On Saturday afternoon, October 10, 2026, Nadine Maestas read at Cascadia Poetry Festival 10 at the Rainier Beach Community Club. The other readers from this segment of the fest have been or will be posted over the next couple weeks, including Ching-In Chen, Dion O’Reilly, Geneviève Hicks, and Mateo Quispe.

Nadine Maestas began her reading with a few of her “La Llorona” poems, bringing the mythology of her ancestry into the present day, and sharing places the mythical figure of La Llorona has been engaged in her world and those of the people she overlaps with. Maybe beneath the Doug Fir grove, or by the Western Red Cedar (which likes to grow near the rivers…). Per usual, she resists the tyranny of the sentence with her alchemical syntax. One of my favorite lines was from Now Sayeth the Ghost, “unmapped sentences miming the abstraction of cities”. Her reading is intimate, but at once expansive. I couldn’t help but get a sort of double vision, where I felt both held in the local and particular details of her poetry and thrust up into the atmosphere to witness the grand scale of the world her work arises from. I hope you enjoy the video of Nadine Maestas’s reading!

Don’t forget to get ready for CPF 11 in October 2027!