2025 Cascadia Poetry Festival 9 – Seattle Poets

Brenda Cardenas

Current Wisconsin Poet Laureate Brenda Cárdenas has authored Trace (Red Hen Press, 2023), winner of the 2023 Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry and silver winner of Foreword Review’s Indie Poetry Prize; Boomerang (Bilingual Press); and three chapbooks. She also co-edited the anthologies Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance and Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest. Her poems and essays have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Braving the Body, Latinx Poetics: The Art of Poetry, Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Anthology, among others. Cárdenas has also enjoyed collaborating with musicians, composers, visual artists, and choreographers. For example, in 2024, her poem “Para los Tin-Tun-Teros,” set to choral music by Daniel Afonso, was performed by the National Concert Chorus at Carnegie Hall. Cárdenas is Professor Emerita of English at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and currently serves on the Board of Directors of Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee where she lives with her husband, the poet Roberto Harrison, and their dog Maya.

Zachary Brett Charles

In BR [BioRegional] Basics: 22 Ways to Come Home, David McCloskey writes about several ways, 22 to be exact, to live with the rhythms of the planet, to live effectively as the small part of a much larger organism that we as homo sapien are. These manners of living emerge from many places: simply sitting and listening to the land and the water, from deep study of the land and the water, and from certain human traditions, often from indigenous peoples around the world. In the 21st way, he consolidates this down to 6 practices of “‘The Real Work’ of Our Time: 1–Restore Integrity of Ecosystems, 2–Rebuild Infrastructure Along Ecological and Community-Based Lines, 3–Revitalize Communities, 4–Regenerate Ties of Local-Regional Economies, 5–Grow a Restorative Life-Place Politics, 6–Celebrate the Place and Build a New Grounded Culture.” Zachary Brett Charles (They/He) sees art, and especially poetry, as a powerful and peaceful medium through which to change the human imagination. They feel their role as a member of Cascadia 2050 is an opportunity to use art and poetry to help their friends, peers, and fellow Cascadians move toward living their lives in a manner consistent with the rhythms of the planet. They volunteer at the Cascadia Poetry Lab as a member of the Cascadia 2050 Youth Committee, Poetry Postcard Fest project board, the Podcast committee, and wherever else is helpful at the moment.

Jim Dott

James (Jim) Dott lives with his family in a 100+ year-old house in Astoria, Oregon above the Columbia River.  Since retiring from elementary school teaching he has immersed himself in poetry.  Jim’s new book, Touch Wood, was published this year by Watershed Press.  These poems are invocations and meditations on trees.  His two previous collections are A Glossary of Memory and Another Shore.  In addition to writing Jim gardens, hikes, studies natural history, and tries to improve his Spanish.  He is a co-host of a monthly poetry open mic, a volunteer programmer/producer at KMUN Community Radio (Children’s Bedtime Stories) and participates in local theater productions both on and off stage.  You can learn more about Jim and his writing at www.jamesdott.com.

Roberto Harrison

Roberto Harrison is a Panamanian American poet and artist living in Milwaukee since 1991. His latest book is Isthmus to Abya Yala, published by City Lights in 2023. He was Milwaukee Poet Laureate 2017-2019.

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)

Alicia Hokanson

A native of Seattle, Alicia Hokanson grew up exploring the beaches, forests, and islands of Puget Sound, inspiring her deep attention to the natural world. Her first book, Mapping the Distance, was selected by Carolyn Kizer for the King County Arts Commission publication prize and it was released by Breitenbush Books in 1989. Brooding Heron Press published two chapbooks, Phosphorous and Insistent in the Skin. Her poems have appeared in a wide variety of journals and anthologies. Upon completing her B.A. and M.A. in English at the University of Washington, Alicia pursued a career teaching English in a variety of venues, from working with high-school students in South Australia to teaching grades 1-8 in a one-room schoolhouse on Waldron Island, 8th graders on Bainbridge Island, and middle-school English for 27 years at Lakeside School in Seattle. Named River of Words Poetry Teacher of the year in 2003 for her work nurturing young writers, she also held the Bleakney Chair in English at Lakeside upon her retirement in 2014. She now devotes her time to writing, reading, and advocating for social and environmental justice. Her latest book is Perishable World (2021).

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.

Brandon Letsinger

Brandon Letsinger is an open source advocate, bioregionalist, movement builder and CascadiaNow! founder.

Cascadia and bioregionalism are one of the most powerful, yet least understood organizing philosophies for our world today.

Join me as I jump in on a journey to learn more about the history, the principles of bioregionalism, bioregional mapping and what it will take to build radical movements that can effectively grow regenerative cultures and be the change that our world needs right now.

Currently, I am an administrator at Regenerate Cascadia, producer of the Cascadia Northwest Arts and Music Festival, and executive director of the Department of Bioregion. I am the founding director of CascadiaNow!, before stepping back in 2017, former board member of the People’s Harm Reduction Alliance, the largest peer run and managed needle exchange program in the United States, and co-founder of the Seattle Street Medical Collective. My journey to learn more about democratic ways of living, human rights and sustainability have taken me around the world, from ecocamp and medical infrastructure building in Germany in 2008, and Scotland in 2005, to living in Tunisia after the Arab Spring during their constituent assembly process in 2011, to living and working in Beijing for the Audi, Volkswagen, as well as the French and German Chambers of Commerce in 2012.

I have always been inspired by the amazing people I meet, their ideas for how to change the world.

Lorin Medley

Lorin Medley is a counsellor and writer from Comox, BC published in several anthologies including Winter in America (Again, Cascadian Zen: volume two, Drift: Poems and Poets from the Comox Valley, Sweetwater: Poems for the Watersheds, and Refugium: Poems for the Pacific. Her writing can also be found in The New Quarterly magazine, subTerrain, The Puritan, Many Gendered Mothers, and Portal. She won the 2014 Islands Short Fiction Contest, Aislinn Hunter’s 2015 Books Matter poetry prize and was long listed for the 2016 Prism International Poetry Contest. Lorin’s poetry chapbook On the Way to Kluusms is forthcoming from Watershed Press.

Rhea Melina

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.

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).

Roxi Power

Roxi Power is a poet, performer, and publisher whose book, The Songs That Objects Would Sing was published in 2023.  She co-edited Winter in America (Again: Poets Respond to 2024 Election (Carbonation Press, 2025) and founded the trans-genre anthology series, Viz. Inter-Arts, at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she teaches.  Roxi podcasts and organizes readings for The Hive Poetry Collective in Santa Cruz. She performs Live Film Narration– “Neo-Benshi”–nationally. She received an AWP Intro Award and publications in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Puerto del Sol, Seneca Review, etc. and received an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University.

Robert Michael Pyle

Ecologist Robert Michael Pyle has studied natural history and written essay, poetry, fiction, and science along a tributary of the Lower Columbia River since 1978. His 30 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, was published by Watershed Press in 2025. A John Burroughs Medalist, Guggenheim Fellow, winner of two National Outdoor Book Awards and three Washington Book Awards, 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. He has worked, taught, studied, and read poems on six continents, most recently in Chile for research on a new novel.

Sharon Thesen

Sharon Thesen grew up in small towns across Western Canada, and for many years she taught English and Creative Writing at Capilano College in North Vancouver and was an active member of the poetry scene in the Lower Mainland.  Since 2003 she has lived in the Central Okanagan and is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at UBC’s Okanagan campus.  She is the editor of two editions of  The New Long Poem Anthology, and was an editor of The Capilano Review and co-editor of Lake: A Journal of Arts and Environment.   She has also co-edited, with Ralph Maud, two editions of the correspondence between Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff.  Her recent poetry books include A Pair of Scissors, The Good Bacteria, and Oyama Pink Shale, from House of Anansi in Toronto, and the forthcoming The Receiver, from New Star in Vancouver. 

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 (formerly 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).

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.

Ken Workman

Ken is a Native American from the Duwamish Tribe and 5th generation Grandson of Chief Seattle. He retired from The Boeing Company’s Flight Operations Engineering Group in 2015 where he worked as a Systems and Data Analyst. He is a Council member of the Duwamish Tribe. Ken can be found throughout the city of Seattle from Town Halls to Universities speaking his indigenous language. Ken lives in Seattle with his wife professor emeriti Dr. BJ Bullert (PhD).

Katie Sarah Zale

Katie Sarah Zale has published four collections of poetry, including The Weight of a Leaf (Kelsay Books), a finalist for the Arizona Book Award. She is the director of a Tucson, poetry-reading series. Co-editor of Winter in America (Again (Carbonation Press), poems in response to the 2024 Presidential election, she is also working on a biography of Sam Hamill.