2024 Cascadia Poetry Festival 8 – Seattle POETS
Fred Wah
Fred Wah is a B.C. poet who has been writing and publishing since the early 1960’s. His early work is collected in Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962-1991. More recently is a collaboration with Rita Wong, beholden: a poem as long as the river and a series of improvisations, Music at the Heart of Thinking.
Koon Woon
Born in 1949 in a village near Canton, China, Koon Woon immigrated to Washington State in 1960. He earned a BA from Antioch University Seattle and studied at Fort Hays State University and the University of New Orleans. He is the author of the poetry collections Rice Bowls: Previously Uncollected Words of Koon Woon (2018); Water Chasing Water (2013), winner of the 2014 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; and The Truth in Rented Rooms (1998), a finalist in the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and winner of a Josephine Miles Award for literary excellence from PEN Oakland. His poetry appears in Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry (1995), among others. He has also published a memoir, Paper-son Poet: When Rails Were Young (2016). Woon is the publisher of Goldfish Press and the literary magazine Chrysanthemum. He lives in Seattle.
Jason 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 Nietzsche and Other Buddhas: Philosophy after Comparative Philosophy (Indiana 2019), Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis (SUNY 2017), a monograph on Milan Kundera (Commiserating with Devastated Things, Fordham 2015), Schelling’s Practice of the Wild (SUNY 2015), and the co-edited volume (with Bret Davis and Brian Schroeder), Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School (Indiana 2011). He is the associate editor and book review editor of the journal, Comparative and Continental Philosophy. He is currently completing a manuscript on the cinema of Terrence Malick as well a work of ecological philosophy called Turtle Island Anarchy. He is an ordained priest in the Soto Zen lineage. He is currently editing with Paul Nelson a collection of poems and essays dedicated to awakening the mind to bioregional thinking in general and to Cascadia in particular. He is a Founding Editor of Watershed Press.
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 Cascadia 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).
C.S. Giscombe
C. S. Giscombe teaches at the University of California’s Berkeley campus, where he is the Robert Hass Chair in English. His prose and poetry books include Negro Mountain, Prairie Style, Ohio Railroads (“a long poem in the form of an essay”), Similarly (selected poetry and new work), Border Towns, etc. In progress are Railroad Sense and Medicine Book. He is a long-distance cyclist.
Diana Elser
Diana graduated from Utah State with a BA in English, then worked as a grant and technical writer in healthcare services and consulting. Born in Montana, she’s lived in El Paso, Texas, Great Falls, Montana; Jackson, Wyoming; Bountiful, Utah; Bay Area (Rodeo/Crockett); and Seattle (also Canada and Thailand). She’s turned over peaches, waitressed, tended bar, and sold Bibles along the way – as well as raising three children and helping raise a stepson. She moved to Seattle for love (which has lasted) in 1994 and went to work for Group Health (now Kaiser Health Plan of Washington) where she did market research and competitive intelligence as part of strategic planning. In 2013, she retired, and dedicated her retirement to “the arts” and having fun – taking writing classes at Hugo House and the Jackson Hole Writers Conference, year after year, as well as traveling, gardening, playing guitar/songwriting and becoming a grandmother. Finishing Line Press published her first chapbook in April, 2021, and she has a couple more in the works. Diana discovered CPL through the Poetry Postcard Festival (collaged her own cards), and continues to take classes. She lives in San Clemente, but spends part of the summer in Seattle.
PAUL E NELSON
Founder of the Cascadia Poetics LAB and the Cascadia Poetry Festival, Paul was a professional broadcaster from 1980 to 2006, and researched, hosted and produced over 450 original public affairs radio programs (1993-2004) and over 300 additional interviews since then. On-air host, news anchor, and public affairs coordinator in Chicago, Seattle, Baltimore and other towns, he’s a poet who has given presentations or readings in Brussels, London, China, Los Angeles, and other places while being very active since 1994 in the Puget Sound literary community. Published books include: Haibun de la Serna (Goldfish Press, Seattle, 2022), American Prophets (Interviews, Seattle Poetics LAB, 2018) American Sentences (Apprentice House, 2015, 2nd edition 2021), A Time Before Slaughter (Apprentice House, Nov. 2009, shortlisted for the Stranger Genius Award in 2010), and the second edition including Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia (2020), Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies, published in English and Portuguese by Lumme Editions of Brazil in 2013 and Organic Poetry (VDM, Verlag, Germany, October 2008). His 2015 interview with José Kozer was published in 2016 as Tiovivo Tres Amigos. He is also co-editor of four anthologies: Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia, Samthology: A Tribute to Sam Hamill (Seattle Poetics LAB, 2019), Make it True meets Medusario (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2019) and 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards. He writes an American Sentence every day and lives with his wife Bhakti Watts and youngest daughter Ella Roque in Seattle’s Rainier Beach neighborhood in the dəxʷwuqʷad Creek/Cedar River watershed in the Cascadia bioregion. He serves as the Literary Executor for Sam Hamill. In late 2022 he released a chapbook The Day Song of Casa del Colibrí and in Spring 2023 released a chapbook entitled: Another Day Song (1980).
Jami Macarty
Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press) and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami is also the author of four chapbooks, including The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by support from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Community of Writers, Napa Valley Writers Conference, and by the tireless editors of American and Canadian literary magazines where Jami’s poetry has appeared including The Capilano Review, Colorado Review, Interim, Puerto del Sol, Ocean State Review, Vallum, and Volt. Jami supports other writers as a teacher of creative writing courses at Simon Fraser University, as an independent mentor to creative writers, as an editor of scholarly and creative texts, and as a reviewer at Colorado Review, The Malahat Review, The Miramichi Reader, and NewPages, among others. Jami lives in and learns from the arborescent desert around Tucson, Arizona, and the rain coast of Vancouver, British Columbia. For more information about Jami’s writing, teaching, and editing practices, visit www.jamimacarty.com.
CA CONRAD
CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. The Book of Frank is now available in 9 different languages, and they coedited SUPPLICATION: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books). They exhibit poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Tucson, Arizona, as well as in Spain and Portugal. They teach at the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Please visit them at https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88
Sharon Thesen
Sharon Thesen has been part of the BC/Cascadian writing scene for many decades as poet, critic, editor, and professor. She is currently working on a collection of critical and autobiographical writings. Her 2022 Charles Olson Memorial Lecture, “Olson & Love” was published by Watershed Press, which also published both volumes of the Cascadian Zen anthologies as well as last year’s Cascadian Prophets, co-edited by herself and Paul Nelson.
Stephen Collis
Stephen Collis is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and prose, including the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (2010), and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (2018). A History of the Theories of Rain (2021) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for poetry, and in 2019, Collis was the recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize. The Middle, the second volume of a trilogy begun with A History of the Theories of Rain, will be published by Talonbooks in 2024.
Robert Lashley
Robert Lashley was a 2016 Jack Straw Fellow, Artist Trust Fellow, and a nominee for a Stranger Genius Award. His books include Green River Valley (Blue Cactus Press, 2021), Up South (Small Doggies Press, 2017), and The Homeboy Songs (Small Doggies Press, 2014). His poetry has appeared in The Seattle Review of Books, NAILED, Poetry Northwest, McSweeney’s, and The Cascadia Review, and recently, The Cascadia Field Guide, which has been on the bestseller list for 40 weeks. In 2019, Entropy Magazine named The Homeboy Songs one of the 25 essential books to come out of Seattle. In September of 2024, his Novel, I Never Dreamed In Summer, was selected as a finalist for a Washington State Book Award.
Carletta Wilson
The narrative threads of Carletta Carrington Wilson’s literary and visual works merge as literary works; artist books, installations and collages mirror the melding of language and form. For Wilson, language is a visual medium, one by which form, shape and color inform an eye and shape a mind. Wilson’s poems peer into a vast unwieldy past to interrogate the role language has played in the creation of the past and the scripting of its future.
She is the author of Poem of Stone & Bone: The Iconography of James W. Washington Jr. in Fourteen Stanzas and Thirty-One Days. Her poems appear in This Light Called Darkness, Cascadian Zen: Bioregional Writings on Cascadia Here and Now Volume Two, Take A Stand: Art Against Hate, Stealing Light, Make It True: Poems from Cascadia, Beyond the Frontier: African American Poetry for the 21st Century, the African American Review, Calyx, Obsidian III, Raven Chronicles and the Seattle Review.
Daphne Marlatt
Vancouver poet and novelist Daphne Marlatt has published some 20 poetry titles, three novels, as well as a Canadian version of a Japanese Noh play, The Gull, and a Noh-inspired libretto for 4 Vancouver composers, Shadow Catch. Her long prose poem The Given won the 2009 Dorothy Livesay Award and in 2012 she was awarded the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2017, Talonbooks published Intertidal, her collected poems 1968-2008, edited by Susan Holbrook. She is a longtime Tibetan Buddhist practitioner under the guidance of Zasep Tulku Rinpoche.
Robert Michael Pyle
Ecologist Robert Michael Pyle has studied natural history and written essays, poetry, fiction, and science along a tributary of the Lower Columbia River since 1978. His 28 books include the Northwest classics Wintergreen, Sky Time in Gray’s River, and Where Bigfoot Walks, the novel Magdalena Mountain, and a flight of respected butterfly books. The latest of his five poetry collections, Swimming With Snakes, will appear from Watershed Press in 2025. A John Burroughs Medalist, Guggenheim Fellow, five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and PEN America Art of the Essay finalist, Bob may be heard on Spotify with Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic for their album, Butterfly Launches from Spar Pole. An Honorary Life Fellow of both the Royal and American Entomological Societies, he has worked, taught, and read poems all over the world.
Samar Abulhassan
Samar is a Jack Straw Writer and holds an M.F.A. from Colorado State University. She’s worked in California public schools for seven years. Born to Lebanese immigrants and raised with multiple languages, she is a 2006 Hedgebrook alum and the author of six chapbooks, including Farah and Nocturnal Temple. Samar has worked with Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools since 2008. Samar also recently participated in the 2018 Skagit River Poetry Festival. In 2016, Samar received a CityArtist grant to aid in completing a novel-in-poems reflecting on memory, longing, and the Arabic alphabet. Samar often finds inspiration in images and places and replicates these techniques in her teaching.
Adelia MacWilliam
When Adelia MacWilliam did her poetry thesis at the University of Victoria she discovered that if you cast the mythic imagination across a piece of land that has always been part of your life, everything will out. What she encountered amidst the remnants of a stunning wilderness – a savage history, with its culturally sanctioned amnesia – changed her view of her home forever. Her work explores the complexities of a settler culture struggling to create a home in a world it is simultaneously gutting.
Adelia was also co-founder of Terra Poetics which, pre-pandemic, produced annual poetry events and the monthly Red Tree reading series in Cumberland on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. She has poems published in Reckoning 3 and 4, and in the anthology, Sweet Water: Poems for the Watershed. She divides her time between Cumberland and Desolation Sound, British Columbia. She is a Founding Editor of Watershed Press.
Sharon Hashimoto
Sharon Hashimoto’s first poetry book is The Crane Wife (reprinted by Red Hen Press, 2021). Her second poetry collection, More American, won the 2021 Off the Grid Poetry Prize and the 2022 Washington State Book Award in Poetry. Her debut short story collection, Stealing Home, is forthcoming in September, 2024 (Grid Books).
Claudia Castro Luna
Claudia Castro Luna is an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate fellow (2019), WA State Poet Laureate (2018 – 2021) and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet (2015-2018). She is the author of Cipota Under the Moon (Tia Chucha Press, 2022) and Killing Marías (Two Sylvias Press, 2017) both shortlisted for the WA State Book Award in poetry 2023 and 2018 respectively. She is also the author of One River, A Thousand Voices (Chin Music Press, 2020) and the chapbook This City (Floating Bridge Press, 2016). Born in El Salvador, Castro Luna arrived in the United States in 1981. Living in English and Spanish, she writes and teaches in Seattle on unceded Duwamish lands.
Lorna Dee Cervantes
Lorna Dee Cervantes a Native Californian (Chumash) is an award-winning author of six books of poetry. The former Professor of English at CU Boulder, she lives and writes in Seattle and her latest book is April on Olympia.
Meredith Quartermain
Meredith Quartermain’s poetry books include Lullabies in the Real World (2020), Vancouver Walking (2005, winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize) and Nightmarker (2008) (all from NeWest Press), and Matter (2008) and Recipes from the Red Planet (2010) (from Book*hug). From 2014-2016, she served as Poetry Mentor in the SFU Writer’s Studio program. Her work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Prism International, The Dalhousie Review, Event Magazine, The Capilano Review, Golden Handcuffs Review, and many other magazines.
Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs
Dr. Gutiérrez y Muhs is a poet, literary critic and professor in Modern Languages and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Seattle University. Gabriella is the author/editor of several poetry collections, books of literary criticism, first editor of Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia, 2012, essays and opinion pieces and many other articles and loose poems, as well as her forthcoming memoir, Fresh as Lettuce (Martillo Press). She received her MA and PhD from Stanford University. She has criss-crossed the nation giving keynote speeches and motivational talks, including the recent EKU Chautauqua keynote address: “(Inter)sectional (Inter)actions: Being Horizontal.” She has also edited several anthologies and has been anthologized and published in multiple journals and anthologies like Cascadian Zen, As/Us: A Space for Women of the World, Bilingual Review: Revista Bilingüe, 25th Anniversary Issue, Quarry West Anthology, In Celebration of the Muse Anthology, Cruzando Puentes: Antología de Literatura Latina, Yellow Medicine Review, Puentes, Ventana Abierta, Camino Real, Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social, Diálogo: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Last year she co-edited In Xochitl, In Cuícatl, a bilingual poetry anthology of Chicanx/Latinx poetry, published in 2021 in Madrid, Spain, (includes more than 60 poets) and another multigenre Latinx women’s anthology Indomitable/Indomables, forthcoming, with San Diego State University Press. Her latest collection ¿How Many Indians Can We Be? ¿Cuántos indios podemos ser? was published with Flowersong Press in 2022.
Jill Lapoint
Poet bio coming soon