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, Poetry Northwest, McSweeneys  The Cascadia Field Guide, and most recently Cascadian Zen  In 2019, Entropy Magazine named “The Homeboy Songs” one of the 25 essential books to come out of Seattle. His novel, “I Never Dreamed You’d Leave In Summer,” was selected as a finalist for a Washington State Book Award in 2024 and this year was selected as one of bookshop.com‘s 30 favorite Black books in the last 10 years. He lives in Bellingham.

Claudia Castro Luna

Claudia Castro Luna is an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate fellow (2019), WA State Poet Laureate (2018 – 2021) and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet (2015-2018). She is the author of Cipota Under the Moon and Killing Marías  both shortlisted for the WA State Book Award in poetry, 2023 and 2018 respectively, One River, A Thousand Voices, and the chapbook This City . Her most recent non-fiction is in There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis and in Memory’s Vault: The Poetic Heart of Fort Worden. Born in El Salvador, Castro Luna lives in English and Spanish, and she writes and teaches in Seattle on unceded Duwamish lands.

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

Paul E Nelson founded the Cascadia Poetics LAB in 1993 and the Cascadia Poetry Festival in 2012. A professional broadcaster from 1980 to 2006, he’s conducted over 700 interviews since 1993 and has published 5 books of poetry. He has also co-edited six anthologies and two books of his transcribed interviews have been published. His first book,  A Time Before Slaughter (2009), was shortlisted for the Stranger Genius Award in 2010 and he was given the Robin Blaser Award in 2014. He writes an American Sentence every day and lives with his wife Bhakti Watts in Seattle’s Rainier Beach neighborhood in the dəxʷwuqʷeb Creek/Cedar River watershed in the Cascadia bioregion. He serves as the Literary Executor for Sam Hamill.

Matt Trease

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).

Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs

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.