Matt Briggs

Seattle, Washington, which he still calls home. He grew up in the Snoqualmie Valley raised by working-class, counter-culture parents who cultivated and sold cannabis.^[1] Briggs has written two books set in rural Washington chronicling this life. Critic Ann Powers wrote of Briggs first book in the New York Times Book Review, "Briggs has captured the America that neither progressives nor family-value advocates want to think about, where bohemianism has degenerated into dangerous dropping out."^[2]

US Army Reserve and his unit was deployed to the Gulf War. Briggs served as a laboratory technician in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This experience became the basis for his novel The Strong Man.^[3] After he returned to the States, where he studied writing at the University of Washington and at the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He returned to the Seattle area where he continues to live.^[4]

Richard Hugo House from 2003 to 2005 where he has taught writing classes for the chronically ill at Gilda's Club and the Polyclinic, a zine class to teenagers in Redmond, Washington, produced literary events, and offered open hours to the community. In April, 2005, Clear Cut Press editor Matthew Stadler and Briggs organized the Unassociated Writers Conference and Dance Party as "part party, part architectural experiment, part performance, part song and dance," the conference promoted an alternative literary culture of zines, micro presses and project-based publishing."^[5]

American Book Award and was a Finalist for the 2006 Washington State Book Award