Mushroom School

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the bestselling novels Thrust, The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, and Dora: A Headcase, as well as the critically acclaimed anti-memoir The Chronology of Water (adapted for feature film directed by Kristen Stewart) and a study on war and narrative, Allegories of Violence. Her polyvocal book The Misfit's Manifesto is based on her TED Talk, "On the Beauty of Being a Misfit," now with over 4 million views. She is a three time Oregon Book Award winner, A PNBA recipient, and a grateful writer who has benefited from grants from Poets and Writers, Literary Arts, and The Regional Arts and Culture Council. She is the founder of Corporeal Writing in Portland, Oregon where she collaborates and agitates, and she teaches in the low residency MFA programs at Sierra Nevada University and Goddard. She lives in Oregon near water. She is a very good swimmer.

Janice Lee (she/they) is a Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 7 books of fiction, creative nonfiction & poetry, most recently Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021) and Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award. A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, a collaborative novel co-authored with Brenda Iijima, is forthcoming in April 2023 from Meekling Press. She writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, inherited trauma, and the Korean concept of han, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? Incorporating shamanic and energetic healing, Lee teaches workshops on inherited trauma, healing and writing, and practices in several lineages, including the medicine tradition of the Q’ero, Zen Buddhism (in the tradition of Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh), plant & animal medicine, and Korean shamanic ritual. She is the Operational Creative Director at Corporeal Writing and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University. She can be found online at https://janicel.com/ and Instagram: @diddioz

Brigid Yuknavitch taught poetry and poetics as an academic at Brandeis University, UC Riverside and University of Oregon. She left academics to become a psychodramatist and therapist, specializing in symbolic processes like dreamwork and sand play. During this transition she published a book of poems, Lives of the Puzzleworkers, beginning an ongoing exploration of how poetic form pushes into language and the the symbolic processes of body and relationships before language. She joined with Corporeal Writing as “Poetry Body Worker” at its beginnings, offering experimental workshops in poetics. She and her sister Lidia also created a series of workshops exploring the imaginal by bringing together psychodrama, sand play, dreams, and writing. She is interested in what there is to learn in new ways about poetic form, beyond history and culture. What can we learn from poetic practice about the innermost rhythms of life and living, conscious and unconscious, that we humans share with other life forms like trees and tides and stars. Poetry can pull language back into connection with the body and other living forms through its rhythms and patterns. What is it to be a living form? What languages do we find through form?

Ella deCastro Baron is a second generation Filipina American born and raised in Coastal Miwok territory (Vallejo, California). She is a VONA alum, holds an MFA, teaches Composition and Creative Writing at San Diego City College and U Mass, and co-facilitates "Where We Come From: Writing Your Ethnoautobiography" and "To Exist is to Flare: Loving Our Chronically Ill Minds and Bodies" through Corporeal Writing. Ella's first book of creative nonfiction is, Itchy, Brown Girl Seeks Employment, and she's published in Nonwhite and Woman, (Her)oics: Women’s Lived Experiences During the Coronavirus Epidemic, Anomaly, and The Rumpus. Her next book, Subos and Baon: A Memoir in Bites, will be published in 2023. As a woman of color who lives with chronic dis-ease, Ella honors sensations, images, story, dance, and decolonial truth-telling. She produces workshops and kapwa (deep interconnection) gatherings that stir love and justice via writing, art, joy, grief-tending, movement, food (yes!) and community. She lives and loves on Kumeyaay territory (San Diego, CA) with her husband and interracial family. Her favorite pronoun is We.

Daniel Isaiah Elder (he/they) is the curly queer son of Soviet dissidents. A 2018 Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Writer, his work has appeared in The Rumpus, Catapult, Pidgeonholes, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and many more. Born and raised in Jackson Heights, Queens, he now lives and writes in Oregon with his cat, Terence.

Katie Collins-Guinn (she/they) is an artist, mother, designer, illustrator and writer, spouse, flower gardener, North Portlander and dirt digger. Her adult coloring book The Stoner Babes was published in 2018 with Microcosm Publishing, which celebrates diversity alongside the transcendental and medicinal qualities of cannabis. She’s spent time as a contributing freelance writer for the Portland Mercury and has been published in Pacific Stone Zine, Call Me [Brackets], Entropy, Nailed Magazine and others. She holds an undergrad degree of Fine Arts in Apparel Design. Katie oversees design elements, merchandise and other creative and logistical happenings at Corporeal Writing, and leads the young mammals collaborations. She co-parents 21 roses and counting. She was honored to create the logo and fungi illustrations for Mushroom School.

Leigh Hopkins is the Editor and Curator of Khôra, a dynamic online arts space conceived and produced in collaboration with author Lidia Yuknavitch and Corporeal Writing. Leigh is a writing workshop leader at Corporeal Writing, a columnist at The Rumpus, and her work has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Longreads, McSweeney’s, Entropy, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, among other publications. After the publication of Leigh’s essay The Brazilian Healer and the Patron Saint of Impossible Causes (Longreads), she was featured in a Brazilian documentary by the film crew who first exposed the crimes of John of God, the world’s most infamous “spiritual surgeon.” When she's not writing, Leigh works as a communications consultant for grassroots political campaigns, with the goal of electing more LGBTQ+ candidates to political office. Leigh lives in Philadelphia and can be found online at leighopkins.com and Instagram.

Dey Rivers is a non-binary Black american writer & artist living with depression, c-ptsd and bodily manifestations thereof. They are inspired by different modes of storytelling through the practice and mantra of Sankofa, meaning “go back and get it”, as well as movement/performance, botanical motifs, breaking harmful cycles, and building relationship. Dey has an educational background in Fine Arts and mental health advocacy. They especially enjoy creating, guiding, and learning in creative communities where they live on stolen land and are currently in final drafts of their first novel, working on various short stories, and poems.

Domi J. Shoemaker is a gender-free writer who lives in Portland, Or. Domi spent several years with Tom Spanbauer's Dangerous Writers, and started the quarterly reading series, Burnt Tongue in 2012, just before snatching a gig with Lidia Yuknavitch for the launch of Dora: A Headcase. While finishing an MFA in Writing from Pacific University in 2015, Lidia asked Domi to help create the Corporeal Writing Seasonal Creative Lab Series. Domi is now the Seasonal Workshop Lead-Facilitator, Corporeal Center Manager, as well as prime holder of space.

Learn more at domishoemaker.com

Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea and Kyah, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Local Futures (Australia). In July 2022, Dr. Akomolafe was appointed the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of University of California’s (Berkeley) Othering and Belonging Institute. He has also been appointed Senior Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany.

www.bayoakomolafe.net

www.emergencenetwork.org

Dominique Christina is an award-winning poet, author, educator, and activist. She holds five national poetry slam titles in four years, including the 2014 & 2012 Women of the World Slam Champion and 2011 National Poetry Slam Champion. Her work is greatly influenced by her family's legacy in the Civil Rights Movement and by the idea that words make worlds. Her fourth book, Anarcha Speaks won the National Poetry Series Prize. 

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, as well as three collections of drawings, Prose Architectures (2017) One Long Black Sentence, a series of white-ink drawings on black paper, indexed by Fred Moten (2020) and Plans for Sentences, an image/text-based meditation on black futurity and other choreographies of gathering (2022). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in POETRY, The Paris Review, Granta, Harper's, BOMB magazine, e-flux and n+1. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), among others, and is the recipient of a 2021 Windham-Campbell prize in fiction. For more information, visit reneegladman.com.

Terese Marie Mailhot is from Seabird Island Band. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Guardian, Mother Jones, Medium, Al Jazeera, the Los Angeles Times, and Best American Essays. She's the New York Times bestselling author of Heart Berries: A Memoir.

A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (Omnidawn 2018) which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and forthcoming collection, Root Fractures (Scribner 2024). Nguyen is a Kundiman fellow, recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Currently, she is core faculty in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor's choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed, Nylon, and Guernica, among others. Rojas Contreras has received numerous awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, VONA, Hedgebrook, The Camargo Foundation, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture. She is a Visiting Writer at Saint Mary’s College. She is working on a family memoir about her grandfather, a curandero from Colombia who it was said had the power to move clouds.

Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine was published by Inner Traditions in Fall 2022. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions in Summer 2023 and is available for pre-order. Subscribe for her newsletter at sophiestrand.substack.com. And follow her work on Instagram: @cosmogyny and at www.sophiestrand.com.