Featured Poets 2025
Contact us to feature in 2025






===================
January 6, 2025
Jory Mickelson
Jory Mickelson is a writer, educator, and storyteller whose first book Wilderness//Kingdom (Floating Bridge Press) won a 2020 High Plains book award in poetry. Their second book All This Divide (Spuyten Duyvil Press) and third book Picturing (End of the Line Press, Canada) are due out in 2024. Their work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Court Green, DIAGRAM, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Jubilat, Mid-American Review, and other journals in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. They are the recipient of an Academy of American Poet’s Prize and have received fellowships from the Dear Butte, The Desert Rat Writers Residency, the Lambda Literary Foundation and The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. They were also a 2022 Jack Straw Writer in the Jack Straw Cultural Center’s Writers Program.
They are a graduate of the University of Idaho’s MFA Program, the former Poetry Editor of 5×5 Lit Mag, and the creator of the blog Literary Magpie that uplifted LGBTQAI+ writers, editors and publishers. They have taught workshops and retreats on a wide variety of topics including writing and wilderness, mindfulness, zines, creative writing, and poetry as a spiritual practice. They live in the Pacific Northwest.
Jory Mickelson’s All This Divide circumambulates through time, excavating the violent layers of lineage: “Our story / one dark furrow.” Mickelson’s images are sharp and evocative, imaginative and felt: “The swallows— // they are combing the clouds’ trailing hair” and “the knotted // hawk you are / pulling from my throat.” Lyrical and sonically curious, these poems press their ears against the hearts of many storytellers. All This Divide asks us to consider our connectedness, one beetle and one stone at a time.
—Jane Wong, author of Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City
===================
January 13, 2025
Kara Briggs
Kara Briggs is a writer and a poet who lives on the Tulalip Reservation in Washington state. She is a Sauk-Suiattle tribal citizen and a descendant of the Yakama Nation. In 2024, she completed her Master of Fine Arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where she studied with Navajo poet Esther Belin, with Oglala poet Layli Longsoldier, and with Mvskoke poet Jennifer Elise Foerster. She previously graduated from The Evergreen State College with a Master of Public/Tribal Administration. Her bachelor's degree in English is from Whitworth College in Spokane, her hometown.
---
Review
Praise for - Rivers in My Veins
With calm elegance, precise language, and the spirit of the Pacific Northwest, Kara Briggs sings her people onto the page. Rivers in My Veins is both protest and celebration, a reminder to readers that the Sauk-Suiattle, Wenatchee, Chelan, Entiat, and Skagit peoples are still harvesting, fishing, and remembering. Land we live on land, she writes, calling us to embrace our kinship with the earth. -Deborah Taffa, Whiskey Tender
Rivers in My Veins is a work of lyric courage that celebrates the interconnectivity of the earth and her people while confronting, through unflinching investigative addresses, the false settler-colonial narratives and power structures within these narrative's problematic etymologies and extractive practices. Kara Briggs' tenacious spirit and fierce love of the lands, waters, and stories of her Coast Salish people makes Rivers in My Veins a powerful debut collection that will become a vital contribution to our shared world's literary-and deeply alive-landscapes. -Jennifer Elise Foerster, Editor - When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry
With a journalist's eye for unflinching truth, Kara Briggs's Rivers in My Veins assembles precise language, lyric verse and innovative form to produce a finely wrought blend of Native perspective poetry. Briggs compels the reader to hold onto familiar narratives of landscape and family while learning more layers of story. At the heart of this collection, a drum of knowledge beats, aiming at nothing less than uplifting the experience of American Indians who are every bit as intellectual and human as the readers of this book. I have known Kara Briggs for many years waiting for this collection to come to light. Now we will be better as a nation for reading Rivers in My Veins. -Suzan Shown Harjo, Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient, Editor - Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations
===================
January 20, 2025
Bev Fesharaki
Bev Fesharaki is an educator / poet. She started writing poetry when she was ten years old, but she first studied writing
with the Inscape Poets at Catherine Place in Tacoma. Every September she attends Poets on the Coast, facillitated by Susan Rich. Bev's work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies and on the website of the Museum of Northwest Art, she writes about relations, religion and recovery. She lives with her husband in Mukilteo, overlooking possession Sound
===================
January 27, 2025
Leah Mueller
Leah Mueller is the author of ten prose and poetry books. Her work appears in Rattle, Midway Journal, Citron Review, The Spectacle, Miracle Monocle, Outlook Springs, Atticus Review, Your Impossible Voice, etc. It has also been featured in trees, shop windows in Scotland, poetry subscription boxes, and literary dispensers throughout the world. Her flash piece, "Land of Eternal Thirst" will appear in the 2022 edition of Sonder Press' "Best Small Fictions" anthology. Visit her website at www.leahmueller.org.
===================
February 3, 2025
Scott Ferry & Douglas Cole
I grew up in Huntington Beach, CA on a steady diet of swim workouts, shredded beef tacos, and skiing. Both of my parents taught high school, so I thought I should do the same. Not a sustainable career for me. My sister became a professor, and a damn good one. I moved to Seattle, became a Licensed Acupuncturist. Barely paid for itself, even though the ancient grid of Qi still informs my body. Lifeguarded for many years. Found nursing and never regretted it. I now work for the most worthy recipients of respect, our Veterans. I married a superior being and made a brilliant female sprig. They are both the reason and the reward.
I began writing poetry in high school to mostly try to communicate a lack of meaning and a yearning for depth. After college I began frequenting Laguna Poets, and other vital readings in mid-90s Orange County. This few years fed me, taught me. I began publishing in Blue Satellite, Spillway, Inevitable Press. My father passed away during this same time and colored the air with charcoal and opened a light around people. I may have had a spiritual awakening, or I may have slid off the visual plane for a bit. When I moved to Seattle I read in local readings and published in Seattle Review, Crab Creek Review, Poetry Superhighway, Pontoon, Bitter Oleander. I wrote hundreds of poems, some were actually decent. I married, divorced. Met my present and beautiful wife and we moved back to Huntington Beach for a long five years while she became a doctor and I became a nurse.
We returned to Seattle when our daughter was one. We bought a house with a sprawling yard and a view of the Olympics off our deck. I began writing again, publishing in Radius, Cobalt, Chaleur, Moon Tide, Pontoon, Slippery Elm, Cultural Weekly, among others. My chapbook Book of 24 streets was a semifinalist in the Floating Bridge contest in 2017. I was a finalist in the Write Bloody Poetry Book Contest in 2019. My collection, The only thing that makes sense is to grow is now available from Moon Tide Press. My second book, Mr. Rogers kills fruit flies, is now available from Main St. Rag. In 2020, my son was born the same day as my father, just 88 years later. I received a Pushcart nomination from Misfit in November 2020 for the poem “Dispersal.” My third book, These Hands of Myrrh, was published by Kelsay Books in Fall 2021. My minichap The Sea of Marrow came out in late 2021 and I have 2 more books upcoming for 2022: Skinless in the Cereal Aisle from Impspired and fishmirror from Alien Buddha. And I have this silly website, of course.
Douglas Cole
Douglas Cole has published eight poetry collections, including The Cabin at the End of the World, winner the Best Poetry Award in the American Book Fest, and the novel The White Field, winner of the American Fiction Award. His work has appeared in journals such as Beloit Poetry, Fiction International, Valpariaso, The Gallway Review and Two Hawks Quarterly. He contributes a regular column, “Trading Fours,” to the magazine, Jerry Jazz Musician. He also edits the American Writers section of Read Carpet, a journal of international writing produced in Columbia. In addition to the American Fiction Award, his screenplay of The White Field won Best Unproduced Screenplay award in the Elegant Film Festival. He has been awarded the Leslie Hunt Memorial prize in poetry, the Best of Poetry Award from Clapboard House, First Prize in the “Picture Worth 500 Words” from Tattoo Highway, and the Editors’ Choice Award in fiction by RiverSedge. He has been nominated Six times for a Pushcart and Eight times for Best of the Net. His website is https://douglastcole.com.
===================
February 10, 2025
E. Grace Dager
Evelyn Grace Dager, who goes by Grace, was born in California in 1962. She has lived in numerous states across the country, choosing the PNW as her home. In 1980 she was a scholarship recipient to the University on Miami for art and writing. She has also attended classes at the Corcoran Gallery School of Art in Washington DC. Dager received her BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in 1989.
Dager has had many 'one man' shows and has participated in many group showings. Dager does not limit expression to painting only and works in video, set design, and performance art. She has appeared and worked in film, including working with the renowned Karl Krogstad. Grace creates recycle art and loves making 'cut up' poetry. E Grace Dager was a Board Member at Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) from 2012-2015. She has worked at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) and taught art to terminal cancer patients.
E Grace Dager was listed in the 2017: Who's Who in Visual Art.
Dager currently lives in Everett, Washington. She hosts Gold E Lofts Gallery. Gold ELofts has resumed showings during the Third Thursday Everett Art Walk. Dager currently presents her works at Gallery '33 Stares leading up to her Little Bo’Teek store inside Gold ELofts.
===================
February 17, 2025
Mary Eliza Crane
Mary Eliza Crane lives in the Cascade foothills in western Washington. A regular feature at Puget Sound
readings, she has read poetry from Woodstock to L.A, and internationally with Siberian poets in Russia.
Mary’s new collection of poetry, Last Call of the Dark, was published by Cirque Press in 2024. She has
has two previous volumes of poetry published by Gazoobi Tales, and has been nominated for a Pushcart
Prize. Her work has appeared in many journals and northwest anthologies, including Raven Chronicles,
WA 129 Poets of Washington (2017), Bridge Above the Falls (2019) and Examined Life (2024), and has
been translated into Russian. Mary is a co- founder of Western Washington Poet’s Network, and co-
curates and co-hosts the monthly Duvall Poetry reading series in her home community.
===================
February 24, 2025
Daniel Edward Moore
Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island.
His work is forthcoming in Drunk Monkeys, Xavier Review,
Ballast Journal, The Chiron Review, Book of Matches,
Main Street Rag Magazine, Hurricane Review, Bryant Literary Review and The Meadow Journal.
His book, “Waxing the Dents,” is from Brick Road Poetry Press.
===================
March 3, 2025
Katy E. Ellis
I grew up under evergreen trees and high-voltage power lines in my backyard in Renton, Washington, a wilderness suburb of Seattle. My passion for writing developed in high school and continued into my university years where I earned a bachelor of arts at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, and a masters of arts at Western Washington University.
In the past, I’ve had the good fortune of working in classrooms as a part-time writing teacher with Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools (WITS) program. And from 2014-2019, I co-founded and co-curated WordsWest, a thriving, local literary reading series promoting high-quality writers of diverse race and cultural background and includes a night for children’s authors.
I’m grateful for poetry and stories in my life. I’m thankful that writing has always been a place for me to explore, examine, and find comfort whenever and however I go to it.
===================
March 10, 2025
Bethany Reid
Bethany Reid is a poet, writer, editor, and writing coach. She has an MFA in poetry and a PhD in American Literature from the University of Washington. For almost thirty years, she taught composition, American literature, and Creative Nonfiction at Everett Community College and elsewhere in the greater Seattle region.
Bethany’s first book, The Coyotes and My Mom: Poems, was published by Bellowing Ark Press in 1990. Her other poetry books are Be Careful (a limited-edition chapbook from Chuckanut Sandstone, 2005); Sparrow, which won the 2012 Kenneth and Geraldine Gell Poetry Prize, selected by Dorianne Laux; and Body My House, published by Seattle’s Goldfish Press in 2018; her chapbook of poetic riffs, “The Thing with Feathers” (inspired by poems of Emily Dickinson), was published in 2020 as part of Triple No. 10 by Ravenna Press. Her parenting memoir, originally a creative nonfiction piece, You Are Very Upset, was published as a Kindle Short by DLG Publishing Partners, also in 2020.
In addition to the Gell Prize, Bethany’s poetry has won numerous awards, including Calyx’s Lois Cranston Memorial Prize, The MacGuffin’s 22nd annual Poet Hunt Contest, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye, and the Olympia Poetry Network’s Jeanne Lohman Prize.
Bethany has been blogging since 2009. Read more on this site, and at One Bad Poem.
bethanyareid.com
===================
March 17, 2025
Jen Broadway
An Everett Poetry Night regular.
===================
March 24, 2025
Steve Sibra
Steve Sibra says, “when I was about 4 years old I was crawling around in
my mother’s vegetable garden, on the family farm in Montana, when I
came face to face with a rattlesnake. We both froze. I looked at the
snake. The snake looked back at me. For a moment time stood still.
Then I got up from my hands and knees and walked away. The snake
just laid there on his belly. As far as I know he may still be there. That
experience, more than any other, inspired me to write poetry.”
Steve’s poetry has appeared in dozens of literary journals over the past
several decades; likewise, his short fiction has been sprinkled across the
ultra obscure literary landscape of small press lit mags. Translations
have appeared in another language or two, live readings have occurred
in several western and midwestern states. His book of poetry, SHOES
FOR BABY, was published in 2022 by Swallow Press. He is currently
dabbling at collaboration as lyricist with a popular rock star (something
may come of it, or it may end up like the snake in the vegetable garden
– who can say?).
In any case, Steve will be thrilled to read a mixture of his most recent
and his “vintage” work. You will get 20 or so minutes of it, after which
you will go home and wonder, “what the hell just happened?” Thank
you for attending. It is my pleasure to perplex and sustain you.
===================
March 31, 2025
Deborrah Corr
Deborrah Corr’s work has been published in two anthologies, The Madrona
Project: The Empty Bowl Cookbook, and Of Our Own Accord: Women’s Embodied
Poetry (Flying Ketchup Press). Her poem, “Night Vision” was awarded an honorable
mention in the Connecticut River Review Contest 2024. An honorable mention was
also given to her poem “The Red Onion” in the 2024 Streetlight Magazine Contest. Her
poems have appeared in several journals including The McNeese Review, Catamaran,
Kansas City Voices, The Sunlight Press, The Main Street Rag, Amethyst, Raven Chronicles and several others.
Naked Rib, Deborrah’s first chapbook, will be published by Finishing Line Press in February of 2025.
Debby came from a family of farm workers. The summers of her early years
were picking strawberries, string beans and cherries in the Yamhill Valley in Oregon.
Now she lives in Seattle with her husband and grows berries and vegetables in their backyard and on their deck.
A classroom teacher for thirty years, she decided, upon retiring, to devote her
time to writing and learning the craft of poetry. She has studied with many Hugo House
and online teachers and is a member of three groups dedicated to helping each other
grow great poems.
Blurbs for Naked Rib by Deborrah Corr
Animated by Deborrah Corr’s muscular voice, each poem in “Naked Rib” is an act of
retrieval. The book opens with the child-self claiming the primordial mother Eve (“I lifted
her out of the ink and drank her”), then arcs through a life driven by hunger for
connection and ultimately carved, as we all are, by love and its loss. These are poems
that embody the transformational power of words to keep and carry forward what we love.
-Elizabeth Austen, former Washington State Poet Laureate and author of Every Dress a Decision
Deborrah Corr’s Naked Rib is a powerful collection of lyric poems illuminating
dramatic moments in a life. Her skillful use of biblical imagery in the first poem, “I
was Eve,” announces her themes: the desire for sensual experience and freedom from
strictures, communion with the natural world, and coming into the power of the female body.
Often elegiac in tone, these poems map a journey through the ferocity of childhood
longings, the growth of sensual awareness, into the experience of motherhood,
marriage, and family. A central sequence of the book explores the loss of her
husband and daughter to cancer, (“cancer, the camera, its shutter snapping/ closed,
first on him, then on her.”) These grief-stricken meditations show her arrival at the
hard-earned understanding “to pay / attention to what I’ve been given.”
What we readers have been given here is a beautifully crafted collection of deeply moving poems.
-Alicia Hokanson, author of Perishable World and Mapping the Distance
There will be safety in the honest word. In this book a fearless girl child grows to be the woman
given to saying hard things with grace, not one to deny the rewards of temptation taken, even
when results are dire. Isn’t this life for living full, no matter what a poem has to say to help a
reader face it? Mean love, frenzied loss, cancer, epiphany—early in this book you learn, and by
end you know: I will follow this voice anywhere.
—Kim Stafford, author of As the Sky Begins to Change and former Oregon State Poet Laureate
===================
April 7, 2025
Marianne Mersereau
Marianne Mersereau is an award-winning poet, writer, dancer and mystic who grew up in the Southern Highlands of Appalachia and now resides in the Pacific Northwest. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, Timbrel (2013), selected as a semi-finalist in the Finishing Line Press New Women's Voices Competition. She is also the author of a children's picture book, The Green Lake Gifting Game (2014). Her first full-length poetry collection, a memoir in verse, "In the Grip of Grace" is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (Spring 2024).
Her work has appeared in The Seattle Times, Bella Grace, Entropy, The Hollins Critic, Still Point Arts Quarterly, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Deep South Magazine, The Remington Review, Seattle's Poetry on Buses and elsewhere, and has been selected for numerous anthologies. Marianne was a finalist in Artists Embassy International's Dancing Poetry Contest in 2018.
Marianne's love of flowers, bees and the natural world earned her the nickname, Wild Honey. In addition to creating poems and stories, she also creates floral designs and volunteered for over a decade as director of the Flower Guild at Saint Andrew's Episcopal Church in Seattle. She is a performer of Appalachian clog dance, modern lyrical dance and liturgical dance and enjoys traveling with her family. She is the proud mother of two children and has enjoyed the companionship of husband, Dave, for over 30 years.
Marianne holds degrees in education from the University of Virginia at Wise and Seattle University. She spent a decade working as an elementary school teacher.
===================
April 14, 2025
Susan Rich
Susan Rich is the author of six books of poetry including Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press), Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry), Cloud Pharmacy (White Pine Press), shortlisted for the Julie Suk Award, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, named a Finalist for the Foreword Prize and the Washington State Book Award, Cures Include Travel, and The Cartographer’s Tongue / Poems of the World, winner of the PEN USA Award.
Rich has also co-edited two prose anthologies: The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Writing Across Borders (McSweeney’s) with Catherine Barnett, Ilya Kaminsky and Brian Turner, and more recently, Demystifying the Manuscript: Essays and Interviews for Creating a Book of Poems (Two Sylvias Press), co-edited with Kelli Russell Agodon.
Her writing has received fellowships from Artists Trust, Seattle/King County, 4Culture, the Fulbright Foundation, and Peace Corps Writers.
She has worked as a staff person for Amnesty International, an electoral supervisor in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a human rights trainer in Gaza and the West Bank. Rich lived in the Republic of Niger, West Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer, later moving to South Africa to teach at the University of Cape Town.
Rich’s international awards include: the Times Literary Supplement Award (London,UK), a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Center (Ireland) and a residency at Fundacion Valparaiso, (Spain). Other poetry honors include an GAP Awards and a featured poet in the Cuirt Literary Festival in Galway, Ireland.
Her poems have been published in the Academy of American Poets: Poem-a-Day, Alaska Quarterly Review, Bennington Review, Harvard Review, New England Review, O Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Slowdown, among other places.
Rich’s anthologized poems and essays are included in The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy; Best Essays of the Northwest, Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID, Take a Stand: Art Against Hate, 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium and Poets of the American West. Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net Awards.
Susan is an alumna of the Blue Mountain Center, Hedgebrook, the Helen Whiteley Center, Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Ucross Foundation. She has served on the boards of Crab Creek Review, Floating Bridge Press and Whit Press.
Educated at Harvard University, the University of Oregon, and the University of Massachusetts, Susan Rich lives in Seattle and teaches at Highline College where she chairs the National Poetry Month Committee. She is co-founder and executive director of Poets on the Coast: A Weekend Writing Retreat for Women and writes Blue Atlas on Substack.
Susan Rich (poetsusanrich.com)
===================
April 21, 2025
Bren Rorack
===================
April 28, 2025
Dion O’Reilly
Dion O'Reilly is the author of three poetry collections: Sadness of the Apex Predator (University of Wisconsin's Cornerstone Press 2024), Ghost Dogs (Terrapin Books 2020), and Limerence, a finalist for the John Pierce Chapbook Competition, forthcoming from Floating Bridge Press. Her work appears in The Sun, Rattle, Cincinnati Review, The Slowdown, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is a podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, leads poetry workshops, and is a reader for Catamaran Literary Quarterly. She splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a residence in Bellingham, Washington.
Home | Dion O'Reilly Award-Winning Poetry (dionoreilly.com)
===================
May 5, 2025
Susan Landgraff
Susan Landgraf was awarded an Academy of American Poets’ Laureate award in 2020. Recent books include Journey of Trees published this year and Crossings from Ravenna Press in its Triple Series last fall. Other books include The Inspired Poet from Two Sylvias Press, What We Bury Changes the Ground, and Other Voices. More than 400 poems
have been published, most recently in Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Calyx, The Meadow, and Tar River. Her full-length manuscript Out of a Land of Alkali and Chromate will be published next March by Moon Path Press.
===================
May 12, 2025
Renée L. Roman Nose
Renée Roman Nose, MAIS, citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, is an activist, artist, motivational speaker, poet, photographer and cultural anthropologist and author of Sweet Grass Talking, published by Uttered Chaos Press. Roman Nose is inspired by historical and contemporary issues. Her CD, The River of Life, is a Spoken Word CD with noted Native flute player, Peter Ali. Her second book is currently with the publisher, with an anticipated release date of Spring 2025, titled: River of Life.
Roman Nose lives and thrives in the Pacific Northwest.
You can reach her on Facebook: Renée L Roman Nose, Instagram: renee_roman_nose, on Bluesky @reneeeomannose.sky.social, www.reneeromannose.com. n Facebook: Renée
===================
May 19, 2025
a
Wesley Fullerton
J. Wesley Fullerton fell in love with poetry in his late teens and took to writing really awful poems through his years at school, which nonetheless brought him joy. He got involved in the poetry scene in Bellingham, WA, which taught him a lot about writing and reading performance, and eventually led to a host of featured readings, slams, theater performances, and classroom presentations. Presently, he joins in the open mic at Everett Poetry Night as often as new writing allows, and is working on a book. He lives in Marysville.
===================
May 26, 2025
Eric R. Kosarot
Eric is an interdisciplinary artist living on Ebey Island in Snohomish County. Besides a person of letters,
paintings, and songs, Eric also farms, gardens, and is an equestrian worker.
===================
June 2, 2025
Shannon Laws
Shannon Laws is a story-telling poet from Bellingham, Washington. She is the author of four poetry books and a poetry audiobook. Shannon publishes a free monthly zine “Corridor” that showcases poetry and art by over 50 contributors. She was twice honored with the Mayor’s Arts Awards for promoting local artists on community radio and through public projects. Shanon is grateful to the Writer’s International Network in Richmond, B.C., Canada for the Dr. Asha Bhargava Memorial Award - Community Champion for her work with World Peace Poets Washington. Shannon's latest book, Tounge In Ink, is a collection of her poems illustrated by collage artist Kathleen McKeever.
Please visit her website to see what she’s up to: shannonplawswriter.com
===================
June 9, 2025
Sandy Yannone
Sandra (Sandy) Yannone grew up near the edge of the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island Sound in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Throughout her pre-teen to college years, she worked as a laborer and sales clerk at ViJon Studios, her parents’ stained glass art studio and supply center.
Her poems and book reviews have appeared in both print and digital anthologies and literary journals, including Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland Review, Prairie Schooner, Women’s Review of Books, and The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. Her work has received the Academy of American Poets Prize and Associated Writing Programs (AWP) Intro Award, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Award. She earned her BA in writing and literature from Wheaton College (MA); an MFA from Emerson College; and a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
She is co-founder and host of Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry, an international, intersectional, intergenerational poetry group and reading series. In addition, Sandy hosts Last Tuesdays with Sandy, a special monthly online reading event for Olympia Poetry Network subscribers, and co-hosts the West-East Bicoastal Poets of the Pandemic & Beyond online reading series. Previous hosting and co-hosting appearances include The Collectibles Lesbian Trading Card Reading Series with Headmistress Press, and as the featured poet and collaborator on the Little Oracles: Divinations podcast miniseries.
After living in the Pacific Northwest for over two decades directing a college writing center, she now enjoys cultivating her love of poetry and all things vintage and nautical from the comfort of her New England hometown.
https://www.sandrayannone.com.
===================
June 16, 2025
Frederick Livingston
I grew up accepting the world as it was, pushing my toy lawnmower over graves at the cemetery across the street simply because it was the nearest greenspace. When sent to grandmother’s forest, I spent days ankle deep in creeks stinking of skunk cabbage. I thought I knew everything, so I drank that water and paid with aching hours.
The last kid on my block to learn how to read, to ride a bike, to swim, I would become an educator who believes in freedom. Initially a reluctant hiker, my uncle dragged me up switchbacks until I started spending weeks then months in northwest forests that slowly became a refuge from anxious hardscapes.
Studying environmental science in college, I measured toxins and degrees of warming, but not how to transmute grief into hope. I was wrapped in thorns and told those were my best years. Walking down to the cold sea I was saved by purple starfish on jagged rocks who promised me not everything on Earth is broken.
I followed this glimmer to Himalayan rooftops where I met a sky viscous with stars and wrinkled faces with even brighter eyes. I learned Swahili from farmers rooted in solidarity and uncertainty. When the monsoon rotted my neighbors’ potato crop, when every continent I visited mentioned unraveling weather, when my own home snowed ashes, the sky lost its distance.
Moving to a city, I built fires with children in suburban forests, overwintered as a sock model guiding tourists to breweries by bicycle, led American students back to East Africa to slaughter chickens and drink unpasteurized milk. I wrote more and mumbled into microphones and watched poets pull their heart from their chest, hand it to the audience still beating and dripping.
Eventually I found a university heady with coffee flowers and snakes. I walked food as a bridge between ecology and human needs alongside global dreamers who watered my suspicions of human potential. This abundant jungle questioned the scarcity and misanthropy I had inherited.
At a fog-cursed farm along the California coast I used a butter knife to ease carrot seedlings into salty soil and calculated the minutia of regeneration. Proving to myself hands can heal helped me question the fusion of humans and harm.
Through sitting in silence, I grew closer to karma’s dark muck, the cacophony of shifting selves inside me. I found the macrocosm of my own inborn fear and shame reflected in my culture. It became clear enough: I plant seeds of peace or more violent brambles claim the bare ground.
Often stumbling, I practiced education and poetry as vessels to carry the faith I had gathered. Both use metaphors to invite new ways of seeing and draw power from the speaker’s self-realization. Teaching and writing of Earth was never about convincing anyone, but of giving voice to the parts of myself still committed to beauty.
I moved to the grass-seed capital of the world and became an ecologist bringing native plants into prisons. I do not know where I will grow, but I carry a pocket of seeds, dreams, an ache everywhere… A fruit tree in the body of a wanderer.
Welcome – Grows food, poems and peace
==================
June 23, 2025
Cindy Veach
Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press) a 2022 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal finalist and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press) a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book ‘Must Read,’ and the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate). Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, Salamander and elsewhere. A recipient of the Philip Booth Poetry Prize and Samuel Allen Washington Prize she is poetry co-editor of MER.
Her newest book, Monster Galaxy is due out May of 2025.
Cindy Veach - Home
===================
June 30, 2025
Mark Strohschein
Pushcart Prize-nominated poet Mark Strohschein resides on Whidbey Island in Washington state. His poems have appeared in Flint Hills Review, Bryant Literary Review, and many other journals and anthologies. Forthcoming work will appear in Cirque, Broad River Review and County Lines. His chapbooks, Cries Across Borders, and Sanctuary of Voices will be published in 2025. His chapbook, Cries Across Borders, was a semifinalist for Button Poetry’s 2023 chapbook contest. His unpublished book of poems, We Share the Same Road & Other Poems, earned honorable mention for the 2024 Sally Albiso Award.
===================
July 7, 2025
Duncan Shields
"Duncan Shields is an animator, author, poet, burlesque performer, podcaster and spoken word artist currently living in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and daughter. A Haiku Champion, Nerd Slam Champion, Movie-by-minute co-host, flash fiction author, and former Vancouver Poetry Slam Master. A huge lover of poetry, science fiction, fantasy, comics, and movies. He enjoys the rain, burritos, and he’s happy to be here."
===================
July 14, 2025
Christine Runyon
I live on an island in the Salish Sea. I've had poems published in journals including, Nimrod, Southern Poetry Review, and Seattle Poetry Review. I am a former educator, and I wrote extensively about beekeeping and my beekeeper until he died
===================
July 21, 2025
Alison Peacock
Alison Peacock, a Seattle-based visual and literary artist, has been chasing the poetry of the every day since she was old enough to hold a pen. Peacock honed her observation skills in the magazine industry for 17 years before returning to her true loves, poetry and prose. Her poetry has been featured in Poetry on Buses and seven anthologies, including Examined Life (a Western Washington Poets Network publication), Bards West, and Ghosts, Echoes & Shadows.
===================
July 28, 2025
Dean Anthony Brink
Dean Anthony Brink’s poetry chronicles changing cultural horizons and an impulse to overcome categories—of love, nationality, how we see and are seen. He is a poet, a painter, and a professor of literature and Japanese thought. From Tacoma, Washington, raised by an immigrant mother, he is now an immigrant father himself in Taiwan, enjoying dual nationality. Reflecting the complications of living across cultures in the shadow of geopolitics, his poetry and artwork seek to explore paths to peace by way of social and ecological justice, and the building of greater empathy in the world through a sort of traveling humor. Poems have appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, Ecozon@, Going Down Swinging, New Writing (UK), Nimrod, and many other venues. No Time and Other Poems, plus The Threepenny Space Opera and A Migrant Homecoming is his first collection (Goldfish Press, 2024). He also publishes speculative fiction set in Taiwan and the Pacific Northwest, and is author of several research monographs, including Poetics and Justice in America, Japan, and Taiwan: Configuring Change and Entitlement (Lexington Books, 2021) and Philosophy of Science and the Kyoto School: An Introduction to Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime and Tosaka Jun (Bloomsbury, 2021).
===================
August 4, 2025
Carolyne Lee Wright
Writer. Teacher. Editor. Translator.
Carolyne Wright’s most recent books are Masquerade, a memoir in poetry (Lost Horse Press, 2021) and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse Press, 2017), whose title poem received a Pushcart Prize and appeared in The Best American Poetry 2009. She has nine earlier books and chapbooks of poetry; a ground-breaking anthology, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace (Lost Horse, 2015), which received ten Pushcart Prize nominations; and five award-winning volumes of poetry in translation from Spanish and Bengali—the latest of which is Map Traces, Blood Traces / Trazas de mapa, trazas de sangre (Mayapple Press, 2017), a bilingual sequence of poems by Seattle-based Chilean poet, Eugenia Toledo (Finalist for the 2018 Washington State Book Award in Poetry, and for the 2018 PEN Los Angeles Award in Translation). Carolyne has served as Visiting Poet and professor of Creative Writing at colleges and universities throughout the U.S., including Harvard, Radcliffe, Emory University and the University of Miami. She teaches for Richard Hugo House and for national and international literary conferences and festivals. A Contributing Editor for the Pushcart Prizes, Carolyne lived in Chile and traveled in Brazil on a Fulbright Study Grant; she returned to Brazil in 2018 with an Instituto Sacatar artist’s residency in Bahia. She has also received grants from the NEA, 4Culture, and Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture, among others. A Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to Brazil granted in 2020 and delayed by Covid-19 took her back to Salvador, Bahia, for two months in mid-2022, and for another two months in 2024.
carolynewright.wordpress.com/
===================
August 11, 2025
Tina Schumann
Tina Schumann is the award winning author of four poetry collections, most recently Boneyard Heresies, winner of the 2023 Moon City Press Poetry Award (Missouri State University), forthcoming January 15, 2025; Praising the Paradox (Red Hen Press, 2019) a finalist in the National Poetry Series, Four Way Books Intro Prize, the New Issues Poetry Prize and the Julie Suk Award among others; Requiem. A Patrimony of Fugues (Diode Editions, 2017) winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition and As If (Parlor City Press, 2010) winner of the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize. She is editor of the IPPY-award winning anthology Two Countries. U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents (Red Hen, 2017.) Schumann’s work received the American Poet Prize from The American Poetry Journal, runner-up status in the 2023 annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize from The Missouri Review and finalist status in the 2013 Terrain.org annual poetry contest. Her work has received honorable mentions in The Atlantic, Crab Creek Review and The Allen Ginsberg Editors' Choice Award. She serves as a poetry editor with Wandering Aengus Press, and is a graduate of the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. Her poems have appeared in publications and anthologies since 1999, including The American Journal of Poetry, Ascent, Bear Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, Cimarron Review, Diode, Hunger Mountain Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Nimrod, Parabola, Palabra, Paterson Literary Review, Poetry Daily, Poemeleon, Rattle, Verse Daily, and read on NPR's The Writer's Almanac.
===================
August 18, 2025
Sheila Sondik
Poetry, like visual art, has always been a pathway for me to find meaning and resonance in moments of experience. Bellingham, Washington, where I’ve lived since 2008, has given me much inspiration from its natural beauty and support from a vibrant community of poets. In 2010, I began the practice of writing haiku, tanka, and other Japanese short form poetry. My poetry is published widely in journals and anthologies.
Lighting Up the Duff
A collection of Golden Shovels, published by The Poetry Box 2024
In a Golden Shovel, a line from another poet is hidden, one word at a time, down the right margin of the poem. I’ve always loved word puzzles, so writing each line towards its end-word is an enjoyable challenge for me, full of surprises along the way. The poets quoted in this chapbook are ones I began to read in my twenties and have revisited often ever since.
The 26 short poems in Sheila Sondik’s Lighting Up the Duff are exquisitely crafted homages to her poetic influences, including Linda Pastan, Maxine Kumin, Kenneth Rexroth, and Terrance Hayes, whose invented form, the Golden Shovel, rules. Although they do not ignore the despair endemic to our times—naysayers, ecological disaster, all doom and zoom—the poems sway like an artist between landscape’s dark shapes and the hours of light, steadily urging us toward hope. Attending to these poems, like tending green plants, is food for our souls.
—Bethany Reid, author of The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm
These poems, more magic windows than weighty shovels, offer encouragement, solace, humor, and intimate company . . . I’ve spent grateful hours in this collection’s shimmering grove, and I’ll walk there again.
—Jed Myers, author of Learning to Hold
Fishing a Familiar Pond: Found Poems from The Yearling
Fishing a Familiar Pond is a chapbook of 30 poems “found” by Sheila Sondik by cutting up and rearranging the text of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ classic novel, The Yearling. The poems are an extended meditation on the themes of the novel, including the loss of childhood innocence, our essential bond with the natural world, self-reliance, and the complexity of familial love. Sheila wrote the poems while participating in The Found Poetry Review’s Pulitzer Remix project in April 2013. She was one of 85 poets who posted poems gleaned from the text of Pulitzer Prize-winning novels on the project website.
Fishing a Familiar Pond was published by Egress Studio Press in June 2013. Poet and book designer Anita K. Boyle designed it and hand-sewed the binding.
https://sheilasondik.com/poetry/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1447VmgB7k
===================
August 25, 2025
Shane Guthrie
Shane Guthrie’s poetry has been alternatively called
‘devastating, humorous, radioactive and amusingly domestic’.
Popular topics include Dealing with Low Self-Esteem, Amusing anecdotes about childhood, why love is really actually pretty hard, why love is really actually pretty great. He resides Duvall, Washington most of the time.
===================
September 1, 2025
Kaitlyn DeMeyere
Kaitlyn DeMeyere is a poet gaining momentum performing around the puget sound region. She credits the start of her poetry career to performing at Drunken Owl in 2024. Greg Heilman of The Sound on Stage reviewed the latest Drunken Owl show and said “I found Kaitlyn's poetry to be one of the highlights of the evening, her prose is very well structured, and her delivery is strong. I'd love to hear more of her work.” Her poem, “To The Boys Who Say Your Body, My Choice” is set to be published in the Seattle Journal for Social Justice’s third issue.
Kaitlyn has published a poetry collection titled “I Don’t Want to Die Anymore” with second book, a deluxe edition of the first, “You Will Not Break” coming at the start of the Summer Solstice.
Kaitlyn is the founder of company PIR Studios which under its umbrella hosts website Poetry in Recovery, an artist collective, and podcast Recovery Isn’t Linear, a mental health-based podcast that aims to inspire the listener to ignite a single thought: you can do this.
===================
September 8, 2025
E. Grace Dager
Grace Dager Biography
Evelyn Grace Dager, who goes by Grace, was born in California in 1962. She has lived in numerous states across the country, choosing the PNW as her home. In 1980 she was a scholarship recipient to the University on Miami for art and writing. She has also attended classes at the Corcoran Gallery School of Art in Washington DC. Dager received her BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in 1989.
Dager has had many 'one man' shows and has participated in many group showings. Dager does not limit expression to painting only and works in video, set design, and performance art. She has appeared and worked in film, including working with the renowned Karl Krogstad. Grace creates recycle art and loves making 'cut up' poetry. E Grace Dager was a Board Member at Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) from 2012-2015. She has worked at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) and taught art to terminal cancer patients.
E Grace Dager was listed in the 2017: Who's Who in Visual Art.
Dager currently lives in Everett, Washington. She hosts Gold E Lofts Gallery. Gold ELofts has resumed showings during the Third Thursday Everett Art Walk. Dager currently presents her works at Gallery '33 Stares leading up to her Little Bo’Teek store inside Gold ELofts.
===================
September 15, 2025
A Western Washington Poets Network Anthology
Examined Life: A Western Washington Poets Network Anthology features forty contemporary poets from Bellingham to Vancouver, Washington. Edited by Griffith H. Williams, and printed on an antique letterpress, this handsome chapbook is bound to become an instant collector’s item. Selected from a broad range of spoken word venues, each poet adds a vibrant voice to our current state of poetry.
===================
September 22, 2025
Iz White
Iz White is an enrolled member of the Snoqualmie Tribe and has been writing poetry since 1996. His work blends confessional elements with social justice themes and the rhythmic, lyrical qualities of rap. Growing up homeless in Seattle, Iz learned to thrive in the city’s diverse environment. Thanks to tribal economic growth, he now enjoys financial stability, allowing him to focus on advocacy. Through his gritty storytelling, Iz White raises awareness, evokes empathy, and drives social change, humanizing homelessness while highlighting modern Indigenous identity.
===================
September 29, 2025
Julia McConnell
Julia McConnell is a poet and a librarian. Her manuscript Landlocked was selected by Thomas Lynch as the winner of the 2022 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize (Emerging). Her chapbook, Against the Blue, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016. Julia’s publications include Whale Road Review, Shark Reef, Right Hand Pointing, Plainsongs, Lavender Review, and other journals. Originally from Oklahoma, Julia lives in Seattle with her partner, her poodle, and her Jack Russell Terrier.
Landlocked
Winner of 2022 Wheelbarrow Books Emerging Poetry Prize
Michigan State University
With humor, grace, the perfectly placed earthbound image, and ineffable longing, Julia McConnell writes of “things that seem unbearable” in ways that make them bearable, glorious, necessary, true. These poems reawaken forgotten yearnings, and remind one of the complexities of love and loss, landscapes, and home. Julia McConnell is an important new voice in American poetry, and Landlocked is a stunning debut.
--Rilla Askew, author of Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place
Against the Blue
Finishing Line Press
Every poem moves, but Julia McConnell’s poems harness a particular lightening energy born of a season of storms. From the jangled bracelets of hidden cuts to the translucence of a lantern tree, from the accelerator pressed to the floor to the sound of an icy shovel on the grave, these poems show us how to live in the turbulence. I like how McConnell can declare the poet’s failure to do her job and how she can almost despair of touching the true wound but then finds the perfect lightening rod to keep us alive and moving toward the next horizon.
–Jane Taylor author of “Pencil Light”
===================
October 6, 2025
Catherine Broadwall
Catherine Broadwall is the author of Water Spell (Cornerstone Press, forthcoming 2025), Fulgurite (Cornerstone Press, 2023), Shelter in Place (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), and other collections. Her writing has appeared in Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. She was the winner of the 2023 Paula Svonkin Creative Arts Award and the 2020 COG Poetry Award, as well as a finalist for the poetry categories of the 2021 Mississippi Review Prize and 2021 Pinch Literary Awards. She is an assistant professor at DigiPen Institute of Technology, where she teaches creative writing and literature. Her website is www.catherinebroadwall.com.
https://www.catherinebroadwall.com/
===================
October 13, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All-Open Mic Evening
===================
October 20, 2025
Angelica Urquizo
Angelica Urquizo strives to uncover the magic in the mundane and finds a great deal of inspiration from the natural world, mythology, shadow work and the human experience. She explores her expression mainly through poetry but also through fiction, collage, mixed media and whichever craft project she’s drawn to at a given time. She is earning her MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics and hopes to continue building community in the writing world.
===================
October 27, 2025
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All-Open Mic Evening
===================
November 3, 2025
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All-Open Mic Evening
===================
November 10, 2025
Melanie Reed
Melanie Reed is a writer and visual artist with a creative writing BA from the University of Washington.
Publication credits include prose poetry collection “Wholehearted Half-Truths” (Hiraeth Publishing,
2023) speculative fiction/psychological suspense novella "Every Other Day" (Hiraeth Publishing, 2021),
and 2018 graphic novel/epic poem/soul collage book artwork "The Scrapbook of Dreams" (University of
Washington's Suzzallo Library special collections). She lives in Seattle, Washington.
===================
November 17, 2025
Jory Mickelson
Jory Mickelson is a writer, educator, and storyteller whose first book Wilderness//Kingdom (Floating Bridge Press) won a 2020 High Plains book award in poetry. Their second book All This Divide (Spuyten Duyvil Press) and third book Picturing (End of the Line Press, Canada) are due out in 2024. Their work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Court Green, DIAGRAM, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Jubilat, Mid-American Review, and other journals in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. They are the recipient of an Academy of American Poet’s Prize and have received fellowships from the Dear Butte, The Desert Rat Writers Residency, the Lambda Literary Foundation and The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. They were also a 2022 Jack Straw Writer in the Jack Straw Cultural Center’s Writers Program.
They are a graduate of the University of Idaho’s MFA Program, the former Poetry Editor of 5×5 Lit Mag, and the creator of the blog Literary Magpie that uplifted LGBTQAI+ writers, editors and publishers. They have taught workshops and retreats on a wide variety of topics including writing and wilderness, mindfulness, zines, creative writing, and poetry as a spiritual practice. They live in the Pacific Northwest.
Jory Mickelson’s All This Divide circumambulates through time, excavating the violent layers of lineage: “Our story / one dark furrow.” Mickelson’s images are sharp and evocative, imaginative and felt: “The swallows— // they are combing the clouds’ trailing hair” and “the knotted // hawk you are / pulling from my throat.” Lyrical and sonically curious, these poems press their ears against the hearts of many storytellers. All This Divide asks us to consider our connectedness, one beetle and one stone at a time.
—Jane Wong, author of Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City
===================
November 24, 2025
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All-Open Mic Evening
===================
December 1, 2025
Rachel Mehl
Rachel Mehl lives in Bellingham, WA where she teaches at Bellingham Technical College. She was awarded a Sundress Residency, during which she did the bulk of the work on The Monster High Files. Poems from this collection have appeared in Pink Plastic House, Gingerbread House, Freeze Ray, Crab Creek Review, and Vagabond City Review.