Teaching-Writer Biographies

TEACHING-WRITERS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Whether being charged by a grizzly in Denali National Park or being bitten by piranhas in the Amazon, Elizabeth Barnes is an avid adventurer and outdoor enthusiast. She loves reading, writing, cooking, and parenting. A lecturer at Boise State University, Elizabeth teaches writing by day and by night battles dragons via her pen.

Natanya Biskar is an MFA student in iction at Boise State University, where she has taught writing and serves as Associate Editor for The Idaho Review. She is the recipient of a 2021 Alexa Rose Foundation Grant, and the winner of the 2021 Glenn Balch Award for Fiction. Her work has appeared in Subtropics. Before she entered graduate school, she was a teacher for over ten years. Colleen Brennan is a freelance writer, editor, writing coach, and teacher with an MA in linguistics. Her stories appear in Writers in the Attic and A Year in Ink. A native Minnesotan, she has lived and worked in San Diego, Boulder, Paris, Bordeaux, and Boise. She is the recipient of a 2018 literary arts grant from the Alexa Rose Foundation. Meg Freitag was born in Maine. She earned her BA from Sarah Lawrence College, and has an MFA in Poetry from UT Austin’s Michener Center for Writers, and an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her irst poetry collection, EDITH, was published by BOAAT Press in 2017. Individual poems have appeared in Tin House, Boston Review, and Black Warrior Review, among other journals. She’s currently at work on a second poetry collection, a short story collection, and a novel. She lives and works in Boise, Idaho.

Katie Fuller is a poet and teacher. Originally from Maine, she worked as a freelance writer before earning her MA in Literature and MFA in Poetry at Boise State. Previously the Program Manager at The Cabin, she’s since returned to teaching full-time and her true passion, spreading the power of the written word to bring joy into the lives of others. She is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Valve and The Greenwood Cemetery, and teaches writing at Boise State and the College of Idaho. Sharon Hanson has been a high school language arts and creative writing teacher for over thirty years, and she recently retired from Boise High School. The core of her teaching has always been the power of narrative. Writing is her parallel passion; she cobbles words together to make sense of the world. Sharon has worked as a freelance writer in the past and continues to write with her students. Her daily writing has taken shape as a book for Scholastic and a Fiction 101 First Place. Currently she works as a trainer for Narrative 4, furthering her belief that by sharing our stories we grow community. Chris Mathers Jackson is a freelance writer and editor, an aspiring novelist, a teacher, a mom, an artist, and a lover of the natural world. Chris received her MA in English Literature from University of Montana in 2005. She taught English Composition at UM from 2003-2006, both during and following completion of her master’s (as a TA and then an adjunct instructor). She worked in the administration of Missoula International School from 2006-2010 before becoming a full-time freelance writer, editor, and graphic designer. Ater several years, she stopped doing design work professionally to focus on her growing family and her passion for the written word. In 2019 she established a book review website (LitReaderNotes). In addition to teaching, writing, and editing, Chris enjoys spending as much time outside as possible, adventuring both near and far, with her husband and two daughters. Playwright, writer and theater maker Heidi Kraay examines the link between brain and body, seeking empathy with fractured characters. Her work pulls myth, metaphor and monsters together to discover connections across diference. Plays include Unwind: Hindsight is 2020, see in the dark, How To Hide Your Monster, New Eden and Kilgore, as well as co-devised plays, one-acts, plays for young audiences and short plays. Her work 154

has been presented where she lives in Boise, Idaho, regionally, in NYC and internationally, recently through The Bechdel Group, West of Lenin Theatre, Spark! Creative Works, Oregon Contemporary Theatre, Women’s Theatre Festival, Fargo Moorhead Community Theatre, Trinity Street Players, HomeGrown Theatre, Tomo Suru Players, Thingamajig Theatre Company, Radio Boise, Boise Contemporary Theater and Seven Devils Playwrights Foundry. Heidi holds an MFA in Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts from California Institute of Integral Studies and is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild of America. Cassandra Padilla is a poet and a teacher. She decided she was a writer at the age of 14 and was determined to use her story as tangible evidence that if she could make it, anyone could. She realized she was a poet while attending a writing class, similar to the ones provided by The Cabin, in a juvenile detention center. She’s won several poetry slam competitions in Boise, has performed throughout the Treasure Valley, and was chosen to represent Boise at Portland, Oregon’s regional poetry slam in 2019. She is a mother to four children and teaches poetry at the same juvenile detention center where she became a poet.

Guisela Penados Baldizón is a writer of iction, poetry, and prose. She has been working with young writers for more than iteen years. A native of Guatemala, Guisela has lived in Boise for 25 years where she was a Top Ten Scholar at Boise State University and earned her M.A. in Literacy. She has been teaching since 1977. She has provided literacy and whole language Spanish workshops throughout the Northwest. One of her favorite projects has been to work with street children in Guatemala, showing them how to use literacy to ind their voices. She runs La Tertulia Spanish Learning Center in Boise, an organization that aims to promote bilingualism and the beneits of multiculturalism. Hannah Rodabaugh is the author of With Words: Verse in Concordance, We Don’t Bury Our Dead When Our Dead Are Animals, and We Traced The Shape Of Our Loss To See Your Face. She’s been published in Anti-Narrative Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, ROAR Magazine, Horse Less Review, K’in Literary Journal, and Written River, among others. She’s received grants from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, the Alexa Rose Foundation, and the COVID Cultural Commissioning Fund. She’s been an artist-in-residence 155

for the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and Surel’s Place. She is a teaching writer for The Cabin. Laura Roghaar is a poet, educator, and arts administrator. She serves as the Poetry Out Loud coordinator for Idaho and teaches writing at The Cabin. She holds an MFA in poetry from Boise State and her chapbook of poems, SISTERHOUSE, is out from dancing girl press. Daniel Stewart, a poet, is the author of the collection The Imaginary World, and a teaching-writer for The Cabin’s Writers in the Schools. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he won the Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace, and has published in BOAAT, Graviton Lit, NightBlock, Prairie Schooner, Puerto Del Sol, RATTLE, Sixfold, Skidrow Penthouse, Thrush Poetry Journal, Yes Poetry, and elsewhere. Tracy Sunderland loves storytelling and the particular demands of writing plays and screenplays. Her short ilms have won multiple festival awards and her irst feature ilm script Tailor played in festivals all over the world and won the 2021 Best Screenplay award at Festival 36 Mostra de Valencia in Spain. Tracy holds an MA in ilmmaking from London Film School and received the 2015 Fellowship in Filmmaking from the Idaho Commission on the Arts. She also teaches at Boise State University and received the Adjunct Faculty of the Year Award in 2015.

Tessy Ward is the author of My Head Can Feel the Vibrating of a Full Heartbeat Through a Chest That Is Neither Hollow Nor Dark, a chapbook from Press 254. She has an MFA from Boise State University and was a Sutherland Fellow in poetry at Illinois State University. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Requited, Rougarou, and Touch The Donkey, among others.