Emily Wolahan, Director

. Emily Wolahan is a poet, writer, and educator living in San Francisco. She is the author of HINGE (National Poetry Review Press, 2015). Her poetry has appeared in Volt, Tinderbox Journal, Fourteen Hills, Gulf Coast, Boston Review and other journals. Her prose has been collected in  Among Margins, Arts & Letters, and other journals. She won the Lorraine Williams prize for poetry from the Georgia Review and the Arts & Letters Unclassifiables contest. She also served as an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA. Emily has collaborated with painter Owen Brown on The Fieldwork Scroll: A Modern Exodus. She is currently a Poetry Editor at Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Emily is also pursuing a Ph.D. in Anthropology and Social Change at the California Institute of Integral Studies focusing on utopias and social practice art.

Isaiah Dufort, Programs Coordinator

. Isaiah Dufort is director of San Francisco Art & Film for Teenagers, an arts education non-profit providing free film screenings, museum tours and tickets to local arts and culture events to Bay Area students. Art & Film has a long history of partnering with Asawa SotA and the Creative Writing department in particular. Isaiah currently produces the department’s three annual shows after having served as the playwright-in-residence for seven years. He also provides support for the senior thesis program, the Umlaut literary magazine and runs the CW summer workshop for incoming freshmen.

Patricia Cotter, Playwriting Artist-in-Residence

. I write about people that tend to be overlooked: shy political groupies, lesbian civil rights pioneers, murderess elderly women, twenty-year-old working class surrogates. I write comedies that feature gender non-conformists. I explore people who have a deep need to answer the question: What is the value of one good person? I write plays that have interesting, powerful roles for women of all ages. I write for the theatre for the same reasons that I go to the theatre, a deep desire to connect, a need to explore, a need to get to the bottom of questions that I can’t seem to figure out on my own and to find some shared moments of unexpected understanding. I want to share my world with the world.

Alexia Nader, Senior Thesis Program Coordinator

I’m a writer from Miami currently living in San Francisco. I’m working on my first novel, The Meaning of Daughter, a multigenerational story about the lives of three women in a Lebanese-Haitian-American family. I’ve received support for my writing from the Steinbeck Fellowship at San Jose State University and the Mendocino Writers Conference. I’ve taught creative writing to children and adults in many settings: universities, high schools, middle schools, libraries, rehabilitation centers, and once, in a casino. I currently teach creative writing at an arts-focused high school and work for a nonprofit organization that provides creative writing workshops to children. I edited the literary magazine The Brooklyn Quarterly for several years.

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Heather Woodward, Founding Director, Emeritus

. Heather Woodward is from a family of Cal Bears, a Bay Area native, and the daughter of public school educators. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in Film Studies from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied writing with Ishmael Reed, Floyd Salas, Charles Muscatine, and Gary Soto. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Ms. Woodward has been teaching at SOTA since 1997; she has never taught anywhere else—nor has any desire to. In 2001 she was awarded a Golden Apple Fellowship from the San Francisco Ed Fund to return to the film department at UC Berkeley full-time for one semester, where she developed a six-week film course to be taught as part of the 10th or 11th grade English curriculum. She started the SOTA Creative Writing Program in 2002, and in 2007 received National Board Certification. An ardent supporter of Ronald Chase’s Art & Film program, she has served as co-moderator with Ronald at the Friday evening Ciné Club screenings. She has been involved with 826 Valencia for many years, and in May 2009 received their Teacher of the Month award. She has an adult daughter, Hadley. Ms. Woodward retired in 2024.