Meet Our Coalition of Writers
Nynke Passi is the founder and director of the Soul Bone℠ Literary Center and Festival. She is also the co-chair of the English dept. and founder and director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at MIU. She holds a graduate degree from San Francisco State University and has been published in CALYX, Gulf Coast, Poetry Breakfast, and more. Her work has been anthologized in The Anthology of New England Writers, River of Earth & Sky, Carrying the Branch, among other places. She was a finalist in the Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize of The Missouri Review both in ‘14 and in ‘22.
Mark Spragg is the author of Where Rivers Change Direction and the novels The Fruit of Stone, Bone Fire, and An Unfinished Life, which was chosen by the Rocky Mountain News as the Best Book of 2004. All four were top-ten Book Sense selections. Mark also has an extensive history as a screenwriter, writing the scripts for movies such as An Unfinished Life and Everything that Rises. His work has been translated into eleven languages. Photo: Neil O. Carlson
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Emilie Lygren’s first collection of poems, What We Were Born For, was selected by the Young People’s Poet Laureate as the Poetry Foundation’s monthly book pick in February 2022 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Emilie has developed dozens of publications focused on nature journaling, outdoor science education, and social-emotional learning through her work at the award-winning BEETLES Project at the Lawrence Hall of Science. In her writing and teaching, Emilie calls on awareness and curiosity as tools to bring people into relationship with place, self, and community. She lives in San Rafael, California, where she wonders about oaks and teaches poetry in local classrooms. Connect on Instagram: @emlygren.
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Jennifer Espinoza is author of the poetry collection THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016) and I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (Big Lucks 2019)., plus I Don’t Want to Be Understood (Alice James Books, 2024). She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of California at Riverside. Her most recent publication is “Everybody at the Same Time is Beginning to Understand There is No Such Thing as a Self” in Gulf Coast. She has years of experience teaching and mentoring in creative writing at the graduate level and was a full-time faculty at MIU for several years.
