Hugo owns its ground floor “condo” space in the mixed-use building developed on the corner it has called home for decades (Image: Weinstein A+U)

Delgado (Image: Hugo House)

By Kali Herbst Minino

Hugo House, Capitol Hill’s literary nonprofit offering writing classes and events at its space across from Cal Anderson Park, has announced Diana Delgado as its new executive director. Delgado is Hugo House’s first permanent executive director since Tree Swenson, who resigned in February 2021 in response to a letter demanding her removal based on racial equity concerns. The new role begins in May, and Delgado will be managing a Hugo House that now employs about 15 people.

One of her first goals, she tells CHS, is to find ways she can make changes within staff culture, where she believes community starts.

“I’d like to begin with my staff and the people that we work with in trying to understand what our values and goals are together so we can move forward in solidarity,” Delgado told CHS.

It’s an appropriate time to re-establish those values and goals. Delgado is joining Hugo House at a moment of recovery in the writing center’s history.

In 2020, the Writers of Color Association (WOCA) wrote a letter laying out their concerns about racial equity at Hugo House including a lack of diversity, tokenization of writers of color, and a lack of transparency about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The letter gained signatures from teachers at Hugo House, writers, and members.

Then, in February 2021, a second letter sent from WOCA via email included four main demands: the removal of Swenson from her position as executive director, a community-led equity process, fair compensation for work involving equity, and the development director application being reopened to the public. Before the month had ended, Swenson resigned.

After her resignation, WOCA released a third letter expressing appreciation, deciding not to move forward with a strike, and exploring details about a racial equity process WOCA hoped Hugo House would implement. In the letter, WOCA asked Hugo House to involve members of the community and WOCA in the new executive director search, the hiring of a DEI consultant, and finding people to fill the five empty board seats that had been vacated during the debacle. WOCA also asked that the board sign a power-sharing agreement with them.

A timeline on Hugo House’s website reports that the development of the power-sharing agreement started in April 2021. Claudia Castro Luna, one of the main organizers of WOCA, tells CHS that after months of negotiations, the board moved forward with their own search committee, departing from the power-sharing agreement plan with WOCA due to the time it was taking to come to an agreement. According to the Hugo House website, Hugo House moved forward with the executive director search along with community members, the board, and staff members.

Castro Luna tells CHS she was invited to meet the final group of people being considered for the position of executive director, along with a group of members, former, and active teachers.

“It wasn’t that we were members of the voting committee,” Castro Luna said. “Each time each of these candidates had an interview, we were invited to meet them.”

Over the course of the multiple-year controversy, Hugo House implemented changes to its organization. Since the first letter from WOCA, Hugo House held community forums, released a survey asking students what kinds of classes they would like to see and what languages they should be offered in, replaced a $500 early registration day with an early registration option costing a $250 donation to scholarship funds, and contacted a consulting firm about starting a DEI audit.

Responding to WOCA’s demands, a Hugo House webpage says that they postponed hiring a development director until after a permanent executive was hired, and that they have invited WOCA members to join their board or DEI committee. A month after the search for an ED was announced in March 2022, Hugo House began hiring a DEI consultant.

Castro Luna tells CHS that she thinks Hugo House is better now than it was at the time WOCA wrote their first letter, and that she thinks real changes were made to the organization.

“I’m very pleased that, finally, Hugo House will have a permanent executive director, I think it’s a step in the right direction,” Castro Luna said.

In addition to the tumult inside the organization, Hugo House also weathered pandemic restrictions on gathering and the CHOP and 2020 protests right outside its front doors.

But it is well positioned among Capitol Hill and the city’s strongest arts nonprofits. In 2018, it opened its new 9,600-square-foot writing center on the ground floor of the new mixed-use apartment building developed on the corner Hugo House has called home since the late 1990s.

Delgado has worked for multiple non-profit organizations including The Clinton Foundation and Coalition for Hispanic Family Services, and is moving to Seattle and Hugo House from her previous position as Literary Director at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

A writer herself, she has a Creative Writing MFA from Columbia University and she’s published the poetry collection “Tracing the Horse,” as well as multiple individual poems.

As for Delgado’s role, she tells CHS she is aware of the challenges facing Hugo House, and says she’s listening to people in the present and in the past to see if their concerns have been addressed.

“One of the bigger items on everyone’s agenda was equity in the teachers, and creating a pool of individuals who are more reflective of what the future is,” Delgado said.

Stepping into the role of an administrator as a woman of color, Delgado believes that her presence in a leadership position will contribute to racial equity at Hugo House.

“There’s not very many arts administrators of color, there’s not very many Latinx, chicana, administrators,” Delgado said. “I’m one of very few, and I think that racial equity starts with me being in a place that typically is held by white cis men, and I say that with respect.”

Castro Luna thinks the board of Hugo House has to give Delgado support.

“Because a new full-time ED is coming in, it doesn’t mean that that person will have all the answers, and I think there needs to be a space for that person to get caught up to living in the Northwest, being in Seattle, and beginning to learn the community,” Castro Luna said.

Support for herself, to Delgado, includes staff transparently sharing their individual truths.

“I’m really interested in learning from the staff and the board so that we can have open discussions that are uncomfortable, that might be able to bring us to a larger understanding of changes that need to be made,” Delgado said.

Hugo House is located at 1634 11th Ave. Learn more at hugohouse.org.

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