Melissa Kwansey
Melissa Kwasny is the author of seven collections of poems, including The Cloud Path, Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today, Pictograph, and The Nine Senses.…
Abe Lagrimas, Jr.
Past Faculty
Abe Lagrimas, Jr. is a musician, composer, educator, and author who plays the drums, vibraphone, ukulele, and studied at Berklee College of Music. He competed in the highly prestigious Thelonious Monk International Jazz Drums Competition and has worked with many different artists such as Eric Marienthal, Eric Reed, Kamasi Washington, Katisse Buckingham, Lalo Schifrin, Barbara Morrison, Michelle Coltrane, Jake Shimabukuro, Kenny Endo, and continues to be an in-demand session musician.…
Stephanie Land
Afternoon Workshop Faculty
Stephanie Land is the New York Times bestselling author of “MAID: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive,” called “a testimony…worth listening to,” by the New York Times and inspiration for the Netflix series “Maid,” and its sequel “CLASS: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education.” Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and many other outlets.…
Susan Landgraf
Afternoon Workshop Faculty
Susan Landgraf is a poet and journalist. She has published more than 400 poems, essays, and articles in numerous journals and magazines. Most recently her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Nimrod, Calyx, The Bellingham Review, Literary Mama, Kestrel, Margie, and The Sow’s Ear. She is the author of What We Bury Changes the Ground (Tebot Bach, 2017) as well as The Inspired Poet (Two Sylvias Press, 2019), a book of writing exercises.…
Sasha LaPointe
Morning Workshop Faculty
Sasha LaPointe is from the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian Tribe. Native to the Pacific Northwest, she draws inspiration from her coastal heritage as well as her life in the city.
Judy LaPrade
Piano
Judy LaPrade is a life-long musician and teacher. She grew up in West Virginia where she played and sang in church. By junior high school she led and accompanied the patient choir at the local state mental hospital, then as an adult took the Blues into schools and music therapy groups for people with developmental challenges.…
John Largess
Viola, Miró Quartet
Violist John Largess began his studies in Boston at age 12 in the public schools, studying with Michael Zaretsky of the Boston Symphony, and later as a student of Michael Tree at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. In 1995, he graduated from Yale University to join the Colorado String Quartet as interim violist with whom he toured the United States and Canada teaching and concertizing.…
Nathan Gourley and Laura Feddersen
Massachusetts
fiddle, guitar
Laura and Nathan are two of America’s most highly regarded young players of traditional Irish music. Their playing is steeped in lifelong study of the Irish tradition, and is at same time colored by their American roots. They have developed a unique style of twin fiddling, sometimes playing in taut unison, sometimes exploring chordal harmonies and rhythmic and melodic variations.…
Chaz Leary
Washboard
Though comfortable in all forms of our diverse American musical heritage, Washboard Chaz Leary has achieved dominance and international recognition in acoustic country blues.
Elise Leavy
Armed with her father’s first guitar, a wry sense of humor and a startlingly cohesive and masterful tone to her writing, Elise Leavy writes and sings folk songs that sound like they came straight from Laurel Canyon in the 70’s. Often likened to Joni Mitchell and Judee Sill, Elise says it must be the California seawater getting inside her head and heart from an early age.…