subduction (noun):

1. a geological process in which the oceanic lithosphere and some continental lithosphere is recycled into the Earth’s mantle at the convergent boundaries between tectonic plates.

2. A reading series that reflects an emerging bio-democracy displacing a culture addled by materialism and its myriad effects.

Hosted by Vermillion art gallery and bar in the heart of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood on the first Wednesday of each month, Subduction  offers energetic performances by a rotating roster of talented poets and writers whose work is rooted in the Cascadia bioregion. We’ll sometimes offer musical interludes and always have an open-mic. Admission is free, but we encourage donations to a featured mutual aid organization each month.

For the second edition of Subduction, we’ll be gathering at Vermillion at 7 pm on Wed. Oct 7 to hear readings by Laura Da’, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Mateo Quispe, and Zach Charles. We’ll have an open mic after the featured poets, and we’ll be raising money for La Resistencia’s mutual aid fund, which provides direct assistance to individuals who have been detained by ICE and their families (these donations are not tax deductible).

Event details:

7 pm, Wednesday, October 7 (doors at 6:30)

Vermillion, 1508 11th Ave, Seattle

Reader bios:

Laura Da’ is a poet and teacher who studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is the author of Tributaries, American Book Award winner, Instruments of the True Measure, Washington State Book Award winner, and Severalty. Da’ is Eastern Shawnee and she lives in Washington with her family. Severalty begins in a garden and moves through ancestral and contemporary hometowns that shimmer between wholeness and severing. In these poems, river currents tick with the intrusion of the clock’s lavish precincts. From powerfully compressed lyrical fragments to pulsing narrative sequences, Severalty shifts perspectives to examine devastation and healing, transience and seasonality, loss and resurrection. With clear roots in her first two books of poetry, Tributaries and Instruments of the True Measure, this volume joins the author’s poetic trilogy with a deeply personal accounting of history, community, and selfhood.

Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs was a child farmworker and is the daughter of migrant farmworkers from Durango, Mexico. She is currently a Professor in Modern Languages and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Theiline Pigott McCone Endowed Chair in the Humanities (2018-2020) at Seattle University. She has served as former Director for The Center for The Study of Justice in Society, Seattle University. She is a polylingual poet, critic, and cultural worker. She is the author/editor of eight 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 and Presumed Incompetent, Vol. II., (2020), and single editor of various other books on Chicana criticism (University of Arizona Press). She also authored the published and forthcoming poetry collections: The Runaway Poems (Finishing Line Press), A Most Improbable Life, The Plastic Book and Kneading Words: Intersectionality, goddesses and beyond.

Mateo Quispe (Red River Métis and Little Shell Chippewa, unenrolled) is a Two-Spirit Peruvian-American poet with Quechua heritage. They serve as the 2024-2026 Auburn Poet Laureate. In 2025, they received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship for the Canoe Poetry Nooks Project, which installs a series of Indigenous-focused poetry libraries in bookcases shaped like Coast Salish canoes in public spaces around Auburn and the Muckleshoot Indian Reservation. From 2023-2024, they served as the Seattle Youth Poet Laureate. Their chapbook Dear Spanish was published by Poetry Northwest in 2024.

Zachary Brett Charles (they/he) is a nonbinary poet and multi-media artist. They are on the board of the Cascadia Poetics Lab, a co-editor of the e-zine Breathe (breatheeveryone.net), where they have work published, and are the author of Twentyfour Self Portraits at TwentyFour from Carbonation Press (2024).