2023 Cascadia Poetry Festival 7 – SEATTLE POETS

Andrew Schelling

-An ecologist, naturalist, and explorer of wilderness areas, Schelling has travelled in North America, Europe, India, and the Himalayas. His poetry is known for its engagement with the rhythms and elements of the natural world, its use of literary forms derived from traditional Asian literary forms and from International modernism, with a grounding in languages. He is one of the few renowned literary translators into American English of the poetry of ancient and medieval India. Dropping the Bow: Poems of Ancient India, his first volume of translations from Sanskrit and related vernaculars or Prakrits, received the Academy of American Poets translation award in 1992. Two volumes of his essays have appeared, and he has edited several anthologies. The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry includes a variety of poets, including experimental writers and younger poets. The Oxford Anthology of Bhakti Literature is a survey of the poetry or song (often orally composed and written down years or centuries later) that has been a pan-Indian “genre” for the past 1000 years. (Wikpedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Schelling )

Brenda Hillman

-One of contemporary poetry’s most eclectic and formally innovative writers, Brenda Hillman is known for poems that draw on elements of found texts and document, personal meditation, observation, and literary theory. Often described as “sensuous” and “luminescent,” Hillman’s poetry investigates and pushes at the possibilities of form and voice, while remaining grounded in topics such as geology, the environment, politics, family, and spirituality. In an interview with Sarah Rosenthal, Hillman described her own understanding of form: “It is the artist’s job to make form. Not even to make it, but to allow it. Allow form. And all artists have a different relationship to it, and a different philosophy of it… I think that when you are trying to open up a territory—in this case I was working with a desire to open the lyric—you have to be greedy, in that you want more than you can do. And you’re always bound to fail. (Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda_Hillman)

Tim McNulty

Tim McNulty is a poet, essayist, and natural history writer. He is the author of three poetry collections: Ascendance, published by Pleasure Boat Studio, In Blue Mountain Dusk, and Pawtracks, and ten poetry chapbooks. Tim is also the author of eleven books on natural history, including Olympic National Park: A Natural History (University of Washington Press), and Washington’s Mount Rainier National Park. He has received the Washington State Book Award and the National Outdoor Book Award. He lives in the Dungeness River watershed, foothills of Washington’s Olympic Mountains and is active in Northwest environmental issues. timmcnultypoet.com

Theresa Whitehill

A California-born poet and letterpress artist, Theresa Whitehill has long been involved in the production of open poetry readings, which became a key part of her own editorial process, refining and strengthening the voice of her poems through the practice of reading for an engaged public.

Her experience traveling in Europe allowed her to witness older cultures in which poetry is considered not just relevant but essential to the vitality of everyday life. This early insight that poets are of value and therefore also have responsibilities led to her adopting the manifesto she came across in Portugal, “Because Culture Is Always Urgent,” which has informed ever since her sense of where poetry sits at the heart of life.

Her publications include Cascadian Zen (Volume I, 2023, Volume II forthcoming, 2024), Heavy Lifting 2023), Deep Valley: Poets Laureate of Ukiah (2019), and A Grammar of Longing (2009). Her poetry and broadsides are in national fine press collections including the Getty Center for the Arts, the John Hay Library of Brown University, and the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. https://theresawhitehill.com/

Holly Hughes

Holly J. Hughes is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Hold Fast,  coauthor of The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World, and editor of several anthologies, including Keep a Green Bough: Voices from the Heart of Cascadia, and Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease. Her fine art chapbook Passings received an American Book Award in 2017 and her poems and essays have been nominated for Pushcart prizes, set to music and performed in New York city and Sitka, Alaska. She served on the staff of Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program for 13 years, in addition to teaching writing at the college level for several decades, as well as at Fishtrap, the North Cascades Institute, LitFuse and other regional conferences. In 2022, she became co-publisher of Empty Bowl Press. She also directs Flying Squirrel Studio, which offers writing residencies for women, and consults as a writing coach. She divides her time between a log cabin in Indianola and her home in the Chimacum valley and is grateful to the Chemakum, S’Klallam and Suquamish people for their ongoing stewardship of the land and waters she calls home.

Michael Daley

Michael Daley lives in Anacortes, Washington, on Fidalgo Island in the Rosario Strait-Strait of Juan de Fuca Watershed, and on the Samish Nation’s traditional land. He taught English at Mount Vernon High School for 22 years. In retirement, he became the publisher of Empty Bowl which he founded in 1976. He’s the author of nine books of poetry and translation, and a book of essays. His work has appeared widely in literary publications including The Hudson Review, American Poetry Review, North American Review, Ploughshares and elsewhere. He has been awarded by Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission, Fulbright, and The National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2022, Pleasure Boat Studio published his novel, Telemachus; Dos Madres Press published Reinhabited: New & Selected Poems, and Cervena Barva published his poetry collection, True Heresies.

Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs

Dr. Gutiérrez y Muhs is a poet and professor in Modern Languages and Women and Gender Studies at Seattle University.  She has served as former Director for various programs and been honored with two Chairs. She is a polylingual poet, critic, cultural worker. Gabriella is the author/editor of twelve books of poetry, criticism and culture, and multiple articles, encyclopedia entries, opinion pieces. She received her MA and PhD from Stanford University. She is first editor of Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia, single editor of various other books on Chicana criticism, (University of Arizona Press, Lexington Books).  She also authored the published and forthcoming poetry collections: Kneading Words: Amasando palabras: Intersectionality, Gooddesss and Beyond and How Many Indians Can We Be? (Flowersong Press) She is the author of A Most Improbable Life, The Runaway Poems, (Finishing Line Press)  and The Plastic Book.

In Xochitl, In Cuícatl, a  bilingual poetry anthology of Chicanx/Latinx poetry, published in 2021 in Madrid, Spain, including more than 66 poets, and another multigenre Latinx women’s anthology Indomitable/Indomables  is forthcoming this year with San Diego State University Press. Her second volume of Presumed Incompetent: Race, Class, Power and Resistance of Women in Academia, for which she is known for having contributed in changing the climate in academia came out from Colorado University Press, in 2020.

Tess Gallagher

Tess Gallagher, Irish American poet and short story writer, from the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, has been awarded the prestigious international Fondazione Roma – Ritratti di poesia Prize for her Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. She is the first American ever to receive this award. She will accept this honor in Rome, Italy in day long festivities which includes her reading her poems on national Italian television on April 14 and being interviewed with her translator of over 35 years, Riccardo Duranti. Gallagher’s eleventh volume of poetry, Is, Is Not, was published May 2019 by Graywolf Press and received the Pacific Northwest’s 2020 Book of the Year Award.  Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems, is the most comprehensive offering of her poems. Other poetry includes Dear Ghosts and Moon Crossing Bridge. Gallagher’s The Man from Kinvara: Selected Stories is the basis for film episodes under development. Gallagher divides her time between her hometown of Port Angeles, Washington, and her cottage in the West of Ireland. She is the literary executor of her late husband, Raymond Carver. In July, 2023, she will teach for the third time at the Port Townsend Writers’ Festival in Port Townsend, Washington. She has also recently accepted the honor to serve as the inaugural writer-in-residence for the Field Arts and Events Hall in Port Angeles opening in late summer of 2023.

Jan Zwicky

Jan Zwicky is the author of over twenty books of poetry and prose including Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, The Long Walk, and, most recently, The Experience of Meaning. Zwicky grew up in the northwest corner of the Great Plains on Treaty 6 territory, and currently lives in a coastal rainforest succession on Quadra Island, which is situated at the north end of the Strait of Georgia. It is unceded territory with a complex history including Coast Salish and Kwakwaka’wakw influences.

Robert Bringhurst

Robert Bringhurst was born in Los Angeles in 1946. He has lived and worked in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and South America, but his home for most of the past five decades has been the British Columbia coast. His Selected Poems are published in London by Jonathan Cape, in the USA by Copper Canyon, and in Canada by Gaspereau Press. He is trained as a linguist and is widely known for his translations from Haida and other Native American languages, and for his typographic work. He lives in Quadra Island’s Heriot Bay watershed.

Gary Copeland Lilley

Gary Copeland Lilley is the author of eight books of poetry, the most recent being The Bushman’s Medicine Show (Lost Horse Press, 2017), and a chapbook, The Hog Killing (Blue Horse Press, 2018). He is originally from North Carolina and now lives in the Pacific Northwest. He has received the DC Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry and is published in numerous anthologies and journals, including The Best American Poetry 2014, Willow Springs, The Swamp, Waxwing, Taos Journal of Poetry and Art, and African American Review. He is a Cave Canem Fellow.

Cedar Sigo

Cedar Sigo was raised on the Suquamish Reservation in the Pacific Northwest and studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the author of eight books and pamphlets of poetry, including Language Arts (Wave Books, 2014), Stranger in Town (City Lights, 2010), Expensive Magic (House Press, 2008), two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003 and 2005) and most recently the Bagley Wright Lecture Series book Guard the Mysteries (Wave Books, 2021). He has taught workshops at St. Mary’s College, Naropa University and University Press Books. He is currently a mentor in the low residency MFA program at The Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Lofall, Washington.

Sara Marie Ortiz

Sara Marie Ortiz  is an Acoma Pueblo poet, a performing artist, a filmmaker, and an indigenous peoples activist. She earned a BFA at the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles. Her poems have been published in journals such as Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, New Poets of the American West, and the anthology Sing: Indigenous Poetry of the Americas (2011). She is the author of the collection of poems Red Milk (volume 1, 2013).

Ortiz has received a Truman Capote literary fellowship, a Brigham Young Morning Star Creative Writing Award, and an American Indian Graduate Center Fellowship. The daughter of poet Simon J. Ortiz, she is currently working on a documentary about her father’s life and legacy. She works as an education administrator in Burien, Washington.