2026 Cascadia Poetry Festival 10 – Seattle Poets

allia abdullah-matta

allia abdullah-matta is a poet and Professor of English at CUNY LaGuardia & The Graduate Center/Africana Studies Program where she teaches composition, literature & culture, creative writing, Ethnic Studies, and Women Gender, and Sexuality Studies courses. She writes about the culture and history of Black women and explores the presence of Black bodies. abdullah-matta has published chapbooks washed clean & blues politico (2021), blackprint (2024), and critical/pedagogical articles. She is working on a collection of poems inspired by archival and field research in South Carolina and Georgia, funded by a CUNY BRESI grant.

Greg Bem

Greg Bem is a Spokane-based poet, librarian, and activist. He directs Carbonation Press and co-organizes Foray for the Arts. His multidisciplinary work blends ecology with sound and performance. Author of several collections, including Emerge, Greg also produces experimental audio as Talus Field and contributes reviews to various literary journals.

Amaranth Borsuk

Amaranth Borsuk is a poet, scholar, and book artist working at the intersection of print and digital media. Her most recent book, W/\SH (Anhinga, 2026), is a work of speculative poetry created with poet and artist Terri Witek. The book includes visual poems, fragments, and epistles envisioning a correspondence between women in two disastrous climate futures who reach for one another across their worlds, hoping to course-correct for the sake of their children. Borsuk is the author of the poetry collections Pomegranate Eater (Kore Press, 2016) and Handiwork (Slope Editions, 2012) as well as three other collaborative books of poems including: Abra (1913 Press, 2016), with Kate Durbin and Ian Hatcher; As We Know (Subito Press, 2014), with Andy Fitch; and Between Page and Screen (Siglio Press 2012, SpringGun Press, 2016) with Brad Bouse. Her contribution to the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, The Book, is a concise introduction to the book’s changing technologies that bridges book history, artists’ books, and electronic literature to reconsider an object we think we know intimately. She has collaborated on installations, art bookmarklets, interactive works, and poems, and is Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell.

Bill Carty

Bill Carty lives in Seattle and is the author of We Sailed on the Lake (Bunny Presse/Fonograf Editions, 2023) and Huge Cloudy (Octopus Books, 2019), which was longlisted for The Believer Book Award. He is Web Editor at Poetry Northwest and teaches at Edmonds College and the Hugo House.

Xavier Cavazos

Xavier Cavazos is the author of three award-winning poetry collections: Barbarian at the Gate (Poetry Society of America), Diamond Grove Slave Tree (Ice Cube Press), and The Devil’s Workshop (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), and winner of the 2024 Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur Award. His poetry has been widely anthologized, including in Best American Experimental Writing (BAX) and Under the Pomegranate Tree: Best American Latino Erotica. Currently, Cavazos is a senior poetry editor for Poetry Northwest and teaches in the Professional and Creative Writing Program at Central Washington University.

Zach 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.

Ching-in Chen

Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of Shiny City, recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) and The Heart’s Traffic: a novel in poems as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. They are a Kelsey Street Press collective member, Airlie Press editor and Nonfiction Coordinator for Best of the Net. They serve on the Governing Council of Seattle’s Cultural Space Agency and on the board of Seattle City of Literature. They received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center, EmergeNYC, Intercultural Leadership Institute and the Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They have served as Pacific Northwest chapter co-lead for Kundiman and recently joined the national Kundiman board. They have served as poet laureate of Redmond, Washington as well as Writer-In-Residence at Hugo House. They collaborate with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation and environmental justice. They teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell.

Photo credit: Cassie Mira

Stephen Collis

Stephen Collis is the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (2010), and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (2018)—all published by Talonbooks. 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 in a trilogy, was published in October 2024, and Knock Down House, an experimental memoir, was published by Pamenar Press in 2025. In 2026 he will deliver the Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poet Lecture at Vancouver Island University. He lives on Burnaby Mountain, unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.

Gary Copeland Lilley

Gary Copeland Lilley is the author of nine books of poetry, the most recent being Raven on the Moaners’ Bench, Four Way Books (2025), and The Hog Killing, Blue Horse Press (2018), and The Bushman’s Medicine Show, Lost Horse Press (2017). Originally from North Carolina he lives now in the Pacific Northwest. He has received the DC Commission on the Arts for Poetry, the Warren Wilson College Joan Beebe Fellowship, and he is a Cave Canem Fellow. He is the Artistic Director of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference.

Alex Gallo-Brown

Information coming soon

Tess Gallagher

Tess Gallagher, the author of eleven books of poetry, lives and writes in her hometown of Port Angeles, Washington, and in her cottage in Co. Sligo, Ireland. She is the only American to have been honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award for her poetry from the Foundation of Rome, which she received in 2023. Her most recent book, SURROUNDED BY WEASELS, stories by Irish storyteller Josie Gray and Gallagher from the NW of Ireland, was published by Cirque Press in August 2025. Her poetry collection Is, Is Not, published by Graywolf press, won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. Gallagher participated in BIRDMAN and SHORT CUTS, films centered on the work of her late husband Raymond Carver’s stories. Her own collection, The Man from Kinvara: Selected Stories, is the basis for film episodes under development. She is privileged to serve as a board member for Friends of Theodore Roethke Foundation.

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.

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).

Nadine Maestas

Information coming soon

Dion O’Reilly

Dion O’Reilly’s books include Limerence, finalist for The Floating Bridge John Pierce Competition for Washington State Poets;  Sadness of the Apex Predator (University of Wisconsin Cornerstone Press 2024), and Ghost Dogs (Terrapin Books 2020). Her work appears in Rattle, New Ohio Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, and RHINO. Most recently, her work was chosen as one of the winners of the 17th Annual Narrative Poetry Prize. A podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, private workshop facilitator, and co-editor of En•Trance Journal, she splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a residence in Bellingham, Washington.

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.

Mateo Quispe

Information coming soon

Linda Russo

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. 

Miriam Tobin

Rodrigo Toscano

Matte Trease

Terri Witek