Our instructors are writers who maintain an active writing practice, which often includes publishing and/or performing, and who are committed to inspiring and enlarging the practices of writers in the Frequency community.

Mary-Kim Arnold‘s prose has appeared online at Tin House, Wigleaf, HMTL Giant, and The Rumpus. She was a finalist in the 2013 Pinch Journal Literary Awards and her poetry collection, Awake, Location was a finalist for the 2013 Kundiman Prize. She has poems at Two Serious Ladies and forthcoming from [burntdistrict]. She has taught creative writing at RISD, Wheaton College, and at Brown University, where she received her MFA. She lives in Pawtucket.

Laura Brown-Lavoie is a fiction writer, poet, and performer here in Providence, RI. Her stories and poems have appeared in some journals, but mostly she likes reading out loud. She represented Providence as a finalist at the 2013 Women of the World Poetry Slam and the 2011 National Poetry Slam, and is currently the is co-slammaster at the Providence Poetry slam, where she also runs the youth slam program. When she isn’t writing, Laura works as a farmer, growing food and raising chickens on a vacant lot in Providence, and selling the produce to her neighbors.

Tina Cane was born in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC in 1969 and grew up in the city’s East and West Village. She attended the University of Vermont, the Sorbonne, and completed her master’s degree in French Literature at the Université de Paris IV-Nanterre. She is the founder and director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI. Over the past twenty years, she has taught French, English, and Creative Writing in public and private schools throughout New York City and Rhode Island. Tina’s poems and translations have appeared in numerous journals including Hanging Loose, Spinning Jenny, The Literary Review, Barrow Street, Tupelo Quarterly and Two Serious Ladies. Her work, The Fifth Thought, was published by Other Painters Press in 2008. She is the 2016 recipient for the Fellowship Merit Poetry Award, and lives outside of Providence, RI with her husband and their three children.

Franny Choi is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) and a recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Frederick Bock Prize. Her work has appeared in POETRY Magazine, The Journal, PANK, Redivider, and others. She has worked in a number of Providence youth/arts organizations over the past five years and is currently a staff member of the Providence Poetry Slam. She is a VONA Fellow, a Project VOICE teaching artist, and a member of the Dark Noise Collective.

Kate Colby is author of six books, including Fruitlands, which won the Norma Farber First Book Award from The Poetry Society of America in 2007. Blue Hole and I Mean are forthcoming in 2015. She is a founding board member of the Gloucester Writers Center in Massachusetts and currently lives in Providence, where she was a 2012 fellow of the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts.

James Crews‘ work has appeared in Ploughshares, Raleigh Review, and The New Republic, among other journals, and he is a regular contributor to The (London) Times Literary Supplement. His first collection of poetry, The Book of What Stays, won the 2010 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and received a Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award. Other awards include residencies from the Sitka Center for the Arts and Caldera Arts as well as two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhD in Writing and Environmental Literature from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he was an Othmer Fellow and worked for Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry newspaper column. He currently lives and teaches in Providence, Rhode Island.

Carolyn Decker, poet and wetland biologist, spends her favorite days outside asking plants about who they are and where they live. She studied environmental science at Wheaton College and spent a year as a Watson Fellow investigating the relationships between nature conservation and creative writing. Endless Beautiful enables her to be a careful listener and thoughtful writer.

Darcie Dennigan is the author of Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse,  Madame X, and The Dept. of Ephebic Dreamery. She is currently a poet in residence at the University of Connecticut, and has taught writing at Brown Continuing Studies, Holy Cross, and elsewhere.

Matthew Derby is the author of Super Flat Times: Stories. and, most recently, The Silent History, the first major serialized, exploratory novel written and designed for iPad and iPhone. He lives in Pawtucket.

Ren Evans is a writer, teacher, book designer and multi-media artist living in Providence.  Co-editor and founder of the online literary journal Digital Artifact, Ren also publishes the bi-annual comic book series The Secret Life. Ren received an MFA in fiction from Bard College and has taught creative writing and bookmaking in San Francisco and Providence. Currently, Ren is at work on a novella entitled Lost Boys.

Kristen Falso-Capaldi‘s writing has appeared in Good Housekeeping, Volume 1 Brooklyn, Joyland, Jenny Magazine, Ripen the Page, 3Elements Review, See the Elephant and on The Other Stories Podcast. Her short play, “Threshold” debuted at the 2016 10-minute play festival at the Sandra Feinstein Gamm Theatre. In her “spare” time, she teaches writing to exuberant middle schoolers and university students. She lives in northern Rhode Island with her musician husband. For more about Kristen, visit: www.kristenfalsocapaldi.com

Stephanie Ford is the author of All Pilgrim (Four Way Books, 2015). Her poems have appeared in Tin House, Boston Review, Fence, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles, where she currently teaches poetry with Writing Workshops Los Angeles.

Susana Gardner is the author of the full-length poetry collections HERSO (Black Radish Books, 2011) and [ LAPSED INSEL WEARY ] (The Tangent Press, 2008). Her third book, CADDISH also from Black Radish Books. She has published several chapbooks, including Hyper-Phantasie Constructs (Dusie Kollektiv, 2010) and Herso (University of Theory and Memorabilia Press, 2009). Her poetry has appeared in many online and print publications including Jacket, How2, Puerto Del Sol, and Cambridge Literary Review among others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies, including 131.839 slög með bilum (131,839 keystrokes with spaces) (Ntamo, Finland, 2007) and NOT FOR MOTHERS ONLY: CONTEMPORARY POEMS ON CHILD-GETTING AND CHILD-REARING (Fence Books, United States, 2007). She lives in Rhode Island, where she also teaches, freelances and edits the online poetics journal and experimental kollektiv press, Dusie.

Debbie Hagan has worked as a writer and teacher for more than thirty-five years. Her articles and prose have appeared in regional and national publications, including Boston Globe Magazine, Harvard Review, Superstition Review, Pleiades, Hyperallergic, Brain, Child, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Dime Story anthology, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College and has a published a narrative nonfiction book, Against the Tide (Hamilton Books, 2004). She is the former editor in chief of Art New England and managing editor of New England Home. Currently, she teaches creative writing at MassArt and is book reviews editor for Brevity literary magazine.

Karen Haskell has an MFA in writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her chapbook Sixty Years was published by Finishing Line Press. Her work has been included in anthologies, RI Parent Magazine, and she was a member of the Listen to Your Mother Providence cast. Karen has over 12 years of experience as an administrator in non-profit adult education and as a teacher in higher education. She has also been a Frequency volunteer and student.

Jeff Hirsch is a Virginia native recently transplanted to the mighty state of Rhode Island. He is the author of six novels for children and young adults, all published by Scholastic and Clarion Books. His novels include, The Eleventh Plague (A USA Today Bestseller), Magisterium (A Junior Library Guild Selection), The Darkest Path, and The 39 Clues: Breakaway, a volume of the New York Times Bestselling Middle Grade series. His most recent novel, Black River Falls, follows a comic book obsessed teen growing up in a small town that’s under quarantine due to an outbreak of a virus that erases its victim’s memories. His next novel, Unnatural Disasters, will be published by Clarion in the winter of 2018. You can find out more about Jeff and his work at jeff-hirsch.com

Elizabeth Howort has taught poetry at the fifth grade, high school and college level.  Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in L Magazine,The Round, Storyscape, THUNDERCLAP! Magazine, Transportal, and the Best American Poetry blog. She has taught writing for URI, Roger Williams University, and as a poet-in-residence for Writers in the Schools Rhode Island.

Amanda Kallis is a science fiction writer, essayist, and poet from Los Angeles. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in the Cimarron Review, Black Warrior Review (2018 Nonfiction Contest Winner), Spillway, Prelude, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and The Cincinnati Review. She holds an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has received fellowships from the Edward F. Albee Foundation and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Here she is hugging a robot in Tokyo.

Janaya Kizzie writes horror stories and an occasional prose-style sonnet. Providence inspires her often, and her career as an archivist often informs the historical elements in her creative work. She is particularly interested in genre fiction  (especially historical fiction, horror and sci fi), interstitial fiction, small-batch self-publishing, and the places where writing meets other things, like visual art, music and film.

Christopher Kondrich is the author of Contrapuntal (Parlor Press, 2013), a New Measure Poetry Prize finalist. He is the winner of The Iowa Review Award for Poetry (selected by Srikanth Reddy) and The Paris-American Reading Series Prize. His poetry appears or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Cimarron Review,Colorado Review, Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Verse Daily and elsewhere, while his criticism appears in Jacket2, Colorado Review and CutBank. He holds an MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts and a PhD from the University of Denver where he was an editor forDenver Quarterly. Currently, he is Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Quarterly and an instructor at theLighthouse Writers Workshop.

Amy Eller Lewis received her MFA in Fiction from Naropa University in 1996. Her stories can be seen in First Intensity: A Magazine of New Writing and Gargoyle. Additionally, she received a Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Fiction for the manuscript of very short stories, entitled: Once: Tiny Tales of Terror. She works as a freelance writing and creativity coach, and writes Steampunk Noir under the pen name Evelyn Archer and has a very lively newsletter. She also shares a birthday with Nikola Tesla and Legs Diamond.

Christina Liu‘s parents escaped China’s Cultural Revolution, settling with her to live in NYC’s Chinatown.  This backdrop informs much of her writing.  She holds a BA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing and an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Formerly an ESL counselor and translator, she is currently an academic advisor and writing instructor at Boston Architectural College.  Her work is published in Dream International Quarterly, Phantasm, and featured on the CD, Spoken Live! (Arula Records).

Christina has been a member of Streetfeet Women since 2014, a non-profit writing and performance ensemble and performs with them regularly.  Her poems, “Only,” and “I Am,” will be published in the upcoming Frequency Writers anthology, tentatively titled, Word in World.  Her recent readings include: The Boston Poetry Marathon, The Boston Poetry Salon, Jamaica Plain’s Chapter and Verse.  In November, she will take part of the Brockton Public Library’s “Voices of Diversity” program prior featuring there.

She dreams, in spare moments, of green places, rushing waters, and dumplings.

Erica Mena is a poet, translator, and book artist. She holds an MFA in poetry from Brown University, and an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa. Her book Featherbone (Ricochet Editions, 2015) won a 2016 Hoffer First Horizons Award. Her translation of the Argentine graphic novel The Eternaut by H.G. Oesterheld and F. Solano Lopez (Fantagraphics, 2015) won a 2016 Eisner Award. She is the editor in chief of Drunken Boat, and the founding editor of Anomalous Press. Puerto Rican by descent, she was born and raised in Boston, and now lives between Providence, RI and San Francisco, CA with three cats, one husband, and a growing collection of imaginary beings. You can find her online at www.acyborgkitty.com.

Walker Mettling is a cartoonist, printmaker, and since 2010 he’s directed the Providence Comics Consortium, an experimental education-based intergenerational comics micro-publisher which teaches comics classes at public libraries and publishes a huge array of comics, zines, and books!

In 2017 he was the Rhode Island State Council on the Art’s Fellow in New Genres. His most recent book is “On Display in a Gallery That No Longer Exists” a screen printed artist book exploring his RISD Museum Fellowship, documenting ‘ethnographic’ objects left behind in the beautiful and messy and ever shifting catacombs of museum storage.

Adara Meyers is a playwright and Managing Director of Sleeping Weazel, a Boston-based multimedia experimental theatre company. Ms. Meyers’ plays, new music collaborations, and multidisciplinary projects have been developed and produced at Boston Center for the Arts, Roulette, the Great Plains Theatre Conference, the L.A. Philharmonic, The Factory Theatre, and Perishable Theatre, among others. Her work has been supported by the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and Sedona Summer Colony. She is currently pursuing an Interdisciplinary Arts MFA at Goddard College and holds a BA in English from Wheaton College (MA).

 Stephanie Gorton Murphy is a Providence-based editor who works directly with  authors on developing their projects to submit to agents. Stephanie started out as an  intern at The Paris Review and went on to work as Managing Editor at Canongate  Books and Editor at The Overlook Press and Open Road Media in New York. The  books she’s edited range from critically acclaimed novels, to Oprah-featured memoirs,  to narrative studies of Internet culture, sports fandom, and the vampire squid. She is  an MFA candidate in Goucher College’s Creative Nonfiction program, where she has also taught in the undergraduate creative writing department.  

Nick Rattner is a poet, sometime basketball journalist, Editor at Ugly Duckling Presse, and co-translator with Marta del Pozo of Yván Yauri’s Viento de fuego / Fire Wind (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011) and Czár Gutierrez’s La caida del equilibrista. Previous occupations include teaching English in the sierra of Perú, refurbishing industrial buildings for a concrete company in northern New England, and creating exhibits for the Museum of American Finance. He holds a Masters in American Studies from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and teaches at Holyoke Community College.

Lucas Pralle is in the right place when he’s putting tools to good use. He’s the writer and producer of the serialized audiobook, Inner Harsh. Production of Endless Beautiful allows him to explore the medium even more, and the sessions are an excellent way for him to put his creativity to test.

Stephanie Reents has lived in a shared flat in Oxford, England, a tiny studio on the wrong side of the tracks in Idaho Falls, Idaho, a fifth-floor walk-up in the West Village, an adobe near the Sonoran desert, a garden apartment in the Upper Haight of San Francisco, and the old Hamilton Watch Factory building in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Her fiction has been included in the O. Henry Prize Stories, noted in Best American Short Stories, and has appeared in numerous journals, including Epoch. Stephanie has been a Bread Loaf Conference Scholar, a Stegner Fellow, and a Rhodes Scholar. She is an assistant professor at the College of the Holy Cross and lives in a creaky Victorian in Providence, Rhode Island.

Rekha Rosha‘s work on the intersections of fiction and finance has appeared in anthologies published by Palgrave Macmillan and Cambridge Scholars Publishing. She has taught courses on American literature and composition at Boston University, Wake Forest University, and at Brandeis University, where she received her Ph.D. in English and American Literature. Her favorite moments in the classroom were teaching “When Zombies Attack!”–a composition course that explored questions only the undead can raise about consciousness and identity. She is currently writing an early American noir novel about the violence of colonization in 1630 Boston. She lives in beautiful Pawtuxet Village.

Nada Samih-Rotondo is a writer, teacher, and mother who is inspired by the relationship between personhood and place. Born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents, she immigrated to the United States at the age of six to Rhode Island as a refugee of the Gulf War. She has taught creative writing, literacy, and English as a second language to low income students in communities of color in grades 7-12 and through college. She holds an MFA from Lesley University in Fiction and loves creating from the intersection of all genres. She is interested in the slippery concepts of home, intergenerational trauma, and folklore. Her writing has been featured in the Masters Review, Squat Birth Journal and the Frequency Anthology. Nada can be followed on her blog: https://nowapproachingprovidence.wordpress.com.

Kate Schapira is the author of four full-length books of poems, most recently The Soft Place (Horse Less Press). Her 11th chapbook, Someone Is Here, will be out with Projective Industries in the summer of 2015. She teaches at Brown University and has led workshops and events for the RISD Museum, the Providence Athenaeum, College Visions, and as a Writer in the Schools. She co-runs the Publicly Complex Reading Series at Ada Books and periodically offers Climate Anxiety Counseling in Providence and other I locations. For more, visit http://climateanxietycounseling.wordpress.com.

Dr. Lucy Spelman is one of 200 board-certified zoological medicine specialists in the world. She teaches in RISD’s History, Philosophy & the Social Sciences department. Her course offerings include Biology of Human-Animal Interactions, Evolutionary Biology, Visualizing the Natural Sciences, Exploring the Art and Science of Biodiversity in Guyana, Living Systems Lab and Field, and South Africa: Art, Science, Biodiversity. She also teaches courses in Guyana and South Africa.

Susan Tacent, PhD (Comparative Literature, Brown) has taught courses on literature, literary theory, and creative writing to people of all ages, from preschool right through college (Brown, Oberlin, RISD) and beyond. She runs the Bold Point Literary Society, a lively book club for Tockwotton on the Waterfront’s assisted living residents, and teaches writing workshops at the Rogers Free Library in Bristol, RI.

S. Tourjee served as Frequency’s director. They are alsothe author of Ghost and When Tongue was Muscle (both published by Anomalous Press). They write in a hybrid form of prose and poetry and collaborate frequently with many different artists. They hold an MFA from Brown University, and are a 2015-2016 Artist-in-Residence at Joshua Tree National Park. More at stourjee.com.

Maryann Ullmann taught adult ESOL at English for Action in Olneyville, as well as history, civics, and Spanish at School One. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University in Pittsburgh with emphases on Fiction and Pedagogy, and earned the program’s top fellowship for commitment to community leadership. She has taught creative writing in numerous community spaces including county jails, cultural centers, and afterschool programs for youth. She has published stories, essays, articles and poems in publications such as Permafrost, Literary Bohemian, Prime Number and Whole Terrain, among others. She is bilingual in English and Spanish, and has worked with English language learners from a wide variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds. She’s fond of blurring the boundaries of genre, mixing realism and fabulism, and encouraging voices that the world needs more of.

Maryann Ullmann había enseñado inglés para adultos en Inglés en Acción en Olneyville, y también historia, educación cívica y español en School One. Ella tiene un MFA en escritura creativa de la Universidad Chatham de Pittsburgh con énfasis en la ficción y pedagogía y obtuvo la beca superior del programa de compromiso con el liderazgo de la comunidad. Ella ha enseñado escritura creativa en numerosos espacios de la comunidad incluyendo cárceles, centros culturales y programas después de clases para los jóvenes. Ha publicado cuentos, ensayos, artículos y poemas en publicaciones como Permafrost, Literary Bohemian, Prime Number y Whole Terrain, entre otros. Ella es bilingüe en inglés y español y ha trabajado con estudiantes del idioma Inglés de una amplia variedad de orígenes culturales y lingüísticos. Ella es amante de desdibujando los límites del género, mezcla de realismo y derroteros y alentando a voces que el mundo necesita más.

Danielle Vogel is a prose poet, lyric essayist, and book artist. She is the author of Between Grammars (Noemi Press, 2014), Narrative & Nest (Abecedarian Gallery, 2012) and lit (Dancing Girl Press, 2008). She holds a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from The University of Denver as well as a MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University. Her written texts have most recently appeared in Two Serious Ladies, The Feminist Wire, La Vague, and Tarpaulin Sky. Her book arts work has most recently been exhibited at RISD Museum, AS220 Project Space, The University of Arizona Poetry Center, and Denver’s Abecedarian Gallery. Through both her written work and book artifacts, she investigates the symbiotic bonds between a writer, language, and her readers—how a book, as an extended architecture of a body, can be a site of radical transformation.

Rosalynde Vas Dias is Frequency’s current Artistic Director. Her poetry has appeared in Crazyhorse, The Cincinnati Review, West Branch, The Pinch, Laurel Review, The Collagist, The Four Way Review, and elsewhere. Her first book, Only Blue Body, won the 2011 Robert Dana Award offered by Anhinga Press.  In the fall of 2014, a selection of her linked poems, ‘Sweet Herald’, was a Campbell Corner Distinguished Entry.

Jodie Noel Vinson received her MFA in non-fiction creative writing from Emerson College, where she wrote a book on literary travel. Her essays and reviews have been published in Ploughshares, Creative Non-Fiction, The Gettysburg Review, The Massachusetts Review, Nowhere Magazine, The Rumpus, SAND, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. Jodie lives with her husband in Providence, where she is working on a book about insomnia.

Victor Wildman is a writer, editor, and teacher living in Providence. His work has appeared in The Encyclopedia and he was the recipient of the 2007 John Hawkes Prize for Fiction. He holds an advanced degree in philosophy from the University of Miami, along with an MFA from Brown University. He has taught writing at Brown University, Bryant University and Providence College. Victor also runs private creative writing workshops geared toward helping people develop longer projects. For more information you may contact him at vhwildman@gmail.com.

Sara Wintz is the author of WALKING ACROSS A FIELD WE ARE FOCUSED ON AT THIS TIME NOW (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012) and The Lauras(sus press, 2014). Her writing has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK (Reality Street, 2015), the Norwegian literary magazine Beijing Trondheim (2017), The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (Telephone Books, 2012), and Strange Attractors: Investigations in Non-Humanoid Extraterrestrial Sexualities (Encyclopedia Destructica, 2012). She lives in Providence and serves on the Advisory Board of Ugly Duckling Presse.