Get to the know the CPF8 Saturday panelists!

The 8th Cascadia Poetry Festival is right around the corner! We are so excited to be hosting an incredible lineup of poets, artists and academics Nov. 1-3 in Seattle! Register for a Gold Pass now!

Saturday, November 2 is going to be a full day of poetry and community in Cascadia hosted at the Hugo House! From 9:30-11, we will have two panels: Issei Zen & Other Migrations with Barbara Johns, Frank Abe, Sharon Hashimoto, Claudia Castro Luna and Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, and Wilson’s Bowl with Stephen Collis, Daphne Marlatt and Fred Wah, both moderated by Tetsuzen Jason Wirth. Read below to get to know the incredible writers, artists and academics that will be speaking at these panels.

Tetsuzen 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.

Barbara Johns

Barbara Johns, PhD, is an art historian and curator, whose work has focused on Issei artists in Seattle. With a past career at the Seattle Art Museum, Johns is the former chief curator of the Tacoma Art Museum. Barbara Johns spoke about Issei artist Kenjiro Nomura and her accompanying book Kenjiro Nomura, American Modernist: An Issei Artist’s Journey on the Cascadian Prophets podcast.

Bio retrieved from Densho Encyclopedia.

Frank Abe

Frank Abe is co-author of the graphic novel, WE HEREBY REFUSE: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration (Chin Music Press, 2021), winner of the Historical Research Award from the Association of King County Historical Associations. In addition, he wrote, produced and directed the award-winning PBS documentary “Conscience and the Constitution” on the largest organized resistance in the camps, and produced the first-ever “Day of Remembrance” in Seattle in 1978 with Frank Chin and Lawson Inada. Abe worked as a reporter for KIRO Newsradio for 14 years, helped fund the Seattle Chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association, and taught broadcast writing at Seattle University. 

Bio information retrieved from AAJA Studio. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.