Rena Priest (BA, 2005) is a 2019 Jack Straw Writer, and recipient of a National Geographic Explorer Grant. She will be reading at Village Books on July 7th to promote the anthology, For Love of Orcas.
Dayna Patterson
Dayna Patterson’s chapbook, Titania in Yellow, is forthcoming in 2019 (Porkbelly Press), and her full-length collection of lyric essays and poetry, If Mother Braids a Waterfall, will meet the world in 2020 (Signature Books). She recently gave a reading in Salt Lake City sponsored by the Sunstone Foundation. This past year, she received three Pushcart nominations and was a finalist for Best of the Net. She won second place in the Eugene England Memorial Essay Contest for her piece “Fledge.” Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, AGNI, Crab Orchard Review, Passages North, North American Review, Cave Wall, and others. She was awarded a 2019 SAF Mineral School Fellowship, and she continues her work as Editor-in-Chief of Psaltery & Lyre, an online literary journal that makes its home at the intersection of faith and doubt.
Kelly Magee
Kelly Magee’s story “Nobody Understands You Like You” was selected by Antonya Nelson to be included in New Stories from the Midwest 2018, her story (with Carol Guess), “With Killer Bees” was included in an anthology of collaborative writing, They Said, and her story (with Kami Westhoff) “The Unbearable Here” was published in Contrary. She developed a new course in “Queer Memoir” and taught a Graduate Fiction Workshop around the idea of “influence”—what things contemporary writers are influenced by, and how they can best exert their own influence. She also spoke on a panel on “The Speculative and Fantastic in LGBTQ+ Writing” and organized “Taste of Western,” a reading of WWU faculty at this year’s AWP conference in Portland.