CPF8 Friday Night Featured Poets!

The 8th Cascadia Poetry Festival is coming soon, on Nov. 1-3! We are so excited to celebrate poetry in Cascadia with everyone! If you have not registered yet, we have multiple registration options available, along with volunteer opportunities. REGISTER HERE.

On Friday, Nov. 1, the festival will open with a keynote reading at the Hugo House with Daphne Marlatt, CA Conrad, Robert Lashley and Fred Wah. Learn more about these incredible poets and academics below! The full CPF8 schedule is available HERE! A full list of the featured CPF8 poets is available HERE!

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.

CAConrad

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

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.

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.