Meet the Pulley Press Team
Frances McCue, Founder + Editor (she/her)
Frances McCue, a literary activist, arts instigator, poet and writer, serves as the Editor of Pulley Press. Other start-ups that McCue has instigated or implemented include her work as the co-founder and founding director of Richard Hugo House where McCue brought the organization, now the largest literary center in the west, from start-up to stability in its first decade.
She also instigated, with a group of undergraduates, the Poetry Brigade, a student-faculty-community collective to promote reading and writing poetry at the University of Washington and she was the co-writer, co-producer and instigator of Where the House Was, a feature-length poetry documentary about gentrification, loss, and one old building in Seattle.
McCue is an award-winning poet and prose writer who has published four books of poetry and two of prose and she is currently a Teaching Professor in the English Department at the University of Washington. In 2018, she won the UW’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest honor for teaching at the University.
Barbara Byrne, Managing Director (she/her)
Barbara is a storyteller at heart with a passion for helping creative minds tell their stories and bring their unique perspectives to the world. She finds deep personal fulfillment in amplifying the voices of marginalized communities.
Barbara holds a MA in International Development and a BA in Political Science and History. She brings over 15 years of experience in values-led marketing and writing, book publishing, and nonprofit work to Pulley Press.
Barbara is an internationally-award winning professional pet photographer, an avid equestrian, a birder, a bubble tea aficionado, and an amateur gardener. She lives with her husband and two rescue dogs on three acres of forest outside a small town with a single traffic light near Puget Sound.
Sidney Rogers, Editorial Assistant + Publicist (he/him)
Sidney Rogers graduated from the University of Washington with a B.A. in Linguistics and Creative Writing. He has lived in Washington his whole life, growing up in both Seattle and just outside of Key Center (or Purdy, or Gig Harbor, or “past the Narrows Bridge,” or even just “on the peninsula” depending on who’s asking – the most well-known nearby landmark is probably the YMCA).
In writing, he enjoys almost anything that makes you question whether or not you’re dreaming, poetry that plays with sound and rhythm, and the occasional wildly outlandish mystery or sci-fi when the realism starts to get a little too real. His work has been published in Bricolage, Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, and Pictura journal, and is forthcoming in ___figuration: an anthology of trans writers.
Angelica Urquizo, Social Media Director (she/her)
Angelica Urquizo holds a B.S. in Environmental Science from the University of Tennessee Chattanooga and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Poetics from the University of Washington Bothell.
She is a poet and collage artist interested in drawing inspiration from the natural world, mythology, and the spectrum of the human experience. She has been published in Women of the Weird West Anthology by Brigid’s Gate Press, Silly Goose Press, and Clamor. Her videopoem, Spellbound Blue, was also featured in the 2026 Cadence Videopoetry Festival.
You can often find her on her porch reading, watching the hummingbirds, and waiting for the rain to come.
Thomas Eykemans, Lead Designer (he/him)
Thomas Eykemans leads our cover design for all of our authors and typesets our books. He is co-organizer of the Seattle Art Book Fair, founder of Tome Press, and instructs at the University of Washington School of Art + Design.
He was previously Senior Designer at the University of Washington Press. He received a BFA in Visual Communication Design from the University of Washington School of Art in 2002. He studies and teaches traditional martial arts at the Seattle Kung Fu Club. He was born in Seattle to Dutch parents and raised in Port Angeles, where the mountains greet the sea.