2019 Cascadia Poetry Festival 6 – Anacortes POETS
Christopher Yohmei Blasdel
Christopher Yohmei Blasdel is a shakuhachi performer, ethnomusicologist, educator and writer. He began studies of shakuhachi in 1972 upon arrival in Japan and lived there until 2016. He received his MFA from Tokyo University of Fine Arts. Performing and teaching around the world, Blasdel maintains a balance between traditional shakuhachi music, modern compositions and cross-genre work with musicians, dancers, poets and visual artists. He is currently an adjunct lecturer in Japanese music at University of Hawai’i, Mānoa. To date he has released numerous CDs, including Heart of Bamboo, a collaboration with the poet Sam Hamil. He has also composed scores for several documentaries and films. His writings include The Single Tone—A Personal Journey through Shakuhachi Music and The Shakuhachi, A Manual for Learning and various short essays, both fiction and non-fiction. Blasdel also holds a fourth degree black-belt in Aikido.
Ian Boyden
Ian Boyden—artist, writer, translator, and curator—investigates relationships between the self and the environment, in particular how art and writing can shape our ecology. Consistent across his productions are his interests in material relevance and place-based thought, as well as a deep awareness of East Asian philosophies and aesthetics. He studied for many years in China and Japan, and holds degrees in the History of Art from Wesleyan University and Yale University. In addition to his independent projects, he also collaborates with scientists, poets, composers, and visual artists. He has exhibited widely, including a solo exhibition in China at the I.M Pei-designed Suzhou Museum. His books, paintings, and sculptures are found in many public collections including Reed College, Stanford University, the Portland Art Museum, and the Victoria & Albert Museum.
Lyn Coffin
Lyn Coffin has had more than 30 of her books (poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction, translations) published by W.W. Norton, Ithaca House Press and others. Her poems have been translated into six languages. William Meredith awarded Lyn’s translations of the Czech poet Jiri Orten first prize in International Review’s translation competition. Joyce Carol Oates included Lyn’s story in Best American Short Stories … and she was praised by Sam for her editing of Habitation.www.lyncoffin.com
Stephen Collis
Stephen Collis is the author of five books of poetry, including the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize winning On the Material (Talonbooks, 2010) and three parts of the on-going “Barricades Project”: Anarchive (New Star, 2005), The Commons (Talonbooks, 2008, 2014), and To the Barricades (Talonbooks, 2013). An activist and social critic, his writing on the Occupy movement is collected in Dispatches from the Occupation (Talonbooks, 2012). Collis is also the author of two book-length studies, Phyllis Webb and the Common Good (Talonbooks 2007) and Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism (ELS Editions 2006), as well as the editor, with Graham Lyons, of Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation (Iowa University Press, 2012). He teaches contemporary poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University, where he was a 2011/12 Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow.
Elizabeth Cooperman
After living and teaching in the Eternal City, Elizabeth Cooperman co-wrote a poetic guide to Rome, The Last Mosaic, with Thomas Walton (Sagging Meniscus, 2018). She is co-editor (with David Shields) of the anthology Life Is Short—Art is Shorter (Hawthorne Books, 2014) and has been an artist-in-residence at Ragdale Foundation Residency and 360 Xochi Quetzal Residency Program in Chapala, Mexico. Elizabeth is Art Director at PageBoy Magazine.
Michael Daley
Michael Daley is a retired Mount Vernon High School teacher. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Hudson Review, Rhino, Seattle Review, APR, and elsewhere. His fifth collection of poetry, True Heresies, is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press in 2019. He lives near Deception Pass in Washington.
John Delaney
John Delaney recently retired after 35 years in the Dept. of Rare Books and Special Collections of Princeton University Library, where he was head of manuscripts processing and then, for the last 15 years, curator of historic maps. He has written a number of works on cartography, including Strait Through: Magellan to Cook and the Pacific; First X, Then Y, Now Z: An Introduction to Landmark Thematic Maps; and Nova Caesarea: A Cartographic Record of the Garden State, 1666-1888. These have extensive website versions. He has written poems for most of his life, and, in the 1970s, he attended the Writing Program of Syracuse University, where his mentors were poets W. D. Snodgrass and Philip Booth. No doubt, in subtle ways, they have bookended his approach to poems. John has traveled widely, preferring remote, natural settings, and is addicted to kayaking and hiking. In 2016, John moved out to Port Townsend, WA, and published Waypoints (Pleasure Boat Studio, Seattle), a collection of place poems, the next year. Twenty Questions, a chapbook, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in July.
Cate Gable
Cate Gable has a poetry MFA from Pacific Lutheran University; an MA from the University of WA; and a BA from University of Pennsylvania. Gable won first place in a San Francisco Bay Guardian poetry contest; an honorable mention in the 2019 Hoffman Center for the Arts Manzanita Poetry Contest; and an award-winning chapbook, Heart (Center for Creative Work). Most recently, she authored a book of poetry and commentary on Stein/Toklas, entitled Chere Alice: Three Lives (Publications Studio, Portland, OR.) and her poem “Kilauea” was selected for Hawaii Public Radio Aloha Shorts. Gable writes a weekly column for The Chinook Observer. She lives in Nahcotta, Washington and Paris, France.
Ed Harkness
To his everlasting regret, Edward Harkness did not see Elvis when the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll visited Seattle during the World’s Fair in 1962. Other than that, Harkness is a happy husband to Linda, father to Ned and Devin, and grandfather to Clio and Hilde. Having retired after a 30+ year career as a writing teacher at Shoreline Community College, he now devotes his time to other pleasures: gardening, cycling, visiting the kids and, now and then, making poems. He is the author of two other full-length poetry collections, Saying the Necessary and Beautiful Passing Lives, both from Pleasure Boat Studio. His most recent chapbook, Ice Children, was published by Split Lip Press in 2014. Two poems in this collection, “Tying a Tie” and “Airborne,” won the Terrain.org annual poetry prize for 2017. He lives in Shoreline, Washington, about a mile from the north Seattle home where he grew up, and where his mother, Doris Harkness, whose art works grace the covers of this book, still lives. http://harkness01.wixsite.com/
Alicia Hokanson
Alicia Hokanson is the author of Phosphorus (1984) and Mapping the Distance (1989). Both books are collections of the author’s poems. Carolyn Kizer, a fellow poet, describes Hokanson’s work as possessing ‘not only a high level of craftsmanship but a real intellectual and moral elegance.’ A copy of Mapping the Distance is available in the local authors collection of the Bainbridge Public Library. Hokanson is also a contributor to Works of Heart (2006), a book which profiles community building through the arts.
Courtney Hudak
Courtney Hudak is a poet, lawyer, and third-generation single mother. Her writing is eclectic and, fittingly, has appeared in a diversity of places, including the Seattle Review of Books; the Ghosts of Seattle Past anthology, which was a finalist for the 2018 Washington State Book Award; at Design* Sponge.com; and in Super Lawyers magazines. As an attorney, she represents people seeking asylum in the United States on a pro bono basis. Sam Hamill was her teacher in poetry, Zen, and activism for just over a decade.
José Kozer
José Kozer, born La Habana, 1940. Has Lived in the USA since 1960. Taught at Queens College (CUNY) from 1965 to 1997 and then retired in Hallandale, Florida. He is the author of some one hundred books of poetry, a couple of prose, has been translated into many languages and studied extensively in dissertations in U.S. universities. In 2013 he received the Pablo Neruda Award from the Chilean government and in 2017 became a Montgomery Fellow.
Stephen Kuusisto
Stephen Kuusisto directs The Burton Blatt Institute’s Interdisciplinary Programs in disability at Syracuse University where he holds a University Professorship. He is the author of the memoirs Planet of the Blind (a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”) and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light and Letters to Borges. His newest memoir, Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey is new from Simon & Schuster. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Fulbright Scholar, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Hobart & William Smith Colleges, and The Ohio State University. Professor Kuusisto has served as an advisor to the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington DC and has appeared on numerous television and radio programs including The Oprah Winfrey Show; Dateline; All Things Considered; Morning Edition; Talk of the Nation; A & E; and Animal Planet. His essays have appeared in The New York Times; The Washington Post; Harper’s; The Reader’s Digest; and his daily blog “Planet of the Blind” is read globally by people interested in disability and contemporary culture. He is a frequent speaker in the US and abroad. His website is: www.stephenkuusisto.com
Jared Leising
Jared Leising grew up in the Midwest, and is the author of a chapbook—The Widows and Orphans of Winesburg, Ohio. Before moving to Seattle, he received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Houston. In 2000, Jared began teaching English at Cascadia College, and continues to do so. For the past two years he’s also been co-teaching a weekly creative writing class for women at the King County Jail.
Claudia Castro Luna
Claudia Castro Luna is the Poet Laureate of Washington State (2018-2020) She served as Seattle’s first Civic Poet from 2015-2017 and is the author of Killing Marías (Two Sylvia’s Press) and of This City (Floating Bridge Press). Born in El Salvador she came to the United States in 1981 fleeing civil war. Living in English and Spanish, Claudia writes and teaches in Seattle where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.
Nadine Antoinette Maestas
Nadine Antoinette Maestas is a poet’s poet and believes that the empire of the sentence is an extremely oppressive totalitarian regime. She prefers the company of poems so much that she would rather read a bad poem than a good novel, but when she is not doing poetry, Nadine loves mountain biking and trail running in dangerous and remote places in the Northwest. She teaches Creative Writing and Literature in San Francisco and New Hampshire, has facilitated writing workshops through Youthspeaks and has helped to pioneer poetry workshops in several public schools in California and Michigan. Nadine holds an M.F.A. from University of Michigan’s Hellen Zell Writer’s Program where she was awarded the Faraar award for playwriting. Her hybrid poem play “Hellen on Wheels: a Play of Rhyme and Reason” was performed at California College of the Arts. She is the co-author with Karen Weiser of “Beneath the Bright Discus” (Potes & Poets Press, 2000), and is a co-editor for the poetry anthology Make It True: Poetry from Cascadia. You can find her poems published in Pageboy Magazine, Lyric &, The Germ, and Poor Mojo’s Almana(k). Her dissertation, Calling out the State: Postmodern American Anthropoetics landed her a Ph.D. from the University of Washington.
Tim McNulty
Tim McNulty is a poet, essayist, conservation activist, and nature writer. He was born and grew up in Connecticut’s Quinnipiac River Valley and attended Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts at Boston. There he met poet Denise Levertov who inspired him with her powerful fusion of visionary poetics and political activism. Tim traveled throughout the West after college and settled on the Olympic Peninsula in 1972. He lives with his wife, Mary Morgan, in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains above the Dungeness and Graywolf rivers. A passionate spokesman for the wild, Tim remains active in the Northwest environmental community. Tim’s poems, essays, criticism, and articles on nature and conservation have appeared in numerous publications in the U.S. and abroad. His natural history writings have been translated into German, Chinese, and Japanese. Tim has received the Washington State Book Award and National Outdoor Book Award among other honors. He reads, lectures, teaches, and conducts workshops throughout the Northwest. READ MORE.
Peter Munro
By day Peter Munro counts fish, conducting research fishing cruises in the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Alaska, and the Aleutian Islands. After the field season they chain him to a computer in Seattle, permitting occasional visits to his wife and children between parameter estimations. By night, Munro makes poems, some of which have been published in Poetry, the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Iowa Review, the Birmingham Poetry Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere. More poems are forthcoming in Passages North, The Cortland Review, The Valparaiso Poetry Review, and the Birmingham Poetry Review. Listen to more poems at www.munropoetry.com, where you will also find an iron-clad guarantee.
Paul E Nelson
Paul Nelson is a poet & interviewer. He founded SPLAB (Seattle Poetics LAB) & the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Since 1993, SPLAB has produced hundreds of poetry events & 600 hours of interview programming with legendary poets, indigenous people & whole systems activists. Paul’s books include American Prophets (interviews 1994-2012) (2018) American Sentences (2015) A Time Before Slaughter (2009) and Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies (2013). Co-Editor of Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia, 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards and Make it True meets Medusario (2019) he’s engaged in a 20 year bioregional cultural investigation of Cascadia, serves as Sam Hamill’s Literary Executor and lives in Rainier Beach, in the Cascadia bioregion’s Cedar River watershed. www.PaulENelson.com.
William O’Daly
William O’Daly has translated eight books of the late-career and posthumous poetry of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, and most recently Neruda’s first volume, Book of Twilight, a finalist for the 2018 Northern California Book Award in Translation. All nine Neruda translations are published by Copper Canyon Press. O’Daly’s books of poems include The Whale in the Web, also published by Copper Canyon, as well as The Road to Isla Negra (2015), Water Ways (2017, a collaboration with JS Graustein), and Yarrow and Smoke (2018), the latter three published by Folded Word Press. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, O’Daly was a finalist for the 2006 Quill Award in Poetry and was profiled by Mike Leonard for The Today Show. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his poems, translations, essays, and reviews have been published in numerous journals and as part of multimedia exhibits and performances. His essay “Creative Collisions: Poetry as a Transformative Act” was a finalist for Tiferet Journal’s 2018 Writing Contest. He has received national and regional honors for literary editing and instructional design, was a co-founder of Copper Canyon Press, and served on the board of Poets Against War. Most recently, he was awarded by the State of California for his written and editorial contributions to the California Water Plan.
Shin Yu Pai
A 2014 Stranger Genius Award nominee, Shin Yu Pai is the author of several books of poetry, including ENSO (Entre Rios Books, forthcoming), AUX ARCS (La Alameda, 2013), Adamantine (White Pine, 2010), and Equivalence (La Alameda, 2003). Her work has appeared in publications throughout the U.S., Japan, China, Taiwan, The United Kingdom, and Canada. She has been a featured presenter at national and international literary festivals including the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival and the Montreal Zen Poetry Festival. She has served as an artist in residence for Seattle Art Museum, Town Hall Seattle, and Pacific Science Center and is a former member of the Speakers Bureau for Humanities Washington. She lives and works in Seattle’s Bitter Lake neighborhood.
Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma
Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma is an author, poet, translator, teacher, magician, musician, and lover of life. He was born in Seattle, has worked in south India and southern Mexico, and is currently a 2018-2019 NEA Translation Fellow. Earlier this year, Marrowstone Press published his first collection of poems, The Safety of Edges. Other books include Give, Eat, and Live: Poems of Avvaiyar and Body and Earth (with the artist C.F. John). Pruiksma performs nationally and internationally, and serves as Language Consultant for the Cozy Grammar Series of Video Courses. He makes his home on Vashon Island with his husband, David Mielke. thomaspruiksma.com
Bob Rose
After studying with Robert Creeley and Jack Clarke at SUNY Buffalo and teaching for 2 years at Bridgewater State College, Bob Rose traveled cross-country from Boston in 1970 and landed on north Whidbey Island. He’s lived within 60 miles of that spot ever since, including 4 years in Vancouver where he apprenticed as a shipwright and enjoyed the companionship of Robin Blaser and others. Beginning in 1977, Rose spearheaded the effort to protect the unique old-growth forest at Heart Lake and create the 3,000-acre Anacortes Community Forest Lands. He then had a long career in land conservation as Special Assistant to the Washington Commissioner of Public Lands (1982-1993) and as Executive Director of Skagitonians to Preserve Farmland (1995-2006). He was a founder of the Co-Op Press where he printed a chapbook, “Living on Islands” under the tutelage of master printer Clifford Burke. From 2011- 2016, he served on the board of the Skagit River Poetry Foundation (2011-2016). His daughter, acclaimed writer Rachel Rose, recently stepped down as Poet Laureate of Vancouver, B.C., Canada (2015-2017) and his son, Jefferson (with wife Alex), head up the Seattle world-beat dance band, The Pazific. Rose now gardens a small plot of oysters on Similk Bay.
Heidi Seaborn
Heidi Seaborn is the author of the award-winning debut book of poetry Give a Girl Chaos {see what she can do} (C&R Press/Mastodon Books, March 2019), Editorial Director for The Adroit Journal and a New York University MFA candidate. Since Heidi started writing in 2016, she’s won or been shortlisted for nearly two dozen awards including the International Rita Dove Award in Poetry and published in numerous journals and anthologies such as The Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Penn Review and Nimrod, as well a chapbook and a political pamphlet. She graduated from Stanford University and is on the board of Tupelo Press. heidiseabornpoet.com
Rebecca Seiferle
Rebecca Seiferle is the author of four poetry collections. Her most recent collection Wild Tongue (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) won the 2008 Grub Street National Poetry Prize. In 2004 she was awarded the Lannan Literary Fellowship for poetry. She has published two book length translations of César Vallejo: Trilce (Sheep Meadow Press, 1992) and The Black Heralds (Copper Canyon, 2003). Her translations are also included in The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (University of California Press, 2009) and Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (Copper Canyon, 2001). She was Tucson Poet Laureate from 2012-16.
Matt Trease
Matt Trease is an artist, poet, IT Analyst, and astrologer living in south Seattle, WA, where he serves on the board of the Seattle Poetics Lab (SPLAB) and co-curates the Margin Shift reading series. His poems have recently appeared in small po[r]tions, WordLitZine, Phoebe, Fact-Simile, Hotel Amerika, Juked, and in the anthology, 56 Days of August: Postcard Poems (Five Oaks Press, 2017). He is the author of the chapbook Later Heaven: Production Cycles (busylittle1way designs, 2013).
Thomas Walton
Thomas Walton is the author of The World Is All That Does Befall Us (Ravenna Press, 2019), a lyric essay written against lyric essays, and dealing with Gertrude Stein, grief, and parenthood. He is also author of the collaborative work (with Elizabeth Cooperman) The Last Mosaic (Sagging Meniscus, 2018), a poetic travel guide to Rome and Roman History. Recent work in Stringtown, Pontoon, and Rivet. He lives in Seattle WA where he edits PageBoy Magazine and runs a counseling center for neglected poets.
Karma Tenzing Wangchuk
Karma Tenzing Wangchuk (Dennis H. Dutton) is the author of several poetry chapbooks including 90 Frogs, Stone Buddha and Shelter | Street: Haiku & Senryu. A Los Angeles native, Tenzing has lived in Port Townsend, Cascadia, since 2006.
Dr. Jason M. Wirth
Dr. Jason M. Wirth is professor of philosophy at Seattle University, and works and teaches in the areas of Continental Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy, Aesthetics, Environmental Philosophy, and Africana Philosophy. His recent books include Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis (SUNY 2017), Schelling’s Practice of the Wild (SUNY 2015), The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time (SUNY 2003) and The Barbarian Principle: Merleau-Ponty, Schelling, and the Question of Nature (SUNY 2013). In 2010, he was ordained as a priest in the Soto Zen lineage and is the founder of the Seattle University EcoSangha (www.ecosangha.net).