2025 Faculty & Fellows
The Heart of It is run by three core faculty alongside teaching and administrative fellows. Fellows serve one to two year appointments as facilitators, workshop leaders, lecturers, and logistics support. During their tenure, they collaborate with core faculty to create responsive, dynamic, emergent curriculum aligned with their interests and expertise. Fellows are returning alumni, and many come back year after year. They are emerging and accomplished writers, community organizers, and teaching artists. At The Heart of It, all workshops, group sessions, craft talks, and activities are created and led by faculty and fellows, oftentimes co-facilitated. In addition to the community and curriculum responsibilities, our team works alongside the stewards at Oz Farm sharing labor and caretaking tasks during our time on site.
Desireé Dallagiacomo, founder & core faculty
Desireé Dallagiacomo (she/her) is a writer, educator, and space creator. She is an enrolled citizen of The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and was raised in the foothills of Northern California and the swamplands of Southeast Louisiana. She is a Pushcart prize nominee, has ranked 3rd at every major poetry slam in the United States, and is the founder of The Heart of It Writing Retreat. Her first full-length collection of poetry, SINK, was published by Button Poetry in 2019. Currently, she is writing poetry, creative nonfiction, and scholarly work about indigeneity, abortion, gender-based violence, and the carceral state as it relates to girlhood and class. She is a Fellow in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she is a poetry candidate in the M.F.A. She has received funding from The Harpo Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, and the University of Michigan, among others. She started The Heart of It in 2016, and you can read about why and how here. At The Heart of It, she supports all core faculty and fellows, develops curriculum, and leads workshops, generative writing sessions, and craft talks.
KC Cullinan, core faculty
KC Cullinan (they/them) is a writer, facilitator, and editor grown in the Chicago area, currently living in Madison, Wisconsin. They are a trans-masc Latino and a co-creator of the Queer & Trans Open Mic at Madison’s gayest bookstore. They learned to tell time from metra train schedules and learned how to tell stories from their sister’s vibrant storytelling. KC is their mother’s rainbow baby turned brown boy, currently studying the prevalence of well-manicured violences and how being a weirdo with words can invite play into authentic articulation. A curious student of their surroundings, they live with their senior dog, the occasional mouse, and a hearty laundry pile in a basement flat they renamed home. At The Heart of It, KC is a co-facilitator and works closely with all first-year writers as a mentor and advocate, and leads generative writing sessions throught the first year and alumni retreats..
Olivia Dudding Rodriguez, core faculty
Olivia Dudding Rodriguez (she/her) is an Appalachian poet, storyteller, facilitator, and devoted celebrant who has made her home in Helper, Utah where in 2023 she became the poet laureate. Her work centers the stories, identities, and inheritances of rural places. She is currently working her next poetry collection that delves into the surreal lore of loss and reinvention within her familial roots along the Ohio River. She has hosted poetry-based writing workshops throughout the Mountain West. Her first chapbook, Honey Wonder, arrived July 2024 from Moon in the Rye Press. At The Heart of It, Olivia is a co-facilitator and culture keeper for the first year and alumni retreats, with additional support with alumni programming and curriculum development. The 2025 gathering of The Heart of It will mark her fifth year on staff at the writing retreat.
Karla Hernandez Torrijos, Teaching Fellow
Karla Hernandez Torrijos (she/her) is a poet and workshop facilitator. Beginning at an open mic in 2017, Karla has been invited to read her work in venues across Nebraska, including The Bay, El Museo Latino, and The UNL Wick Alumni Center. The recipient of the 2024 Kate Sommer Memorial Poetry Prize, the 2024 Gaffney Prize for Poetry, the 2023 Irby F. Wood Prize for Poetry, and the 2021 Vreeland Award for Poetry, her writing interrogates our understanding of home, displacement, and the liminal space in between. Karla was the 2021-2022 Creative in Community Resident for the LUX Center for the Arts and the inaugural Student Storyteller in Residence for The Center for Great Plains Studies. Her chapbook saturn devouring his daughter is forthcoming from Game Over Books. At The Heart of It 2025, Karla is a Teaching Fellow & Workshop Facilitator.
Sam Slupski, Newsletter Lead
Sam Slupski (they/them) is a trans nonbinary nonfiction writer and poet from the Midwest. They are the author of UNTIL TENDER (Game Over Books). In their work, Sam interrogates the mental health industrial complex and the wellness industry, destigmatizes sexual health, and speaks to their lived experience with complex trauma and queerness. They are a disability justice advocate, speaking out against pandemic denial and encouraging everyday safety precautions to protect against disabling viruses. Sam has worked with St. Louis Queer Support & Healing, focusing on community consciousness-raising, outreach, and external communications skill-building. They were the Wellness Editor of Swift Wellness, a former Program Director of Poetic Underground, and a teaching artist with Austin Bat Cave. They’ve headlined events like the Melbourne Spoken Word Poetry Festival, toured the US and Canada, and were a Button Poetry Chapbook Contest finalist. Sam writes a newsletter called Nourishing Notes, shares on Instagram at @theyaresam, and is an organizer with the Northern Olympic Peninsula Mask Bloc. Sam curates, edits, and creates The Heart of It newsletter.
Sara Beth Brooks, Travel Coordination Fellow
Sara Beth Brooks (she/they) is a white, queer, and disabled self-taught poet & teaching artist. In 2024, Sara Beth self-published their mixed-media Zine “IN BLOOM," which explores being disabled during the first few years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her creative work has appeared in Rogue Agent, Tiny Spoon Literary Magazine, Big Windows Review, Squawk Back, and elsewhere. She facilitates online writing workshops and other spaces for tender hearts, and is an alumni of The Heart of It 2024. They are deeply committed to cultural work, mutual aid, civil disobedience, subversive art, legislative advocacy, and public protest. They were first radicalized by the anti-war movement in the early 2000s, and have since been involved with movements for queer liberation, disability access and inclusion, and Palestinian freedom. In addition to activism, she is a multi-media artist who explores self-expression through creative writing, collage, pottery, painting, and digital art. They have a passion for embodied practice that led her to become a certified yoga and meditation teacher. They continue to study non-violent communication and mindfulness meditation as vehicles for liberation. She holds a bachelor's degree in Communication Studies from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and is an award-winning scholar published in critical media studies. Sara Beth loves to meet new people and create welcoming environments of hospitality that attend to the access needs of all participants. They live with their spouse and house cat on the ancestral lands of the Nisenan Miwok people, colonially known as Sacramento, CA. Sara Beth supports the logistics team in travel coordination for The Heart of It 2025
Devin Devine, Teaching Fellow
Devin Devine (they/he) is a writer, comedian, performer, and current MFA student at Randolph College. They have performed and hosted across the country, on poetry and comedy stages, at universities, coffee shops, and countless dive bars. They published their debut book of poetry, Drinking to Sainthood, in November 2021 with Game Over Books. He is an assistant editor at YesYes Books and a freelance poetry editor, primarily editing poetry collections. They are the co-founder and host of Giggle Bottom, a kink comedy education show based in Portland, Oregon. Devin is a Teaching Fellow, and at The Heart of It 2025, Devin will be leading craft talks and generative writing sessions during the alumni retreat, and they will be working with writers on their manuscripts.
Nancy Frenesy Azcona, Teaching Fellow
Nancy Frenesy Azcona (they/he/she) is a Queer, Trans, Two-Spirit multi-disciplinary artist who has taken their lived experiences and chosen to face the world through the bravery of vulnerability. Above all, community and forged family are integral to their soul and can be sensed throughout their artistic creations. Nancy self-published their first chapbook, Corazón De Seda, in 2021, a bildungsroman collection of poems, spanning from adolescence to young adulthood. They have published works in two anthologies (Dear Future Lovers and Preposition) and have performed for events/organizations such as the Pay It No Mind Showcase, Body of Art Showcase, Identity Portrait Short Film for the Connie Norman Foundation, and Lady Gaga's Born This Way Foundation Re.Mixer. You can catch new essays, poems, and prose from Nancy on their substack Playground Poetics or join one of their monthly Mad Libs or Trans(form)ation workshops through D.I.Y. Museum. At The Heart of It 2025, Nancy is a Teaching Fellow
Caeli Benson (KY-lee Ben-suhn) (they/them) is a queer and nonbinary Filipino American writer, educator, and organizer based in the Bay Area. Their poetry explores survivorhood, community, and resisting fascism and US imperialism. Both of their collections of poetry 一 Return to Sender, An Undisclosed Poetry Special (2023) and Do (Not) Crush (2024)一 emerged from working grueling hours (even graveyard shifts) as a warehouse worker with UPS and USPS. Caeli also organizes with Malaya Movement USA, a grassroots organization fighting for human rights, democracy, and sovereignty in the Philippines. They support with political education, skills-building, and propaganda work for campaigns fighting against historical revisionism (Martial Law Showcase), the exploitation of workers and the land (No To APEC), and counterinsurgency programs (Anti-COIN). Through this work, they’ve seen how necessary art and writing are for agitating the masses and building the mass movement fighting for our liberation. Last year, they facilitated their workshop What Hailed Us & What We Made: Poetry In Building Our Mass Movement at The Heart of It! This year, they are looking forward to studying political poetry as they work towards their new collection of poetry which explores survivorhood and imperial violence. They are also hoping to facilitate more generative writing workshops (both virtual and in the Bay Area), so if you’d like to hold them accountable to their #2025Goals, let them know @caelorum (IG) or caeli@fire2wire.com. At The Heart of It 2025, Caeli is a Teaching Fellow
Caeli Benson, Teaching Fellow
Sebastian Grace, Teaching Fellow
Sebastian Grace (they/them) is a teaching artist, health and wellness practitioner, and community organizer. A trans queer disabled Gen X medical refugee from South Florida, Sebastian's work can be found in Jai Alai Magazine, Winter Tangerine, the Offing, great weather for MEDIA and elsewhere. Sebastian received an MFA in Writing and Activism in 2016, and has spent over a decade writing, performing and facilitating within the greater spoken word poetry community and beyond. At The Heart of It 2025, Sebastian is a Teaching Fellow & Workshop Facilitator.