Low Residency Creative Writing: Residency Central

PNCA Low Res Creative Writing Readings, Conversations, and Workshops, given by incredible faculty and guest artists are open and free to the public.

Readings & Screenings

Readings are open to the public, in person or on Google Meets.

Saturday, June 20

2pm: Performance: Yelling Choir at PNCA’s 511 Building

6-8pm: Reading: Stephanie Adams-Santos, Megan Milks, Diana Oropeza at Word Virus 

https://meet.google.com/mkw-xcga-qpt

Sunday, June 21

7pm: Reading: Alejandro de Acosta, Jennifer S. Cheng, Poupeh Missaghi, Asiya Wadud—Virtual

https://meet.google.com/yhu-qrrd-yvd

Monday, June 22

6:30pm: Reading: Sara Jaffe, Emilly Prado, Jay Ponteri, Sara Vetiver at Word Virus

https://meet.google.com/msp-kyon-yjv

Tuesday June 23

6-8pm: Film Screening of Cancer Journals Revisited with Lana Lin in the Mediatheque at PNCA’s 511 Building

Wednesday June 24

6:30pm: Reading: Lana Lin & Diamond Sharp at Word Virus

https://meet.google.com/ggf-kjyg-bhz

Talks and Workshops

Conversations can be attended in person at the Graduate Professional Center in the Ecotrust Building or on Google Meets.

Monday June 22, 9-10 am / Graduate Professional Center, EcoTrust Building

The Visitors: On Creative Reading, Part III

Jay Ponteri

https://meet.google.com/ubg-uzwm-exr

This is the third installment of my exploration of my reading practice. It includes shelving methodologies, seasonal reading strategies, and books in films, among many other ways to approach reading as an imaginative, constructive action. This third installment attempts to describe and reflect on my last year of reading—in particular, the experience of being Fosse’d (Searls’d), reading diaries/journals to get closer to my grandmother, and the practice of reading as a way to slow down my experience of time while resetting my nervous system.

Tuesday, June 23, 9-10 am  / Graduate Professional Center, EcoTrust Building

DREAMING WITH THE VULTURE

Stephanie Adams-Santos

https://meet.google.com/usp-nsuz-fcw

O psychopomp, mother of life & king of the skies, witness sagrado, poet of the word enfleshed, let us turn toward the vulture & together dream beneath her bright shadow.

Wednesday, June 24, 9-10 am / Graduate Professional Center, EcoTrust Building

Nearly Any Two Things Can Cohere

Asiya Wadud

https://meet.google.com/myd-osir-stb

The ideas presented here examine the bridges that connect that which otherwise appears far away, disparate and not relationally held in accord. 

Friday, June 26, 10-11am / Graduate Professional Center, EcoTrust Building

What Is This Thing Called ‘Weird’?

Megan Milks

https://meet.google.com/gdi-rgcx-ngj

While the category of “the weird” is generally associated with horror and speculative fiction, weirdness exceeds these genres, serving up a certain kind of shivery, intoxicating strangeness wherever it shows itself. In this craft talk combined with writing prompts, we will explore the pleasures and delights of weirdness. We’ll first get our bearings with the term “weird”, asking what it is, what it has meant and can mean in literature, and how and why we might harness it as writers; then we’ll turn to generative writing exercises.

Saturday, June 27, 9-10 am / Graduate Professional Center, EcoTrust Building

The Whole Truth, the Half Truth, and Something Like the Truth

Emilly Prado

https://meet.google.com/cfs-ktvd-pto

Examining memory may be what initially draws some of us towards writing, but the truth is our memories are malleable and the line between fiction and fact can feel blurry, especially when invoking imagination. The boundaries of truth, it turns out, aren’t universally drawn. So how do we write into the spaces we can’t remember or the moments where contradictions abound? The times we want to paint as black or white, but where gray seems to be the only color available in our palettes? This lecture examines truth as a spectrum, culling scientific data alongside quotes from writers with varying perspectives on what counts as ‘nonfiction’. We’ll walk away with generative prompts and exercises to sharpen our craft while guiding us towards carving our very own lines of truth.

Saturday, June 27, 1:30-2:30 pm / Graduate Professional Center, EcoTrust Building

"Support Women's Wrongs": The Vigilante Heroine and the Morally Grey Female Heroine in Dark Romance Novels 

Shawna Lipton

https://meet.google.com/kgx-srqn-bon

This lecture examines the emergence of the morally grey female heroine in dark romance, a genre that has made moral compromise its defining feature for male protagonists while largely insisting on female innocence. Where the morally grey male main character — the stalker, the mafia don, the serial killer — is the genre's central and celebrated figure, the morally grey heroine remains an exception, her violence and moral compromise requiring far more narrative justification than his ever does. Drawing on S.T. Abby's The Mindfuck Series (2018-2019), Brynne Weaver's Butcher & Blackbird (2023) and Tourist Season (2025), and Navessa Allen's Lights Out (2024), this lecture tracks the genre's evolution from Carol Clover's Final Girl to what reading communities might now call the "murder girl," arguing that these vigilante justice narratives provide powerful catharsis for readers, offering fantasies of female revenge and agency in which women take matters into their own hands.

Sunday, June 28, 11 am -12 pm / Graduate Professional Center, EcoTrust Building

“Would Anyone Celebrate Me?”: On Being a Writer and Parent 

Sara Jaffe

https://meet.google.com/phx-vnum-njz

Caring for another dependent human shifts one’s relationship to time and space for artmaking like little else. What are the strategies we can use and the stories we can tell about ourselves to art while parenting, and vice versa? How does being a queer parent create particular challenges and opportunities for artistic practice? My hope is that this talk will be generative for anyone who strives to make space for other humans alongside their practice. 

Monday, June 29, 11 am -12 pm  / Graduate Professional Center, EcoTrust Building

Two Recent Writing Technologies: Dictation and Texting

Alejandro de Acosta

https://meet.google.com/bwk-pcuk-qvx

I want to meditate on the creative potentials of these two relatively recent technologies/media. Some subtopics are: ambient capture; everyday vs. authorial styles; conventions, habits and styles; digital orality.

Workshops

Monday-Tuesday, June 22-23, 3-5 pm / Graduate Professional Center, Ecotrust Building

Diamond Sharp Workshop

https://meet.google.com/tna-fibu-cdw

What does it mean to be a working writer—especially one who writes across genres? In this talk, we’ll read selections from Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and Kathleen Collins. Brooks was a poet and novelist; Hansberry was a playwright and essayist, and Collins was a screenwriter and short story writer. I think the aforementioned writers exemplify the inherent expansiveness of a writerly life. As an editor and creative writer, I can draw from my own experiences. We’ll also work on generative writing prompts to flesh out new ideas.

Wednesday, June 24, 1:30-2:45 / Graduate Professional Center, Ecotrust Building

“NARRATIVE AND NEST”

Jennifer S Cheng

https://meet.google.com/acs-ezxq-faa

If “words are skeins” (Susan Howe) and “a nest is a hiding place for winged creatures” (Gaston Bachelard), what might it mean to construct a home for the hidden narrative that is trying to make its way out? In this generative workshop, we will examine various nests, artifacts, and textu(r)al architectures to consider how they are “built by and for the body, taking form from the inside.”  We will observe, gather, and write through a lens of inhabitation and shelter as primal spaces of instinct, relation, recursion, regeneration, and intimate daydreaming.

Wednesday, June 24, 3-5 pm / Graduate Professional Center, Ecotrust Building

Polyvocality, its Politics and Poetics

Lana Lin

https://meet.google.com/dva-jveb-jxy

“Polyvocality” is defined as a “multiplicity of independent and often antithetic narrative voices, none of which is given predominance,” and is also referred to as polyphony. Ventriloquism, mimicry, and harmony are forms of polyphony. In literary criticism, Mikhail Bakhtin attributes the polyphonic ideal to Dostoevsky who constructs a polyphonic world against the canon of “monologic visualization.” Centered on two works that have been variously described as polyvocal, this workshop will unpack polyvocality’s political and poetic dimensions. The Cancer Journals Revisited (2018) is a feature-length film that gathers a chorus of twenty-seven voices to perform a close reading of Audre Lorde’s classic 1980 manifesto. The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam (2025) uses Gertrude Stein’s device of ventriloquism to tell an intertwined love story where authorship and subjecthood are continually put into question. What might it mean to build a world attending to polyvocality, one that works against the dominance of the univocal, the sovereignty of the singular? Together we will consider why an artist might employ polyvocality; what are its affordances; what can it achieve? How might a polyvocal poetics embrace the potential chaos, uncertainty, and contradictions of the plural?

Sunday-Monday, June 28-29, 9:30-11am / Graduate Professional Center, Ecotrust Building

Let Translating Be Your Guide to Writing  

poupeh missaghi

https://meet.google.com/edv-uekp-nxy

Even if you do not know a second language, you still do have access to languages other than English. So, let’s take theories and practices of translation as a point of departure to arrive at a new relationship with our work as writers. How can thinking about language through the lens of translation help us reposition ourselves as writers? How can the art and craft of translation inspire us to try new approaches to writing?

In our workshop, we will cover three areas together: discuss theory, investigate praxis, and delve into exercises to generate new writing.

Summer Residency 2026 Faculty / Guest Artist Bios

Faculty

Alejandro de Acosta is a teacher, writer, and translator in a secret order. His most recent teaching includes private tutoring in writing, literature, philosophy. He also works as a freelance editor. This year four of his essays appeared in Ukrainian translation under the title Moralia. Alejandro lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Influenced by a childhood spent between Oregon and Guatemala, the art and writing of Stephanie Adams-Santos explores the ancestral, primal, and mythological forces that shape inner life. They are the author of several full-length poetry collections and chapbooks, including DREAM OF XIBALBA (selected by Jericho Brown as winner of the 2021 Orison Poetry Prize; finalist for a 2024 Oregon Book Award and Lambda Literary Award) and SWARM QUEEN'S CROWN (finalist for a 2016 Lambda Literary Award). In addition to their literary work, Stephanie has written for television, radio, film, and is creating an original tarot deck that blends poetry, animism, and ancestral magic.

Jennifer S. Cheng’s work includes poetry, lyric essay, and image-text forms, exploring immigrant home-building, shadow poetics, and the interior wilderness. Her hybrid book MOON: LETTERS, MAPS, POEMS (2018) was selected by Bhanu Kapil for the Tarpaulin Sky Award and named a Publishers Weekly “Best Book of 2018.” She is also the author of HOUSE A, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Omnidawn Poetry Prize, and INVOCATION: AN ESSAY, an image-text chapbook published by New Michigan Press. A former National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has received awards and fellowships from Brown University, the University of Iowa, San Francisco State University, the U.S. Fulbright program, Kundiman, Bread Loaf, MacDowell, and the Academy of American Poets. Having grown up in Texas and Hong Kong, she lives in San Francisco. www.jenniferscheng.com

Sara Jaffe is a Portland, OR-based writer, educator, and musician. She is the author of the short-story collection Hurricane Envy (Rescue Press) and the novel Dryland (Tin House), as well as short stories, essays, and criticism that have appeared in publications including NOON, Fence, BOMB, The Offing, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Though mostly a writer of fiction, Sara is also interested in the generative crossings between fiction and other prose genres. She has recently started playing guitar again under the name Camp Cataract. www.sarajaffewriter.com 

Megan Milks is the author of the novel Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body (a Lambda Literary Finalist in Transgender Fiction), Slug and Other Stories, and most recently Mega Milk: Essays, all published by Feminist Press. Their personal history of early online music fandom, Tori Amos Bootleg Webring, was published as part of Instar Books' Remember the Internet series. They are also the co-editor, with Marisa Crawford, of We Are the Baby-Sitters Club: Essays and Artwork from Grown-Up Readers. Their current book project is an anthology of short fiction titled The New Queer Weird, co-edited with Amber Dawn. They have published criticism in 4Columns, The New York Times, and Bookforum, among other publications. They live in Brooklyn. Find out more at meganmilks.com.

Lara Mimosa Montes is a writer, editor, and teaching artist whose practices span the fields of alternative publishing and experimental writing. She is the author of a short work of fiction, The Time of the Novel (Wendy's Subway, 2025) and two books of poetry, THRESHOLES (Coffee House Press, 2020) and The Somnambulist (Horse Less Press, 2016). Her writing has appeared in BOMB, Fence, POETRY, The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, and elsewhere. In 2018, she was awarded a CantoMundo Fellowship as well as a McKnight Fellowship in Poetry. She teaches in XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement Master’s program at NYU.

poupeh missaghi is an Assistant Professor in Literary Arts and Studies at the English Department of the University of Denver. She is a creative writer, scholar, editor, and translator (between English and Persian). Her debut novel trans(re)lating house one was published in 2020 (Coffee House Press) and her translation of Nasim Marashi’s novel I’ll Be Strong for You in 2021 (Astra House). Her second book Sound Museum was published in 2024 (Coffee House Press). She has a PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver; an MA in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD; and an MA in Translation Studies and a BA in Translation Practice from Azad University, Tehran. She also teaches at the Pacific Northwest College of Arts, Portland, OR.

Jay Ponteri directed the creative writing program at Marylhurst University from 2008-2018 and is now the program head of PNCA’s Low-Residency Creative Writing program. His book of creative nonfiction Someone Told Me has just been published by Widow+Orphan House. He’s also the author of Darkmouth Inside Me (Future Tense Books, 2014) and Wedlocked (Hawthorne Books, 2013), which received an Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Two of Ponteri’s essays, “Listen to this” and “On Navel Gazing” have earned “Notable Mentions” in Best American Essay Anthologies. His work has also appeared in many literary journals: Gaze, Ghost Proposal, Eye-Rhyme, Seattle Review, Forklift, Ohio, Knee-Jerk, Cimarron Review, Tin House, Clackamas Literary Review, While teaching at Marylhurst, Ponteri was twice awarded the Excellence in Teaching & Service Award. In 2007, Ponteri founded Show:Tell, The Workshop for Teen Artist and Writers, now part of summer programming at Portland's Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC.org) on whose Resource Council he serves. He teaches memoir classes at Literary Arts. He lives with his son Oscar and Oscar's pug MO.

Emilly Prado is an award-winning writer, educator, and cultural worker living in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of Funeral for Flaca (Future Tense Books, 2021), winner of a 2022 Pacific Northwest Book Award, praised by Ms. Magazine as “utterly vulnerable, bold, and unique,” and Examining Assimilation (Enslow, 2019), a nonfiction book at the intersections of culture, history, and identity for young readers. As an educator, Emilly has taught in public high schools, juvenile detention facilities, MFA programs, and through organizations such as the McCormack Writing Center, Literary Arts, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and the IPRC. Her writing has appeared in outlets including NPR, Marie Claire, and Eater, and has been supported by fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Oregon Humanities, and Randolph College, amongst others. She co-founded the BIPOC arts non-profit, Portland in Color, and the Latiné DJ collective, Noche Libre. When not teaching creative writing at the Low-Res MFA at PNCA, she moonlights as DJ Mami Miami. Learn more at emillyprado.com.

Asiya Wadud is a writer, most recently of the poetry collections Mandible Wishbone Solvent, No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body and the chapbook like threadlove, like rubble, like excess. Other recent work can be found in Interlude Docs, POETRY, e-flux journal, the Paris Review, and the Danspace Project Journal. Recent projects have been supported by Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Foundation Jan Michalski, Tekstintalo Helsinki, and Danspace Project.

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Guest Artists

Lana Lin Lana Lin is a writer and multidisciplinary artist based in New York and Connecticut. She is the author of The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam (Dorothy, 2025), which was a Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus “Best of the Year” for 2025, longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award in Nonfiction, and is a 2026 Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir/Biography. Her previous book is Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer (Fordham, 2017). Her writing has been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Portable Gray, ASAP/Journal, Millennium Film Journal, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and Asian American Literary Review. She has made award-winning experimental films and collaborative mixed media art (as “Lin + Lam”) that have screened and exhibited around the world. She is the recipient of fellowships including the Jerome Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, and four MacDowell residencies since 1996. lanalin.com; linpluslam.com

Diamond Sharp is a poet and writer from Chicago. Her work has appeared in Poetry, New York Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and more. She is a former editor of Bandcamp Daily and Rookie and a graduate of Wellesley College. Her debut book of poetry, Super Sad Black Girl, was published in 2022.

Sara Vetiver is a writer, educator, and therapist based in Portland, OR.  Sara holds an MFA in Poetry & Creative Nonfiction and an M.S. in Integral Psychology. Sara teaches literature and creative writing at PNCA and at Harrisburg Area Community College. Sara’s writing appears in Fence, the Seattle Review, Nailed Magazine, and her two collections, O to Be a Dragon and Sirenomelia. Her writing practice explores themes of presence, inner child reclamation, trauma, ancestral healing, nature, sacredness, rebellion, and the grotesque. 

Yelling Choir is a femme, women, and nonbinary performance process that reimagines voice, presence, gender, and power.

We share with people the immediate, visceral experience of having a voice (both sonically and creatively), especially for those who have historically had less of a voice in our culture. We love to yell—and we also explore other sounds, extended vocal techniques, movement, and improvisation. We explore getting big, taking up space, allowing big emotions—from joy to rage to boredom to delight, and in between—in an emotionally-regulated and supported way.

We aim to take up the full size of the vast wordless mystery of existence that we are part of RIGHT NOW.

Yelling Choir has a forward-thinking aesthetic based in contemporary classical music, improvisation, performance art, and social practice. The group is influenced by organizer and musicologist Maxx Katz’s diverse fields of study (performance theory, improvisation, classical music, heavy metal, free jazz) as well as study in somatic awareness practice and trauma-informed mindfulness.

Yelling Choir has performed at the 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time-Based Art Festival, and the American Choral Directors Association Biannual NW Conference. Sign up below for our email list to hear about upcoming workshops and performances!