Please register to join us on Zoom on Thursday, June 18 at 6pm Alaska Time for June’s Live from Storyknife event. Participants will read from their current work. A recording of the event will be available from this page afterwards.

Kai Coggin is the Inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Hot Springs, AR, and author of five collections, most recently Mother of Other Kingdoms (Harbor Editions, 2024). She is an arts educator, master naturalist, and host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry.

Chioma Iwunze-Ibiam is a PhD candidate and Vice Presidential Fellow in the University of Utah’s dual English-Creative Writing program; she’s also the founder of Creative Writing News. A Cornell MFA alumna, her literary honors include recognitions from the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Storyknife, and Hedgebrook. Her work appears in Aster(ix) Journal, MTLS, Mukana Press Anthology, ANA Review, and elsewhere. She is currently completing her novel, which explores the intersection of immigration and disability. She is the Storyknife Kenai Lake Fellow for 2026.

Didi Jackson is the author of the poetry collections My Infinity (Winner of the 2025 Tennessee Book Prize) and Moon Jar. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Bomb, The New Yorker, and World Literature Today among other journals and magazines. She is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee and teaches creative writing at Vanderbilt University. Most recently she completed her certification as a Tennessee Naturalist. 

Carolyn Kremers writes poetry and literary nonfiction, is a lifelong musician, and lives in Fairbanks, Alaska. Her books include Upriver, The Alaska Reader, and Place of the Pretend People: Gifts from a Yup’ik Eskimo Village. She was a Fulbright Scholar twice at Buryat State University in Ulan Ude, Russia.

Angela Peñaredondo is an inter-transdisciplinary poet, artist and educator. They are the author of nature felt but never apprehended (Noemi Press) and All Things Lose Thousands of Times (Inlandia Institute, Hillary Gravendyke Book Prize). They live and create on unceded ancestral homeland of the Tongva people, Tovaangar in southern California.

Please register to join us on Zoom on Thursday, May 21 at 6pm Alaska Time for May’s Live from Storyknife event. Participants will read from their current work. A recording of the event will be available from this page afterwards.

Marianne Manzler is a Filipina-American writer, educator, and editor from Cincinnati. Her memoir explores beginnings and endings, identity and illness, home and the beyond. Recognized by Best American Essays 2022, her work appears in Fourth Genre, Seventh Wave, and others. She holds an MFA from the University of Washington and is the Director of Education at The Porch in Nashville.

K’Ehleyr McNulty (they/them/elle) is a descendant of the Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation. They live and work in creative writing on the lands of the Akimel O’odham, and Piipaash Nations. Their work can be found in ni’hikeyah tʼáá jííkʼe, all free nations, todas las naciones libres: migratory in verse, I Sing the Salmon Home, edited by Rena Priest, and The Madrona Project, Keep a Green Bough: Voices from the Heart of Cascadia, edited by Holly J Hughes.

Jodi Paloni is the author of They Could Live with Themselves, runner-up for the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, an Indie Publishers Award Silver Medalist, and a finalist for the Maine Book Award. Her short works appear in literary journals and anthologies. She has an MFA from Vermont College. She lives in Maine.

Jeneé Skinner’s work has appeared in One Story, Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Tin House Summer Workshop, Vermont Studio Center, and Hedgebrook. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is an assistant memoir editor at Split Lip Magazine. 

Ariadne Will was born and raised in Sitka, Alaska, and now works in city government. A granddaughter to newspaper publishers, Ariadne writes about home and the people who live there. She holds a BA in English and an MFA in creative writing.

Yvette DeChavez was born and raised in San Antonio and earned a PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin. Her writing can be found in American Short Fiction, Colorado Review, Passages North, and elsewhere. She is this year’s Rona Jaffe Fellow for Storyknife. 

Beste Filiz was born in Istanbul, Türkiye. She became a child asylum seeker and refugee at three years old when her family was forced to flee to London, England. She holds a MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. She writes for young people about difficult topics with hope and magic.

Liz Iversen‘s fiction and essays explore migration, motherhood, and the history of the Philippines, where she was born. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Passages North, Room, and Fourteen Hills, and has been supported by Tin House, VCCA, and Monson Arts. She lives with her family in Maine. She is this year’s Katahdin Fellow for Storyknife.

Margarita Ramirez Loya is a Mexican writer. She writes in Spanish and English while exploring hard topics of the borderlands. Her work-in-progress YA novel has been supported by Hedgebrook, Mesa Refuge, Looking Glass Arts, Border Arts Corridor, and Storyknife. She is currently a fellow for the Naco Heritage Alliance working on a picture book.

Emily Shoteen Si’al believes creative expression is a vital component of wellbeing. She seeks to tell stories through her work that speak to reclamation, strength, empowered healing, and of voices once unheard made known.  Emily is a proud citizen of the Tlingit and Haida Nations. Emily is this year’s Fireweed Fellow for Storyknife.

Lesley Wheeler, Poetry Editor of Shenandoah, is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Mycocosmic. Her other books include the hybrid memoir Poetry’s Possible Worlds and the novel Unbecoming.  Wheeler’s work has received support from the Fulbright Foundation, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers, and the Sewanee Writers Workshop. She teaches in Lexington, Virginia.