recent work appears in Lake Effect, Atticus Review, Contrary, Convergence, Spillway, Cider Press Review, Eclectica, The Tishman Review, Tinderbox, The Red Wheelbarrow, and Main Street Rag, among others.

She is the founder of Girls’ Voices Matter, an arts education program for teen girls. Erica is the editor of Sticks & Stones, a monthly poetry newsletter. Please visit her at www.ericagoss.com.

Meg Hayertz (she/her, they/them), author of Tarot for Beginners (Althea Press), believes creating is an act of listening. As the founder of Creative Momentum, she helps writers, artists, performers and academics unlock creative blocks, deepen their inspiration and finish their project.

She holds an MFA in Writing and Consciousness from California Institute of Integral Studies. Her fiction has appeared in The Louisville Review and VoiceCatcher, among others. She is an alum of Lit Camp, and she has been interviewed in LitHub. Also, she believes in you.

Jen Hernandez (she/they) is an artist and educator based in Corvallis, Oregon.

Through fine arts illustration, comics and crafting, Jen tells stories inspired by the natural environment, people, and stories of the Pacific Northwest and world mythology.

Connect with her on Instagram or at her website https://jenhernandezart.com/.

Over the past four decades, Nebula- and Stoker Award-winning writer Nina Kiriki Hoffman (she/they) has sold adult and young adult novels and more than 400 short stories. Her works have been finalists for the World Fantasy, Mythopoeic, Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, and Endeavour awards.

Nina teaches writing through Fairfield County Writers’ Studio and Wordcrafters in Eugene. She lives in Oregon. For Nina’s publications: ofearna.us/books/hoffman.html

Valerie Ihsan (she/her), Story Analyst and Book Coach, is the author of You Can’t Dance a Lie: A Memoir of Stepping Into My Truth; The Scent of Apple Tea; and Smell the Blue Sky: Young, Pregnant, and Widowed, winner of a B.R.A.G. Medallion for Top Indie-Published Books.

She co-chaired the Eugene Chapter of Willamette Writers for more than eight years, diagnoses manuscripts as a Certified Three Story Method Editor, and helps authors write memoirs.

She podcasts at the Writer Craft Podcast, loves dogs, and aims to live in Costa Rica and run writing retreats. She lives in Oregon with her husband and three dogs.

Jon Labrousse (he/him) is a published, award-winning poet. He was on the last Poetry Slam team to represent Eugene, Oregon at the National Poetry Slam in 2005. He recently quit his Montessori middle school teaching job in Eugene to resuscitate his writing career.

Jon is particularly passionate about spoken word poetry and storytelling. He plays bass and sings lead vocals in the Dad Bandits, and is the lead singer and ukulele player for the Eugene-based Hawaiian music group, ‘Olekona.

Jorah LaFleur (she/her) is a writer/performer who enjoys wearing many different hats. She finds herself on stage as a spoken word poet, event emcee, actor, and interviewer. Offstage, she works with youth as a teaching artist. Each role engages her relentless curiosity about cultivating connection through creative communication.

Jorah is currently serving as WITS Coordinator and lead Writer in Residence for Wordcrafters in Eugene. She is committed to helping others experience the power of being seen/heard, and to promoting the arts as tools of social change and community building. For over a decade (2006 to 2019), she ran the Eugene Poetry Slam, which gifted her with a wealth of stage experience, and a front row seat to the recitation of thousands of original poems. Jorah has been writing and performing for 25 years.

Drea Lee (she/her), is a literary and performing arts educator. She has a B.A. in writing and literature, an M.A. in educational technology, and took part in ASU’s Your Novel Year program in 2016.

She’s been working with youth in public and private schools, after school programs, and online since 2009. When she’s not teaching, you can find her reading YA novels or playing with her three adorable chihuahua mixes.

Elle Mitchell (she/her) is a multidisciplinaryartist and author of dark fiction, crip fic, and essays. She spends her downtime fighting for disability rights, researching, gaming, and eating more than her share of homemade baked goods (when her body allows). Being a woman with several invisible illnesses, she enjoys living a semi-horizontal life with her husband and spoiled furbutts in the PNW.

You can find her books and limited edition miniatures connected to them in her shop. Sign up for her newsletter to keep up to date with her goings on, receive a free horror short story, and get other exclusive content delivered to your inbox twice a month.

Brendan O’Meara (he/him) is a journalist, author, and podcaster. He founded The Creative Nonfiction Podcast in 2013, now the longest running nonfiction interview show. He’s the author of two works of nonfiction, Six Weeks in Saratoga: How Three-Year-Old Filly Rachel Alexandra Beat the Boys and Became Horse of the Year (SUNY Press, 2011) and The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine (Mariner Books, 2025). He publishes the newsletters Pitch Club, where he invites someone to share a query and has them audio annotate their reasoning throughout and Rage Against the Algorithm, his up-to-11 monthly newsletter of recommendations.

Susan Palmer (she/her) is an award-winning journalist, a dilettante birder, and a lover of trees. Her short stories have been published in magazines and anthologies. Her first novel, The Tabernacle Bar, was set in Utah and received positive reviews in the Salt Lake City press. Her second novel, The Booker Rebellion, is set in the Oregon Coast Range and will be published in November 2026. She dabbles in poetry because it’s fun. She knows how to order a meal and ask about the weather in French and Spanish. In Italian, she can say: “How sweet to do nothing” and “Please let me off this bus.” In Swedish, she has perfected her pronunciation of “Tack” which means thank you. 

As a working journalist for 30 years, she has techniques for overcoming writer’s block and uses a daily practice to maintain the skills all writers need for fluency with storytelling. When she’s not writing, she’s embroidering or traveling or sweetly doing nothing.

You can find links to recent journalism and blog entries at susanpalmer.org

Emma Stockman (she/her) is a Seattle-based writer and educator with an MFA in Fiction from the University of Oregon.

In 2023, she moved to Seattle to pursue greater literary opportunities. She writes short fiction and is currently working on a novel.

Rosiee Thor (they/them) is the Pacific Northwest Indie Bestselling author of Tarnished Are The Stars, Fire Becomes Her, and tie-in novels for franchises like Life is Strange and Firefly. Their debut cozy mystery, Dead & Breakfast, co-written with Kat Hillis, is out now from Berkley. They live in Oregon with a dog, two cats, and an abundance of plants.

Jeany Van Meltebeke Snider (she/her) Ever since she listened to stories on records, cassette tapes, or visually on flannel boards, Jeany has been smitten. In her imaginary world under the piano where she was supposed to be practicing, she was creating worlds with characters from a deck of cards. After years of forcing the younger set of cousins to perform skits for the relatives, she ventured into theatre and has never looked back. Jeany loves Story. It is how she understands life and finds resonance and inspiration. Fiction or non, old or new, original or classic, stories affirm the human journey and tickle one with hope and curiosity for purpose and meaning.
Jeany was born and raised in Eugene, and after three years in theatre graduate school in Illinois, she and her husband David spent 25 years in Canada doing living, breathing, and teaching theatre as a resident artists with three theatre companies and raising their family. She loves to be in the center of the story as an actor or director, but has also enjoyed playwriting, designing, teaching, and when no other opportunities present themselves, producing.
Other than playwriting, Jeany’s love of writing has primarily been through blogging and journaling where she has found an outlet to name and honor what she is carrying and discover more who she is and who she is becoming.

Learn more about her at jeanyspot.blogspot.com and jeanysnider.wixsite.com

Leah Velez (they/she) is an interdisciplinary teaching artist and writer from Chicago, who loves using improv, and elements from RPGs for immersive learning experiences. A former high school teacher, and graduate of the University of Oregon’s MFA program in fiction, Leah is the founder of TeachWriteNow.

When they’re not involved in some kind of storytelling shenanigans, they can be found dancing around the country on their bus with two cats and an amazing partner in crime.

Lyzette Wanzer (she/her) is a San Francisco writer, editor, and writing workshop instructor. Her work appears in over twenty-five literary journals, magazines, books, and newspapers. Library Journal named her book, TRAUMA, TRESSES, & TRUTH: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives, a Top 10 Best Social Sciences Book. Her articles have appeared in Essay Daily, The Naked Truth, and the San Francisco University High School Journal. Her research interests include professional development for creative writers, Black feminism, critical race theory, and the lyrical essay form.

Lyzette serves as judge of the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition’s Intercultural Essay category and the Women’s National Book Association’s Effie Lee Morris Writing Contest’s Fiction category. She presents her work at conferences across the country, including the American and Popular Culture Association, Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), College English Association, Desert Nights, Rising Stars (Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing), Empowering Wom[x]n of Color Conference, Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture Since 1900, Grub Street’s Muse & The Marketplace, San Francisco Writers Conference, The Society for the Study of African American Life and History, and Southern Humanities Council. In August 2021 she produced her own two-day virtual conference, Trauma, Tresses, & Truth: A Natural Hair Conference, featuring panels, workshops, and readings examining the policing, perception, politics, and persecution of Black women’s natural hair.

A National Writers’ Union and Authors Guild member, Lyzette has been awarded writing residencies at Blue Mountain Center (NY), Kimmel Harding Center for the Arts (NE), Playa Summer Lake (OR), Horned Dorset Colony (NY), Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow (AR), Headlands Center for the Arts (CA), The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada, PlySpace (IN), and The Anderson Center (MN). Her work has been supported with grants from Center for Cultural Innovation, San Francisco Arts Commission, California Arts Council, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Black Artist Foundry, The Awesome Foundation, and California Humanities, a National Endowment for the Humanities partner.

Flora Winters (she/her) is an Oregonian writer and folklorist. Her short stories have appeared in The Bitter End: Tales of Nautical Terror and Mertales: Short Stories of Water, Fin and Pearl.

She has taught speculative fiction writing workshops for teens through the Young Writer’s Association, the Noti Community Center, and Wordcrafters.

When it is raining, she spends most of her time spinning yarns, literally and figuratively. When it is not raining (a scant few months of the year), she is often in the woods looking for dragons. She lives in an old farmhouse in Creswell with one human, two dogs, and a fluffle of rabbits.

m5 vibe (he/him) is an up and coming Hip Hop Artist and Spoken Word poet by way of Georgia. m5 started off his career in the Spoken Word genre and now, six years later, has five albums of music under his discography!

He’s performed his music/poetry at multiple venues and events including: Oregon Country Fair, Matthew Knight Arena, The McDonald Theater, Whiteaker Block Party, Lane Community College “BAM SLAM”, The Annual Eugene Mardi Gras event, Overflow Hip Hop Showcase, “Love You Madly” series held by NAACP Eugene Springfield Oregon Unit 1119, and placed consecutive years at the Eugene Poetry Slam at Tsunami Books.

m5 has worked with numerous artists, producers (national and international), and several production companies. m5 intertwines his poetry background into his music for very lyrically rich content.

Dante Zúñiga-West (he/him) is a storyteller who lives in the coastal mountain range of Oregon. He is author of the novel Rumble Young Man Rumble (2014, Zharmae Press) and founder of the Oregon-based writing collective known as The Stonecutters Union.

His work is frequently published in alternative newspapers, lifestyle magazines, and adventure journals. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from CalArts and a BA in Creative Writing from The Evergreen State College.