Introducing A Sense of Place: The Washington State Geospatial Poetry Anthology edited by Katharine Whitcomb, Robert Hickey, and Marco Thompson, The Center for Geospatial Poetry at Central Washington University! The project features, via Google Earth, poems by Washington poets ABOUT a particular location in the state. A visitor can call up a Google Earth map of Washington and see a map with pins indicating the locations of poems all over the state. Each pin can be zoomed in on and opened to a photograph and a full text, attributed poem with information about the poet.

Poets from the anthology will be featured Sunday at 4:30 at SPLAB, including Kathleen Flenniken, the new Poet Laureate of Washington. Suggested donation $5, but free to Cascadia Poetry Fest Gold Pass holders. 

Katharine Whitcomb is the author of a collection of poems, Saints of South Dakota & Other Poems, which was chosen by Lucia Perillo as the winner of the 2000 Bluestem Award and published by Bluestem Press, and two poetry chapbooks. Hosannas (Parallel Press, 1999) and Lamp of Letters (Floating Bridge Press, 2009), winner of the 2009 Floating Bridge Chapbook Award. Her poetry awards include a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, a Loft-McKnight Award, a Writing Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Halls Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She lives in Ellensburg, WA, where she is Coordinator of the Writing Specialization English Major at Central Washington University. Find out more on her website: www.katharinewhitcomb.com.

Kathleen Flenniken

was raised in Richland, Wash., and currently lives in Seattle. She holds engineering degrees from Washington State University and the University of Washington, as well as a Masters in Fine Arts degree from Pacific Lutheran University. She is president of Floating Bridge Press, a nonprofit organization dedicated to publishing Washington poets, and teaches poetry writing to students of all ages with the support of arts organizations including WSAC, Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools program and Jack Straw Productions.

Flenniken’s first book, Famous (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, and was a finalist for a Washington State Book Award. Her second collection, Plume (University of Washington Press, 2012), about the Hanford nuclear site, was recently chosen for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series.

Elizabeth Austen  is the author of Every Dress a Decision (Blue Begonia Press, 2011), and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Goes Alone (Floating Bridge Press, 2010) and Where Currents Meet (one of four winners of the 2010 Toadlily Press chapbook award and part of the quartet Sightline). She recently moved to West Seattle, where views of Vashon Island and Puget Sound have become new muses. She was the Washington “roadshow poet” and is the literary producer for KUOW 94.9 public radio. She makes her living at Seattle Children’s Hospital, where she offers retreats and poetry/journaling workshops for the staff.

Alice Derry’s newest collection of poems, Tremolo, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2012.  It received a 2011 Washington Artist Trust Award.  Strangers To Their Courage, from Louisiana State University Press, 2001, was a finalist for the Washington Book Award.  She has two previous full collections, Stages of Twilight (chosen by Raymond Carver) and Clearwater (Blue Begonia Press).  A chapbook of translations from Rainer Rilke appeared in 2002 from Pleasure Boat Studio, New York City. Derry taught English and German at Peninsula College in Port Angeles, Washington, for twenty-nine years, where she co-directed the Foothills Writers’ Series.

Paul Fisher is the author of Rumors of Shore, winner of the 2009 Blue Light Book Award, and is the recipient of an Individual Artist’s Fellowship in Poetry from the Oregon Arts Commission. A 2011 graduate of Artist Trust’s EDGE Program for Writers, he has recent poems appearing in journals such as Cave Wall, Crab Creek Review, DMQ Review, Naugatuck River Review and Nimrod International Journal. Born and raised in Seattle, he studied at the University of Washington, earned an MA from Washington U in St. Louis, and an MFA in poetry from New England College. Paul currently lives in Bellingham, a stone’s throw from beautiful Lake Whatcom, where he divides his time between the visible world and various realms of the inner eye.

Kathryn Hunt is a writer and filmmaker. Her stories and poems have appeared in Rattle, The Sun, Willow Springs, Crab Orchard Review, and Open Spaces, among other magazines. She is a director of documentary films, including Take this Heart, a feature-length film that was honored with the Anna Quindlen Award for Excellence in Journalism. She recently completed a memoir, The Province of Leaves, the story of a mother and a daughter and the tangled, maddening, and abiding claims of family. She teaches writing classes in memoir at the Writers’ Workshoppe in Port Townsend.

Terry Martin is an English Professor at Central Washington University. An avid reader and writer, Martin has published over 250 poems, essays, and articles and has edited both journals and anthologies. Her most recent book of poetry, The Secret Language of Women, was published by Blue Begonia Press in 2006.

 

Kevin Miller lives in Tacoma, Washington. Pleasure Boat Studio
published his third collection Home &

Away: The Old Town Poems in
2008. He has poems forthcoming in the Massachusetts Review and Barely
South.

Ann Teplick is a Seattle poet, playwright, and prose writer, with an MFA in creative writing from Vermont

College of Fine Arts. For eighteen years she’s written with youth in schools, juvenile detention centers, psychiatric hospitals and literary non-profits. Her work has appeared in Crab Creek Review, Drash, Chrysanthemum, Hunger Mountain, Reality Mom, Jack Straw Writers Anthology, Washington State Geospatial Anthology and others. Her plays have been showcased in Washington, Oregon, and Nova Scotia. In 2010, she participated in Artist Trust’s EDGE ~ Personal Development Program for Writers. In 2010 she received funding from Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs and 4Culture, for a collection of poetry The Beauty of a Beet, Poems from the Bedside. In 2011, she was a Jack Straw and Hedgebrook Fellow. Currently, she is a member of The Teaching Artist Training Lab at The Seattle Repertory Theater. In addition, she is wrapping up a young adult novel, called Hey Baby, Wanna Dance?