Jack Straw Writers Cohort Reading

The readers include Kevin Dean, Elissa Favero, Jean Ferruzola, Rasheena Fountain, Maiah A Merino, and Ruth Marie Tomlinson.
About this Event

Writers from the 2026 Jack Straw Writers cohort visit the store for a reading of their selected work. The readers include Kevin Dean, Elissa Favero, Jean Ferruzola, Rasheena Fountain, Maiah A Merino, and Ruth Marie Tomlinson. This year's program was curated by Claudia Castro Luna.

Registration is not required, but helps us anticipate audience size.

Kevin Dean (he/him) is a Seattle-based writer of poetry and fiction. Previously, he lived in Cairo, Egypt, where he worked as an editor and studied Arabic. Before all that, he was a kid with a library card in southwest Virginia. His work has been published in The Common and The Rumpus. In addition to the Jack Straw Writers Program, he’s an alum of the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. He’s currently at work on a debut collection of poetry.

Elissa Favero’s writing often centers visual arts and built and living worlds. Informed by her previous roles as an educator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and at the Seattle Art Museum as well as by her current work teaching visual arts histories at Cornish College of the Arts at Seattle University, Elissa situates her observations of and reflections on art adjacent to and in conversation with her place-based experiences and memories, bringing art criticism together with the more personal, expansive, and associative qualities of the essay. Her writing has appeared in Temporary Art Review, The Rumpus, Terrain.org, River Teeth Journal’s Beautiful Things series, and Ecotone, and she is the winner of the 2023 Newfound Prose Prize for writing that explores how place shapes identity, imagination, and understanding. Her winning chapbook, Children of Rivers and Trees: An Abecedarian, was published by Newfound in 2024. A graduate of the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program, where she focused on creative nonfiction and ekphrastic writing, Elissa volunteers as a nonfiction editor at the environmental literary magazine The Hopper and is currently at work on a full-length collection of essays, tentatively titled The Queen is Dead.

Jean Ferruzola is a writer focused on stories for young adult readers. Her work often centers on family, memory, and the ways heritage shapes identity. As a first-generation Ecuadorian-American, she is drawn to narratives that explore how the past echoes across generations. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Brevity, The Offing, and ELLE Magazine, among other publications. She earned her MFA from the University of Washington and was a 2014–2015 Hugo House Fellow. In 2016, she received Artist Trust’s Grants for Artist Projects, and in 2021 she was honored as a YA Tin House Scholar. She is currently at work on a young adult novel about a girl confronting long-buried secrets after her missing sister suddenly returns home, a project that continues her interest in resilience, memory, and the complicated bonds of family.

Rasheena Fountain centers environmental advocacy and justice in her work. She has received fellowships and support from the Jack Straw Writers Program, National Audubon, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. Her film, Dropped Down Blues, debuted in the “How We Carry Water” 2024 exhibit at PRAx. In 2025, she released In the Aftermath, a blues guitar and poetry performance set. Fountain has a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an M.A.Ed. from Antioch University Seattle/IslandWood, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, where she studies blues and environment as a PhD candidate in English.

Maiah A Merino, a first and second-generation Mexican-American/Chicana Poet, mixed-genre writer, teaching artist. and therapist, has poems in A New Season: Poems from a World in Flux Anthology; In Xóxitl, in cuícatl: Flor y Canto, Antología de poesía; I Sing the Salmon Home: Poems from Washington State; and Windblown I, and is a regular contributor and past co-editor of The Yellow Medicine Review Journal. A 2025 “Garden Poet,” a 2021 Writing the Land Poet, and a recipient of the 2021 Artist Trust GAP award, Maiah utilizes her training as a narrative therapist and writer in support of others reclaiming their own stories. She currently teaches Poetry through Path with Art and her private practice. She is a single mom who lives with 3 cats and is often hunted, as prey, daily.

Ruth Marie Tomlinson has always been a maker and a writer. Early on she chose to pursue studio art professionally, with her written work playing a supporting role. She has exhibited her visual work in locations around the Pacific Northwest and beyond for more than 30 years, including: 4 Culture, The Vestibule, Method, CoCA, Soil, Jack Straw New Media Gallery, G. Gibson, and the Bellevue Art Museum. In the last decade Ruth has turned toward writing. The shift began with short pieces accompanying her studio work. More recently her focus has been written works, occasionally with visual companions. Currently Ruth is tackling a long-form non-fiction manuscript exploring an imagined river route between Seattle, WA and Two Dot, Montana. Observation and the consideration of place have always been critical to her practice whether installation, sculpture, drawing, or writing. The work remains tactile – be it material or text. Ruth is Professor Emeritus at Cornish College of the Arts. She is also director of the Two Dot Schoolhouse Invitational Residency Program in Two Dot, Montana.

Claudia Castro Luna is a 2014 Jack Straw Writing Fellow, an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate fellow (2019), WA State Poet Laureate (2018–2021) and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet (2015–2018). She is the author of Cipota Under the Moon (Tia Chucha Press, 2022) and Killing Marías (Two Sylvias Press, 2017) both shortlisted for the WA State Book Award in poetry, 2023 and 2018 respectively. She is also the author of One River, A Thousand Voices (Chin Music Press, 2020) and the chapbook This City (Floating Bridge Press, 2016). Her most recent non-fiction is in There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis (Vintage) and in Memory’s Vault: The Poetic Heart of Fort Worden (Empty Bowl). Born in El Salvador, Castro Luna lives in English and Spanish.