Paul E Nelson, B.A., M.A. Founding Director.

Founder of the Cascadia Poetics LAB and the Cascadia Poetry Festival, Paul was a professional broadcaster from 1980 to 2006, and researched, hosted and produced over 450 original public affairs radio programs (1993-2004) and over 300 additional interviews since then. On-air host, news anchor, and public affairs coordinator in Chicago, Seattle, Baltimore and other towns, he’s a poet who has given presentations or readings in Brussels, London, China, Los Angeles, and other places while being very active since 1994 in the Puget Sound literary community. Published books include: Haibun de la Serna (Goldfish Press, Seattle, 2022), American Prophets (Interviews, Seattle Poetics LAB, 2018) American Sentences (Apprentice House, 2015, 2nd edition 2021),  A Time Before Slaughter (Apprentice House, Nov. 2009, shortlisted for the Stranger Genius Award in 2010), and the second edition including Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia (2020), Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies, published in English and Portuguese by Lumme Editions of Brazil in 2013 and Organic Poetry (VDM, Verlag, Germany, October 2008). His 2015 interview with José Kozer was published in 2016 as Tiovivo Tres Amigos. He is also co-editor of four anthologies: Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia, Samthology: A Tribute to Sam Hamill (Seattle Poetics LAB, 2019), Make it True meets Medusario (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2019) and 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards. He writes an American Sentence every day and lives with his wife Bhakti Watts and youngest daughter Ella Roque in Seattle’s Rainier Beach neighborhood in the dəxʷwuqʷad Creek/Cedar River watershed in the Cascadia bioregion. He serves as the Literary Executor for Sam Hamill. In late 2022 he released a chapbook The Day Song of Casa del Colibrí and in Spring 2023 released a chapbook entitled: Another Day Song (1980).

Matt Trease, M.A.

Board Member since December 17, 2017

Matt Trease is an artist, poet, IT Analyst, and astrologer living in south Seattle, WA, where he serves on the board of the Cascadia Poetics Lab (SPLAB) and co-curates the Margin Shift reading series. His poems have recently appeared in small po[r]tions, WordLitZine, Phoebe, Fact-Simile, Hotel Amerika, Juked, and in the anthology, 56 Days of August: Postcard Poems (Five Oaks Press, 2017). He is the author of the chapbook Later Heaven: Production Cycles (busylittle1way designs, 2013).

Dr. Jason M. Wirth

Board member since July 13, 2020, Dr. Jason M. Wirth is professor of philosophy at Seattle University, and works and teaches in the areas of Continental Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy, Aesthetics, Environmental Philosophy, and Africana Philosophy. His recent books include Nietzsche and Other Buddhas: Philosophy after Comparative Philosophy (Indiana 2019), Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis (SUNY 2017), a monograph on Milan Kundera (Commiserating with Devastated Things, Fordham 2015), Schelling’s Practice of the Wild (SUNY 2015), and the co-edited volume (with Bret Davis and Brian Schroeder), Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School (Indiana 2011). He is the associate editor and book review editor of the journal, Comparative and Continental Philosophy. He is currently completing a manuscript on the cinema of Terrence Malick as well a work of ecological philosophy called Turtle Island Anarchy. He is an ordained priest in the Soto Zen lineage. He is currently editing with Paul Nelson a collection of poems and essays dedicated to awakening the mind to bioregional thinking in general and to Cascadia in particular. He is a Founding Editor of Watershed Press.

Diana Elser, Secretary/Interim Treasurer

was elected to the Board on April 5, 2021. Diana graduated from Utah State with a BA in English, then worked as a grant and technical writer in healthcare services and consulting. Born in Montana, she’s lived in El Paso, Texas, Great Falls, Montana; Jackson, Wyoming; Bountiful, Utah; Bay Area (Rodeo/Crockett); and Seattle (also Canada and Thailand).  She’s turned over peaches, waitressed, tended bar, and sold Bibles along the way – as well as raising three children and helping raise a stepson.  She moved to Seattle for love (which has lasted) in 1994 and went to work for Group Health (now Kaiser Health Plan of Washington) where she did market research and competitive intelligence as part of strategic planning.  In 2013, she retired, and dedicated her retirement to “the arts” and having fun – taking writing classes at Hugo House and the Jackson Hole Writers Conference, year after year, as well as traveling, gardening, playing guitar/songwriting and becoming a grandmother. Finishing Line Press published her first chapbook in April, 2021, and she has a couple more in the works.  Diana discovered CPL through the Poetry Postcard Festival (collaged her own cards), and continues to take classes.  She lives in San Clemente, but spends part of the summer in Seattle. She’s new to the CPL Board and serves as Board Secretary, and on the Governance Committee.

Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs

board member since September 11, 2023.

Dr. Gutiérrez y Muhs is a poet and professor in Modern Languages and Women and Gender Studies at Seattle University.  She has served as former Director for various programs and been honored with two Chairs. She is a polylingual poet, critic, cultural worker. Gabriella is the author/editor of twelve 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, single editor of various other books on Chicana criticism, (University of Arizona Press, Lexington Books).  She also authored the published and forthcoming poetry collections: Kneading Words: Amasando palabras: Intersectionality, Gooddesss and Beyond and How Many Indians Can We Be? (Flowersong Press) She is the author of A Most Improbable Life, The Runaway Poems, (Finishing Line Press)  and The Plastic Book.

In Xochitl, In Cuícatl, a  bilingual poetry anthology of Chicanx/Latinx poetry, published in 2021 in Madrid, Spain, including more than 66 poets, and another multigenre Latinx women’s anthology Indomitable/Indomables  is forthcoming this year with San Diego State University Press. Her second volume of Presumed Incompetent: Race, Class, Power and Resistance of Women in Academia, for which she is known for having contributed in changing the climate in academia came out from Colorado University Press, in 2020.

Joe Chiveney

Board Member June 15, 2011 – Dec 31, 2020
President, July 17, 2012 – Dec 31, 2020.
Chair Governance committee, December 2020 – present.

Joe is a mental health professional, an athlete (running, hiking, biking) with a healthy lifestyle emotionally and spiritually. Since 1986, he has worked therapeutically with youth, families and individuals from many cultures and backgrounds in educational, community and home based settings. He lives and works in Olympia, WA.

Administrative Support

Veronica Martinez (Joined June 7, 2023)

Veronica Martinez is a fiction writer, poet and musician. Veronica graduated from the University of Arizona in 2022 with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing, and has had multiple pieces of fiction and poetry published in student-run literary journals and zines based in Arizona. She has experience working in educational nonprofits such as the Boys and Girls Club of Arizona, and interned with the Worlds of Words Reading Ambassador Program, where she assisted in the planning and organization of published author events for middle and high school students. With two musician parents, Veronica herself is a lover of music, and deeply enjoys balancing her love of literature, music and performance through her poetry. Veronica currently lives in downtown Seattle with her partner and their cat. Her work can be found on her Instagram @m0ronica.

Poetry Postcard Fest Committee

Dr. Ina Roy-Faderman

Poetry Postcard Board chair since its inception, Dr. Ina Roy-Faderman (she/her) has been a yearly participant in the Poetry Postcard Festival for over a decade and co-editor of the Poetry Postcard Fest anthology, 56 Days of August (Five Oaks Press, 2017). Her writings, focusing on the natural world and non-human animals, can be found in Trash Panda Magazine, Pigeon Papers, The Rumpus, Minding the Future (Springer Verlang, 2021) and the forthcoming Purr and Yowl anthology, among others. When she’s not writing, providing editorial assistance for Right Hand Pointing, or herding the human and non-human animals in her household, she teaches medical ethics and philosophy of science at Oregon State University.

Sally Hedges-Blanquez

is a poet and educator. Her work appears on the Seattle Poetic Grid, in the anthology Strange Fruit: Poems on the Death Penalty, as well as on postcards in mailboxes. She lives on the traditional land of the Coast Salish people where she writes, gardens, and shares plants and berries.

J.I. Kleinberg

An artist, poet, and freelance writer, J.I. Kleinberg lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA, and on Instagram @jikleinberg. Her poems have been published in print and online journals worldwide. Her visual poems were featured in a solo exhibit at Peter Miller Books, Seattle, Washington, in May 2022, and displayed at the 2022 Skagit River Poetry Festival and in The Cutting Edge: Art of Collage in Asheville, North Carolina, in April 2023.

Zachary Brett Charles

is a young artist and teacher living in Seattle, WA with his partner, their cat, Frankie, and their dog, Earle. He loves writing of all kinds but mostly works on poetry and short stories. He has poetry published in the ezine breatheeveryone.net. They also make multimedia works that involve painting, drawing, and collaging. They have lots of thoughts and feelings about the state of the world which can hopefully be deciphered in their works of art. Above all, they consider themself a storyteller weaving a tale they cannot finish. Other works of theirs can be found on Twitter @brettspoems, Instagram @bretts_poems, and now on their website https://brettcharles.wixsite.com/brettspoems. As a member of the Poetry Postcard Fest Project Board, they hope to get other young writers involved in the project and spread the love and connection of poetry.

Margaret Lee

Margaret joined the Poetry Postcard Fest in 2020. She is a poet, scholar, fiber artist, watercolor sketcher, and aspiring naturalist in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She finds poems in the Oklahoma prairies, New Mexico deserts, Oregon seashores, and inner landscapes. Margaret is retired from a career in higher education as administrator and college faculty member in the Humanities. Her academic research and previous publications focus on the language, history, and culture of the ancient world, and she has published three chapbooks with Finishing Line Press: Someone Else’s Earth (2021), Sagebrush Songs (2022), and Oklahoma Summer (2023).

*CPL Project Boards are committees of the organization and do not have fiduciary responsibility, which remains with the CPL Board of Directors. Project Boards offer suggestions to CPL on best practices, improving the experience of participants and increasing levels of participation. Project Board members act as ambassadors for the project they represent and for CPL.

CASCADIA 2050 Committee

Veronica Martinez

Veronica Martinez (she/they) is a Seattle-based writer, musician and community worker. Growing up in a military family with musician parents, Veronica moved around the U.S. and Europe during her childhood, always finding home within art and music in her communities and schools. After settling in Tucson, AZ as a teenager, Veronica received a BA in Creative Writing and English from the University of Arizona, and soon after moved to Seattle with her partner, Angel, and their cat, Naboo, to engage with the city’s music scene.

 In June of 2023, Veronica was hired as the administrative assistant of Cascadia Poetics Lab. Her work with Cascadia Poetics Lab has exposed her to bioregionalism and expanded her passion for the intersection of art and community. Discovering the ability to use art and writing to connect with environmentalists, ecologists and cultural workers to bring attention to current social and environmental crises has been vital and essential to Veronica’s progression as both a writer and community worker.

 Veronica is also the editor in chief, head writer and head designer of Disposable Parts, a DIY arts and culture media outlet created by Veronica and Angel. The outlet releases film videography of music and culture events shot and edited by Angel, along with full size, full color magazines designed and edited by Veronica featuring art and interviews by DIY creators in Seattle and beyond. This experience has exposed Veronica to the pursuit of arts and culture journalism, combining her love for community with her passion for writing. You can see Veronica’s work with Disposable Parts on Instagram @disposable.parts and read her writing on analogfog.substack.com. 

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.

Zaylan Jacobsen

Zaylan Jacobsen is a Seattle-based entrepreneur, mountaineer and Cascadian. He is originally from Sumner, Washington, a town whose motto is “Live Like the Mountain Is Out”. Growing up in the shadow of Mount Tahoma (Rainier), Zaylan grew a love of the mountains at a very early age that has played a key role in his identity and connection to Cascadia.

During the week he can be found at cafes or at the University of Washington, mainly working on mobile apps, web apps and websites. On the weekends, Zaylan spends time on the trails of Cascadia, always striving for a new summit to climb or trail to run. He loves to find unique ways to combine his passion for Cascadia and his skills in digital products, currently culminating in a web and mobile app at www.cascadia.world.

Zaylan first learned about Cascadia three years ago when studying the Cascade mountains and immediately resonated with the concept of identifying with place. He met the CPL crew at the 7th annual Cascadia Poetry Festival and was amazed by the brilliant minds that were there to discuss Cascadia. Although he would not call himself a full-on poet, Zaylan loves to write, dabbles in poetry and enjoys reading the works of others. He also always likes to know where he is at, which led him to an obsession with maps that now line the walls of his room. The centerpiece of his map collection is, of course, McCloskey’s incredible map of the Cascadian Bioregion.

Cascadia Poetry Festival Committee

Matt Trease, M.A.

Matt Trease is an artist, poet, IT analyst and astrologer living in south Seattle, WA, where he serves on the board of Cascadia Poetics Lab (SPLAB) and co-curates the Margin Shift reading series. His poems have recently appeared in small po[r]tions, WordLitZine, Phoebe, Fact-Simile, Hotel Amerika, Juked, and in the anthology, 56 Days of August: Postcard Poems (Five Oaks Press, 2017). He is the author of the chapbook Later Heaven: Production Cycles (bussylittle1way designs, 2013).

CPL committees do not have fiduciary responsibility, which remains with the CPL Board of Directors. Committees offer suggestions to CPL on best practices, improving the experience of participants and increasing levels of participation. Committee members act as ambassadors for the project they represent and for CPL.

Kagean Ni Committee

Watershed Press Committee

Adelia MacWilliam

When Adelia MacWilliam did her poetry thesis at the University of Victoria she discovered that if you cast the mythic imagination across a piece of land that has always been part of your life, everything will out.  What she encountered amidst the remnants of a stunning wilderness – a savage history, with its culturally sanctioned amnesia – changed her view of her home forever. Her work explores the complexities of a settler culture struggling to create a home in a world it is simultaneously gutting.

Adelia was also co-founder of Terra Poetics which, pre-pandemic, produced annual poetry events and the monthly Red Tree reading series in Cumberland on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. She has poems published in Reckoning 3 and 4, and in the anthology, Sweet Water: Poems for the Watershed. She divides her time between Cumberland and Desolation Sound, British Columbia. She is a Founding Editor of Watershed Press.

Dr. Jason M. Wirth

Dr. Jason M. Wirth is professor of philosophy at Seattle University, and works and teaches in the areas of Continental Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy, Aesthetics, Environmental Philosophy, and Africana Philosophy. His recent books include Nietzsche and Other Buddhas: Philosophy after Comparative Philosophy (Indiana 2019), Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis (SUNY 2017), a monograph on Milan Kundera (Commiserating with Devastated Things, Fordham 2015), Schelling’s Practice of the Wild (SUNY 2015), and the co-edited volume (with Bret Davis and Brian Schroeder), Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School (Indiana 2011). He is the associate editor and book review editor of the journal, Comparative and Continental Philosophy. He is currently completing a manuscript on the cinema of Terrence Malick as well a work of ecological philosophy called Turtle Island Anarchy. He is an ordained priest in the Soto Zen lineage. He is currently editing with Paul Nelson a collection of poems and essays dedicated to awakening the mind to bioregional thinking in general and to Cascadia in particular. He is a Founding Editor of Watershed Press.

Paul E. Nelson

Founder of the Cascadia Poetics LAB and the Cascadia Poetry Festival, Paul was a professional broadcaster from 1980 to 2006, and researched, hosted and produced over 450 original public affairs radio programs (1993-2004) and over 300 additional interviews since then. On-air host, news anchor, and public affairs coordinator in Chicago, Seattle, Baltimore and other towns, he’s a poet who has given presentations or readings in Brussels, London, China, Los Angeles, and other places while being very active since 1994 in the Puget Sound literary community. Published books include: Haibun de la Serna (Goldfish Press, Seattle, 2022), American Prophets (Interviews, Seattle Poetics LAB, 2018) American Sentences (Apprentice House, 2015, 2nd edition 2021),  A Time Before Slaughter (Apprentice House, Nov. 2009, shortlisted for the Stranger Genius Award in 2010), and the second edition including Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia (2020), Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies, published in English and Portuguese by Lumme Editions of Brazil in 2013 and Organic Poetry (VDM, Verlag, Germany, October 2008). His 2015 interview with José Kozer was published in 2016 as Tiovivo Tres Amigos. He is also co-editor of four anthologies: Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia, Samthology: A Tribute to Sam Hamill (Seattle Poetics LAB, 2019), Make it True meets Medusario (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2019) and 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards. He writes an American Sentence every day and lives with his wife Bhakti Watts and youngest daughter Ella Roque in Seattle’s Rainier Beach neighborhood in the dəxʷwuqʷad Creek/Cedar River watershed in the Cascadia bioregion. He serves as the Literary Executor for Sam Hamill. In late 2022 he released a chapbook The Day Song of Casa del Colibrí and in Spring 2023 released a chapbook entitled: Another Day Song (1980).

Cate Gable

Cate Gable is a Journalist, strategic planner for NGOs, poet, author, ecopreneur/agent for change, musician, and foodie, w/ homes in Paris, France; Seattle & Nahcotta WA. Cate has an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University; MA from the University of WA; BA from University of Pennsylvania (magna cum laude) She is a columnist for the Chinook Observer and has won awards for both poetry and ecological journalism (from the Hoffman Center for the Arts, Manzanita, OR; and the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association, Dolly Connelly Award and a Grantham Prize for Excellence). Her chapbook, “Chere Alice: Three Lives” (Publication Studio, Portland, OR) accompanied a UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library exhibit, “A Place at the Table.”  Recent poetry was selected for Hawaii Public Radio Aloha Shorts and has appeared in Bamboo Ridge, Bryant Literary Journal, Writers Resist, Washington 129, Twentieth, and Rain Magazine. Cate wrote the introductions for both Samthology, a memorial anthology for Sam Hamill (Seattle Poetics Lab, 2019), and Historic Haunts of the Long Beach Peninsula (The History Press). 

Ursula Vaira

Grew up in northern BC; after studying Education at UBC, she taught school on the northern coast and in the Arctic, then moved to Vancouver Island in the early eighties. Ursula loves wilderness camping and kayaking, and has a passion for the west coast—in the summer of 2005, she kayaked with a group from Port Hardy to Zeballos, around Cape Scott and Cape Cook. In 1997 she paddled by Coast Salish canoe from Hazelton to Victoria as part of Roy Henry Vickers’s Vision Quest to raise addictions awareness and funds to build an all-nations recovery centre on Vancouver Island. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and chapbooks, and in anthologies published by Hawthorne Society, Outlaw Editions, Anvil Press, Quills, the B.C. Federation of Writers and Mother Tongue Publlshing. In 2011 Caitlin Press published her poetry collection And See What Happens. Ursula is the founder and publisher of Leaf Press (www.leafpress.ca), publishing “poetry only” in print and online since 2001.

Dan Clarkson

Information coming soon