Jack Straw Reading, hosted by Kathleen Flenniken

Writers from the 2025 Jack Straw Writers cohort visit the store for a reading of their selected work. The readers include Hillary Behrman, Mateo Bracken, Makayla Danielle Gay, Bill Hollands, and Nhatt Nichols. The evening will be hosted by Kathleen Alcalá.

Hillary Behrman’s award winning short stories have been described as deeply humane and unsettling and have been published in journals, magazines, short story dispensers and an anthology. Lake Effect, her debut collection of stories was chosen by Lauren Groff as the winner of the 2024 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction and will be published by Sarabande Books in 2026. Groff praised Lake Effect as a book of “great moral power and heart” by “an author of extraordinary grace.” Hillary is a recipient of the Chris O’Malley Prize in Fiction from The Madison Review. She has an MFA in fiction from Pacific University and was a participant in fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She’s been a writer in residence at the National Willa Cather Center and an artist in residence at the Vashon Artist Residency. Hillary lives and writes in Seattle where she raised two kids and worked as a children’s civil rights lawyer and public defender. She’s excited to be a part of the Jack Straw Writers Program and is working on her first novel.

Mateo Bracken is a poet, librettist, and actor who splits his time between Auburn and Seattle, Washington. He was the 2023-2024 Seattle Youth Poet Laureate and currently serves as the 2024-2026 Auburn Poet Laureate. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in the Gay & Lesbian Review, EchoX, The Washington State Queer Poetry Anthology, Abya Yala: Indigenous Connections in Latin America, Creative Colloquy, Bird Brains: A Lyrical Guide to the Birds of Washington State, and more. As a librettist in the Seattle Opera Creation Lab, he developed the twenty-minute chamber opera Blood Dawn of the Inti Sun in collaboration with composer Mina Pariseau. His first chapbook, Dear Spanish, was published in 2024 through Poetry Northwest and explores the languages of identity, heritage, and belonging. He is currently working on a manuscript about the settler colonial history of Auburn in verse.

Makayla Danielle Gay hails from Southeastern Kentucky. Her work has appeared in Adroit, Prairie Schooner, and American Literary Review, among others. Her debut collection, Hackles (Girl Noise Press 2025) is available now.

Nhatt Nichols (she/her) is a multidisciplinary journalist, poet, and artist whose work focuses on the intersections of humans, animals, and their environment. A graduate of The Royal Drawing School in London, she uses words and images to cover food and environmental issues using solutions journalism practices for High Country News, Edible Magazine, Civil Eats, Modern Farmer, and The Daily Yonder. She is the founder and editor of The Jefferson County Beacon, a rural weekly news outlet. Nhatt is a 2024 Blue Sky Community Action Fellow and a 2023 Artist Trust Literary Gap grant recipient for her project documenting the history of human/animal dependency and the current refugee crisis in Białowieża, Europe’s oldest forest. Her first museum show, Nhatt Nichols: The Willapa Oyster and its Environs, was on display at The Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum in 2025. Her first book, This Party of the Soft Things (Bored Wolves 2022), a heavily researched graphic poem, is now awaiting its third printing. Her first novella, Burn Morels, is forthcoming from Bored Wolves this summer.

Bill Hollands was born and raised in Miami, Florida, graduated from Williams College, and received his MA in English as a Dr. Herchel Smith Fellow at Cambridge University. He worked for the New York Public Library and Microsoft before becoming a high school English teacher. He lives in Seattle with his husband and their son. He has returned to poetry after a long hiatus, and his recent poems have appeared in such journals as The Adroit Journal, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, Rattle, The Florida Review, DIAGRAM, Boulevard, and Plume, as well as on The Slowdown podcast. A multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee, he has been a finalist for North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize, Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize in Poetry, Smartish Pace’s Erskine J. Poetry Prize, and New Ohio Review’s NORward Prize. He reads submissions for Poetry Northwest. His debut poetry collection Mangrove (ELJ Editions) will be published in 2025.

Kathleen Flenniken began her career as a civil engineer and didn’t discover poetry until her early 30s. Her collection, Plume (University of Washington Press, 2012), a meditation on the Hanford Nuclear Site and her home town of Richland, Washington, won the Washington State Book Award and was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Pacific Northwest Book Awards. Her first book, Famous (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association. Her other honors include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust. She was the 2012 – 2014 Washington State Poet Laureate. Kathleen teaches poetry in the schools through arts agencies like Writers in the Schools and Jack Straw, and Seattle University. For 13 years Flenniken was an editor at Floating Bridge Press, a nonprofit press dedicated to publishing Washington State poets. She currently serves on the board of Jack Straw, an audio arts studio and cultural center. Flenniken holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Pacific Lutheran University, as well as bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering.

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