​January 8, 2024
Becoming Christopher
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Chris is a writer, spoken word poet, and co-founder of the online creative community “The Heart Union”. He’s performed on the national stage, earning 6th place at the 2022 Canadian Poetry Slam. His personal development and experiences with mental illness bring both passion and inspiration to his writing.
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January 15, 2024
Ryler Dustin
Ryler Dustin is the author of Heavy Lead Birdsong from Write Bloody Publishing, and his forthcoming collection, Trailer Park Psalms, was selected for the University of Pittsburgh Press’s Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. He has represented Seattle on the final stage of the Individual World Poetry Slam, and his poems appear in outlets like American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, Gulf Coast, and The Best of Button Poetry. He holds an MFA from the University of Houston and a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and recently returned to his hometown of Bellingham after living in Michigan, Spain, Jack Kerouac's former home in Orlando, and an off-grid cabin in the Oregon wilderness.
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"Ryler Dustin’s poems achieve a clear and accessible quality, not through the simplicity of idea or emotion (for his poems are rich with surprising language and complex sentiment) but through his remarkable facility with syntax. Indeed, his elegant sentences convey feeling with vulnerability and sensitivity, while achieving what can only be called pure music. The ingenious metaphors in Trailer Park Psalms manage to contain the contradictory and conflicting emotions that come with loss, nostalgia, humor, and the effort to cope with the wounds of a complicated personal history."
- Kwame Dawes
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January 22, 2024
Mark Simpson
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Mark Simpson farms a few acres on Whidbey Island, Washington, raising what the climate and land allow. He has a Ph.D. but has never used it for the thing a Ph.D. is typically used for, although he feels it has informed his life in a way he can't quite put his finger on. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sleet (Pushcart Prize nominee), Broad River Review (Rash Award Finalist), Columbia Journal (Online), Third Wednesday, Backchannels Review, Flyway, and Cold Mountain Review. He is the author of "The Quieting" (2023, Pine Row Press) and the chapbook "Fat Chance" (2013, Finishing Line Press).
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Mark Simpson’s The Quieting is a deer stepping silently out of the wood, just down the road from the neighbor’s meth lab, an area on the map of the past that lives in the present—tornado alley held in a skein of rock n’ roll each night, netted by gridded roads, cowboy hot-rodders, the poet's fond yet weird memories of “Childhood,” always slightly off-kilter: ‘Mother fixed hamburgers and put them on a bun[,]” (where else would she put them?), while father strums an arcane and mournful instrument in the garden of the dead, (“My Continuation), and inmates at the institution learn not to tell staff when they have any thought—scenes in a phantasmagoric Joseph Cornell/Edward Albee shadow box. Simpson’s search takes his readers to where primeval thought dwells and we lean in to listen to the sound of fox fire winking where this poet was lost and found.
Greg Kosmicki, Founder, The Backwaters Press
In Mark Simpson’s debut collection, “The Quieting,” When your run is up, where does it leave you from the poem, “I was Lucky for a Change,” echoes with mortality’s kiss and curse found in places both emotional and physical. From rabbits, those small departures of fur to the Cows off I-5 by the Jesus Saves sign, pastoral redemption is nowhere to be found, only a world where the boy with a crewcut squints into the lens of the future, from the poem “Landscape with my Imprint.” In the end it’s the Nuthatches on the Fir tree that attempts to console both the poet and us, to hope that’s how we go, leaving, whatever from our going takes us.
Daniel Edward Moore, Waxing the Dents
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January 29, 2024
Billy Carty
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Bill Carty 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. Recent poems have appeared in jubilat, Best American Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Iterant, Paperbag, The Kenyon Review, 32 Poems, and other journals. Originally from midcoast Maine, Bill now lives in Seattle where he is Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest and teaches at Edmonds College and the Hugo House.
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Following up his The Believer Book Award nominated debut collection Huge Cloudy, Bill Carty's second poetry volume WE SAILED ON THE LAKE continues the poet's idiosyncratic poetic pursuit, one simultaneously concerned with family and commerce, the natural world and the urban landscape.
WE SAILED ON THE LAKE, Bill Carty's second collection of poetry, consists of lyrics of spiraling awareness. As a signal lamp, unused, mirrors the sky, these poems reflect approaching storms, near-misses, and the violence inherent in nature, country, and economy.
The poems in We Sailed on the Lake are closely observed, finding unexpected affinities within urban and natural environments alike. As one poem states, "to cross the lake / you've got to make each step / pertain the water," and these poems explore relationality in many forms, moving from gentrifying cities to coastal beaches, from the sculptures of antiquity to YouTube searches, cataloging passing days "of which light is the measure."
Alternating longer, occasionally narrative poems with short lyrics, this collection plays with time and ideas of promise, from youth to parenthood, noting how the self negotiates the artifices, be they technological or of self-design, that infringe upon reality and experience.
"Bill Carty is a poet of emotional depth and conceptual range--fluent in both Wordsworth and the sounds of a stranded seal--making poems that can feel simultaneously mythic and modern. This book is a gift, full of large-scale questions about being human ("I'm only as human as the last place I've slept," he writes) delivered with a voice that feels genuine, sharp, and full."--Matthew S. Olzmann
"Being inside a Bill Carty poem is like going on a walk to the corner store for a bag of chips and on the way getting an unexpected natural history lesson whose insights deftly link, sometimes with the hinge of a single word, this history to your life, which of course was never unrelated to begin with, and at once the connections between things sharpen, and perception tilts as you sense, more acutely, the shape of what had settled over you (for how long now?), as the poem speaks the temporary name of this shape aloud just before it shifts its form, and all of this feels somehow normal, and also sacred but not in an overdetermined way, and in the end you get your chips and they are just as good as you hoped. No, they're better."--Ari Banias
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February 5, 2024
Claudia Yaw
Claudia Yaw began writing as a reporter in the Puget Sound area. She left journalism to work outside, where she started writing poetry. Claudia draws inspiration from local rivers and their inclinations, as well as the countless critters that inhabit them. In her 2023 chapbook, “Extra-Slimy Earthworms on an Extra-Round Earth,” Claudia tries to bury herself with the bugs. The book’s visuals are meant to evoke a subterranean wonder.
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February 12, 2024
Daniel Edward Moore
Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island.
His work is forthcoming in Tar River Poetry Journal, Triggerfish
Critical Review and Watershed Review.
He is the author of two chapbooks, “Confessions of a Pentecostal Buddhist,”
and “Boys.” His book “Waxing the Dents,” is from Brick Road Poetry Press.
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February 19, 2024
Steve Sibra
Steve Sibra describes himself as a moderately motivated writer who excels at mediocrity. He grew up on a small farm of four hundred and ninety acres in North Central Montana. Nearly was a town of about a thousand people, hard working folks marching in place as the outside world passed them by.
In time Steve left the farm behind, got an education, moved to the coast and the big city. He started an oddball business involving comic books, enjoyed some success, and once in awhile he wrote some poetry and some fiction. Eventually he got good enough to stick his face in a microphone, good enough to be published in tiny literary journals no one ever read or even heard of. In this manner he became a success of sorts.
He is here tonight to share some of the poems he has written in the recent past. He also has a book to sell you, “SHOES FOR BABY”, if you do not already have a copy. If you don’t care for what you hear tonight, pass on the book. But please give a listen in the meantime, for Steve Sibra has something to say and he thinks while you may not learn much from him, you should at least be no worse off than you were when you got here. And you will be twenty minutes older for the experience.
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February 26, 2024
Jen Broadway
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An Everett Poetry Night regular features for the first time.
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March 4, 2024
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.
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Wholehearted Half-Truths? Here’s one:
“I just couldn’t make these characters work the way I wanted them to. Right now I keep all my rough drafts inside this bottom drawer. Once in a while I hear some noise down there. They’re frustrated, half-finished, want some kind of resolution, but I’m tired. They will have to wait a few more centuries.”
There’s lots more inside…
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March 11, 2024
Nila Phillips
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Hi there! I'm Nila Phillips, or Ami, I'm a coming on sixteen year old indie author and poet~ The poetry I write is all mental health based, targeted at students, young adults, and what's not spoken about enough. I hope to advocate for mental health in the future and encourage other young authors to follow their ambitions. I love writing, it's always been a passion of mine, so I'm more than thrilled to be able to show you my heart and soul in words.
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March 18, 2024
Tom Prince
Thomas R Prince, reads from his book Paper House.
Thomas R Prince is known for his experimental, no budget, multimedia, stage shows in Seattle from the 1980s as well as political theater through the 1990s. His photocopy satire magazine Threadbare Rag was also known during Seattle's grunge era. He has a newly created website, ThreadbareRag.com. Many people know Prince by his pseudonym; hyp3rcrav3. Prince is currently working on a massive
documentary video project with a working title, Red Sky Poetry Theatre: An Alternative Seattle.
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Thomas R Prince reads excerpts of his new book of Poetry, Paper House. Prince is prone to improvising. Paper House was published by nine muses books (sic), an esteemed small press in the Pacific Northwest, managed by publisher and author margareta waterman. Samples of renowned contributing artists Jeff Mihalyo, Grace Dager, and Laurie Ragan Anderson adorn this work. Mostly autodidactic Prince was born in Chicago but moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1973. He has an Associate of Arts degree in Journalism from Seattle Central Community College.
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March 25, 2024
Lennée Reid
Lennée Reid is a Creole, queer, disabled, poet, author, multimedia artist, activist, healer, and single mom on the spectrum, who doesn't like labels. They are published many places including her chapbooks, "Universal State of Mind" and "Qi Woo Mojo Juju". Lennée's spoken word albums, "The Second Coming of Matriarchy", "Crazy Thunder Medicine", and "Awareni", are available online. Lennée featured in "Artist's Among Us", "Dabbing with Washington Artists", and "Lean In Olympia". They are touring with UnityHenge, a social justice black light art installation that has shown at Luminata and numerous festivals. Follow @lenneereid and #TheQueenMystic online, and visit awareni.wordpress.com, for more information.
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April 1, 2024
Celaine Charles
Celaine Charles is a multi-genre author living in the Pacific Northwest. She balances her dual life writing poetry and fiction by night and teaching elementary students by day. On the poetry side, her chapbook Colors Collected (stemming from her Channillo-hosted, online poetry series, Colors) launched in 2019 (Palmetto Publishing Group). Her newest full collection, Three Hearts Stitched, is forthcoming in January 2024 (Egret Lake Books). Previous works include: Tupelo Press 30/30 Challenge Project, Dime Show Review, Nine Muses Poetry, Spillwords Press, The Seattle Star, and The Sunlight Press, among others. Celaine was a poetry finalist in the PNWA Literary Contest, July 2017. On the fiction side, her YA Fantasy, Seam Keepers, debuted May 2021 (The Wild Rose Press), and her holiday paranormal novella, Stained Glass Secrets and Star Wishes, released November 2022 (The Wild Rose Press). Both have received awards. Celaine has many writing projects in the fire, craves allergy-free chocolate, and thrives taking walks in her beautiful Washington State forests. Connect with CC via https://linktr.ee/celainecharles.
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Celaine Charles (celainecharlesauthor.com)
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April 8, 2024
Poets Table Group Reading
Featuring Nan Harty, Michael Magee, Darren Nordlie, Cathy Ross, Ken Shiovitz, and Sue Lovgren-Wade
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Poets Table was formed after a University of Washington certificate of poetry class decided to continue meeting after their class was over. The group has been meeting monthly for more than twenty years to share and critique poetry.
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Nan Harty
is a community poet sharing her poems and listening to other poets in open mic venues throughout the Seattle area. She published The Telling of the Trees in 2021.
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Michael Magee's
poems and plays have been produced and published in the United States, England, and Greece. His latest book is Terra Firma: Sacred Ground.
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Darren L. Nordlie
is the 2022 first place winner in Poetry for EPIC Group Writers and his work has appeared on the Washington state poet laureate website. He serves as vice president of the Redmond Association of Spokenword.
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Cathy Ross's
poems reflect a woman's journey through the middle years and often reveal unexpected layers within an ordinary life. Her latest book is What the Tulips Said.
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Ken Shiovitz,
former animal behaviorist, real estate broker, and poetry venue host, has published birdsong research, essays, and poetry. Books are Rules of the Universe and Illuminating the Void.
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Sue Lovgren-Wade
is a poet from Woodinville, Washington who writes what might best be described as miscellaneous poetry, ranging from centipedes to PTSD. Publishing seems to be a new adventure on the horizon.
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April 15, 2024
David Post
David Post has been a featured reader at Poetry Is Everything in Kirkland, at Downtown Bellevue Poetry Reading in Bellevue, at Duvall Poetry in Duvall and at PoetsWest venues in Seattle, Bothell and Woodinville. He has been a guest reader for over ten years at African American Writers Alliance venues in Seattle and Burien and has read at open mics in Auburn, Bellevue, Edmonds, Everett, Kenmore, Lake Forest Park, Olympia. Redmond, Renton, Seattle and Tacoma. He was the last emcee for PoetsWest readings at Green Lake Library in Seattle; is co-emcee for Tsuga Poetry Group in Bothell and is an admin for Western Washington Poets Network's Facebook page. He is a member of The Notion Club, a Christian writers group in Seattle. His poem "Brown Shoes" was published in 2021 in the anthology "Poetic Impressions" by East Point West Press and in 2024 his poem “Love Alone” will be published in “An Examined Life: An Anthology of Western Washington Poets Network” by East Point West Press. He has a son and a grandson who live in Ballard.
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April 22, 2024​
Subhaga Crystal Bacon
Subhaga Crystal Bacon is a Queer poet living in rural northcentral Washington on unceded Methow land. She is the author of four collections of poetry. Her latest book, Transitory is the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry, from BOA Editions, and was listed in the Publisher’s Weekly’s Top 50 Books of 2023.
She’s also the author of Surrender of Water in Hidden Places, 2023, winner of the Red Flag Poetry Chapbook Prize, Blue Hunger, Methow Press, 2020, and Elegy with a Glass of Whiskey, winner of the A. Poulin New Poetry America Prize, BOA Editions, 2004.
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A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, Subhaga is a teaching artist working in schools and libraries as well as with private students. Her work appears or is forthcoming in a variety of print and online journals including Diode, the Bellevue Literary Review, Indianapolis Review, Rise Up Review, Ghost City Review. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing: Poetry, from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
subhaga crystal bacon – Trust in Being
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April 29, 2024​
Jenny Liou
Jenny Liou (born 1983) is an English professor at Pierce College and a retired professional cage fighter. She lives and writes in Covington, Washington.
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May 6, 2024
Yvonne Higgins Leach
Yvonne Higgins Leach’s second collection of poems In the Spaces Between Us was published last fall by Kelsay Books. Her first collection Another Autumn was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2014. She spent decades balancing a career in communications and public relations, raising a family, and pursuing her love of writing poetry. Her latest passion is working with shelter dogs. She splits her time living on Vashon Island and in Spokane, Washington. For more information, visit www.yvonnehigginsleach.com
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May 13, 2024
Matthew Lane Brouwer
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May 20, 2024
Kelsey Taylor
Kelsey Taylor is a former figure skater with a fear of falling who has traded in her figure skates for poetry slams and leotards for leather jackets. When she’s not working her food service job, she is busy with her untitled hybrid memoir project based around her experiences of growing up with an alcoholic family member.
She currently splits her time between Marysville, WA and Portland OR. Sometimes the Silence Kills Me, her second poetry collection was released during the pandemic with the help of her cat Olivia, who loves to assist by laying on the keyboard.
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May 27, 2024
Jude Stratis
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A dynamic emerging poet who has developed a distinctive voice.
A poet who is socially active and the cause they support often become poetic subjects.
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June 3, 2024
Chris Jarmick
Christopher J. Jarmick’s poems have appeared in newspapers, literary journals and online including: Seattle Weekly, Cambridge Book Review, Chrysanthemum, Raven Chronicles, Real Change, Pedestal, South District Journal, in anthologies including Many Trails of the Summit, and 2013’s RASP Anthology. His essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in Rattle, Rain Taxi, Reader, Brutarian, Los Angeles Times, Film Journal, World of Entertainment, Military Times and elsewhere. His latest collection of poetry is Ignition: Poem Starters, Septolets, Statements and Double Dog Dares (2010), and the limited edition CD: Radio Mysteries: Aural Anxieties (produced by Kevin Gershan and featuring Los Angeles poet Michael C. Ford;) was released in 2009. For more than 12 years he has curated and hosted regularly scheduled poetry readings throughout the Seattle/Puget Sound region including the 2nd Wednesdays Take a Poem From Your Heart Series at Park Place Books in Kirkland, Washington (September through June). His blog is PoetryIsEverything (google it). He’s a former board member of PEN USA, president of PEN-WA and former executive vice president of the Washington Poets Association. His blog is called Poetry is Everything (Google it). Chris was born on the East Coast, moved to Los Angeles and for nearly 20 years wrote screenplays and did script doctor work for several films. He also produced award winning PBS documentaries, segments for programs like Entertainment Tonight, Hard Copy and others. He re-located to the Seattle area in 1994, continued writing, and became a financial advisor working at Morgan Stanley, then Waddell and Reed.​
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June 10, 2024
Cynthia French
This will be a rare opportunity to experience the poetry of Cynthia French, who will be relocating to the east coast.
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Cynthia French is an artist and writer living in Bellingham, WA. As a veteran of the poetry slam scene, she has performed her way around the country and into Canada and across the pond to England, where she was the only non-rhyming poet to make it to the 2nd round of the Swindon Festival of Literature's poetry slam. Often humorous, frequently cynical, wholeheartedly Aquarius. Her pen of choice is the Uni-Ball Vision Elite in every color except royal blue.
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​There will be a guest host.
Duane will be featuring out of state.
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June 17, 2024
Kris Hall
Kris Hall (aka Barracuda Guarisco; C.C. Hannett) is the author of several collections of poetry and hybrid works published by Spuyten Duyvil, Vegetarian Alcoholic, Really Serious Literature, Feral Dove Books, Voice Lux, Alien Buddha, and Chat Rooms. Widely published in journals, online and in print, they have also been nominated for Best Microfiction and The Elgin Award. They currently reside in Everett, WA.
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June 24, 2024
Jeremy Voigt
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Jeremy Voigt is the author of the book Something to Carry Home and Not Kill, forthcoming from Elixir Press, and two chapbooks: Neither Rising Nor Falling (Finishing Line press) and The Invisible Heart of Everything (Floating Bridge Press). His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Gulf Coast, Post Road, Willow Springs, BPJ, and other magazines. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, was featured on The Writer’s Almanac, and was runner up for the 2019 Discovery Poetry Prize. He is a high school English teacher and adjunct professor. He lives by a large lake in western Washington with his wife and three children.
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July 1, 2024
S. Salazar
Raised in the Pacific Northwest, S. Salazar has always felt at home in the mountains. As an English teacher, she strove to show students that success isn’t defined by background.
S. is published in Harpur Palate, The Acentos Review, Booth Journal, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She's an MFA candidate currently juggling multiple poetry and young adult fiction manuscripts that explore generational trauma, identity, Latinx heritage, diaspora, and mental health. Her debut poetry collection, Raíces, Relics, and Other Ghosts was published by Kelsay Books in 2023.
When she isn’t writing, she can be found hiking with loved ones, talking to her parrot, Gizmo,
and gushing over every dog she sees.
About — S. SALAZAR (writessalazar.com)
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July 8, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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July 15, 2024
Julene T. Weaver
Julene Tripp Weaver (formerly June Arlene Eggler) has her B.A. in Creative Writing from the City University of New York. She chose Hunter College as her main school so she could study with Audre Lorde. In the CUNY program she studied with Joan Larkin at Brooklyn College.
She moved to Seattle in 1989 and enrolled at The Leadership Institute of Seattle, an experiential, self-assessment learning program. She received her Masters in Applied Behavioral Science, orientated in Family of Origin therapy, in 1992. Since then she worked for 18 years in HIV/AIDS services, which included medical case management and adherence counseling.
Her poem, “death walk,” won third prize for poetry from the Unfinished Works Competition sponsored by AIDS Services Foundation Orange County. She traveled to California to read her poem on World AIDS Day, December 1, 2006, at their candlelight vigil and art opening.
Since November 2002, when she studied fiction writing with Tom Spanbauer and his team of Dangerous Writers TM, she also writes fiction and creative nonfiction.
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www.julenetrippweaver.com​​
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July 22, 2024
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.
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July 29, 2024
Examined Life; 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. Forty pages for forty poets, available June 15, 2024. Price $20.
So far, six poets have signed up to participate in the reading. In alphabetical order, they are:
Terry Busch, Janaka Hobbs, Christopher J. Jarmick, David Post, Julie Robinett, and Griffith H. Williams.
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August 5, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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August 12, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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August 19, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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August 26, 2024
THE MADRONA PROJECT #6:
The Empty Bowl Cookbook
In its sixth issue, The Madrona Project delivers a literature of sustainability. A banquet of writers and artists addresses the ways our species sustains itself with ancestral foods and recipes, adheres to earth’s cycles, and protects the habitat of our food sources. Here, poems, prose and art exemplify human successes and failures, and offer up some darn good recipes. Tim McNulty remembers simple sustenance while hiking canyons, mountains and coastlines of the West. Carly Goodkind follows her husband to Morocco for delicious harira. The late Don Kruse’s poem rhapsodizes Skagit Valley strawberries. John Lane looks at grief through the foods offered after a funeral. There is humor in the clash of food ways with friends as told by Carlos Reyes. And Finn Wilcox illustrates the art of finding good food in the garbage. Other well-known writers here include Sam Green, Susan Rich, Clemens Starck, Jeremy Voigt, Lorna Crozier, Charles Goodrich, Jane Hirschfield, Kim Stafford, Alice Derry, as well as many new voices.
Readers include:
Morgan Randall
Suan Landgraf
Anne Basye
Deborrah Corr
Georgia Johnson
and more
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September 2, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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September 9, 2024
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.
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September 16, 2024
David Johnson
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David has been writing and recording music since 2003, performing since 2012, and he formed a duo with Christopher Gray in 2014. Christopher plays both electric and upright bass. His intuitive melodies add stories of their own to David's material. Colleagues who have worked with David in the studio have described his music as "vulnerable" (Conrad Uno of Seattle's former Egg Studios). Heartfelt, offbeat and occasionally visceral, his music lays his heart bare. His style has been likened to Nick Drake, Joan Baez, Elliot Smith, etc. With material that brings light to his own experiences while leaving room for listeners to draw parallels of their own, hearing his music is a unique experience.
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September 23, 2024
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Dario Cvencek
Dario Cvencek was born in former Yugoslavia. He started writing poetry in high school, inspired by his growing up during the Bosnian War in the 1990s, and his subsequent experiences as a refugee of war and an immigrant in Germany and United States. In his poems, he explores the themes of war, trauma, search for meaning, nature, love, pain, healing, self-discovery, and growth. He lives and works in Seattle, WA.
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September 30, 2024
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Tana Jean Welch
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Tana Jean Welch is the author of Latest Volcano, winner of the 2015 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in the New York Times, the Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, the Colorado Review, and other national literary journals. Born and raised in Fresno, California, she currently lives in Tallahassee where she is associate professor of medical humanities at the Florida State University College of Medicine.
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In Parachutes Descending follows the speaker’s decision to leave her Bostonian husband for Jane, a San Franciscan artist, while charting the sensual consequences of our bodily entanglements. These poems capture personal desires fermenting among current earthly cataclysms, including climate change and global capitalism. In doing so, this collection asks us to think inclusively about the ways we become with all humans and nonhumans, all of us—past, present, and future—intimately entwined with others.
“The poems of In Parachutes Descending float between fact and possibility, destruction and passion, introspection and challenge, between the bodies we create together—lovingly, disastrously, rupturingly, rapturously—and the bodies we dwell in alone.”
—Lauren Russell, author of What’s Hanging on the Hush and Descent
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October 7, 2024
Kevin J Craft
Kevin Craft lives in Seattle and directs the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College. For two decades he served as a faculty director of the University of Washington’s Writers in Rome Program. His books include Solar Prominence, selected by Vern Rutsala for the Gorsline Prize from Cloudbank Books (2005), and Vagrants & Accidentals, published in the Pacific Northwest Poets Series of the University of Washington Press (2017). He has received fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, MacDowell Colony, the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), the Camargo Foundation (France), 4Culture, The Jack Straw Cultural Center, PLAYA, and Artist Trust. In 2022 he was Artist in Residence at Olympic National Park, and often volunteers as a lookout steward in the North Cascades. Editor of Poetry Northwest from 2009 – 2016, he now serves as Executive Editor of Poetry NW Editions.
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Traverse, Craft’s third collection explores the music, the miscues, the hidden forces and quirks of circumstance that constitute a human life. It’s a book of family origins and discovery, an adoptee’s journey toward self-knowledge, a son’s journey toward becoming (and losing) a parent, navigating the cross-currents of estrangement and acceptance, ecological peril and ambiguous loss. It is also a history of walking, of moving through the world at human speed. As such, Traverse maps a new understanding of familial relation, from birth kin to chosen clan, from missing link to known donor children, arcing toward a wider embrace of the generational and archetypal substrates that inform identity, singular and plural alike. What kin are you to me? Craft asks, sifting through uncertainties, genealogies, and the geological record to find a deeper connection to both human and non-human nature, piecing together, step by step, a vision of expansive love and the fragile ecology in which our lives subsist.
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October 14, 2024
Mark Strohschein
Mark Strohschein is an educator and poet who lives on Whidbey Island. His work is forthcoming in Main Street Rag and The Aerial Perspective. His poems have appeared in Flint Hills Review, Barren Magazine, Lips Poetry Magazine, The Milk House, Red Fern Review, The Big Windows Review and various anthologies.
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October 21, 2024
Sibyl James
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Sibyl James has published 12 books of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, including The Grand Piano Range (most recent poetry), In China with Harpo and Karl (about her year teaching in China) and The Adventures of Stout Mama (short stories that cured one woman of post-partum blues), plus The Further Adventures of Stout Mama (including "Bad Hormone Day"). Much of her nonfiction work is concerned with making other cultures accessible to a US audience, including her Vietnam memoir, Ho Chi Minh's Motorbike, and her account of a year in West Africa, The Last Woro Woro to Treichville.
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October 28, 2024
Jane Alynn
Jane Alynn is a Pacific Northwest poet and photographic artist who, for over 40 years, has found inspiration in the natural world. Self-educated she studied the work of masters, such as Minor White, Paul Caponigro, and early twentieth-century pictorialists; and she studied with gifted teachers. For a number of years, she led creative vision workshops in Seattle, the Southwest, and B.C. Among her awards, she was selected in 2014 as a finalist in Photolucida’s Critical Mass. Her photographs are exhibited regularly and are collected at Western Washington University; the New Mexico History Museum, Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, Pinhole Collection, in Santa Fe, NM.
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November 4, 2024
​Julie Robinett
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November 11, 2024
PETER LUDWIN
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Peter Ludwin is the recipient of a Literary Fellowship from Artist Trust and
the W.D. Snodgrass Award for Endeavor and Excellence in Poetry. His first
book, A Guest in All Your Houses, was published in 2009 by Word Walker
Press. His second collection is Rumors of Fallible Gods, a two-time finalist
for the Gival Press Poetry Award that was published in 2013 by Presa Press.
His third book, Gone to Gold Mountain, was published in 2016 by Moon-
Path Press and subsequently nominated for a Washington State Book Award.
In 2017 the Before Columbus Foundation nominated it for an American
Book Award. His most recent manuscript, Where the Silver Bullet Lies, was
a three-time finalist for the Wandering Aengus Press Book Award, and will
be published by Trail to Table Books in October, 2024.
A fourteen-year participant in Mexico’s San Miguel Poetry Week, where he
studied under such noted poets as Mark Doty, Tony Hoagland, Joseph
Stroud and Robert Wrigley, Ludwin won The Comstock Review’s 2016
Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award, judged by Marge Piercy. That same
year he was the Second Place winner of the Paulann Petersen Poetry Award,
and a finalist in poetry for both the Tucson Festival of Books Literary
Awards and the Pangaea Poetry Prize. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee,
he received nominations in 2016 from MoonPath Press and Connecticut
River Review.
His work has appeared in many journals, including Atlanta Review, The
Bitter Oleander, The Comstock Review, Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod,
North American Review and Prairie Schooner, to name a few. A world
traveler who has journeyed by canoe to visit remote Indian families in the
Amazon Basin of Ecuador, hiked in the Peruvian Andes, thumbed for rides
in Greece, bargained for goods in the markets of Marrakech and Istanbul and
survived debilitating illness in China and Tibet, he is also accomplished on
acoustic blues guitar and autoharp. He lives in Kent, Washington, where he
is currently writing a memoir/autobiography about growing up during the
Cold War and coming of age in the counterculture of the 1960s and ‘70s.
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November 18, 2024
Cindy Veach
Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind, (CavanKerry Press), a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal, Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), named a Paterson Poetry Prize finalist and a Massachusetts Center for the Book 'Must Read' and the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate Press). Her poems have appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, AGNI, Chicago Review, Prairie Schooner, Sugar House Review, Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review, Diode, The Journal, Nimrod, North American Review, Verse Daily, Salamander and elsewhere. Her poem, "This Patch Where the Light Cannot Reach," was selected by Mary Ruefle for the Philip Booth Poetry Prize (Salt Hill Journal). Her sonnet crown, "Witch Kitsch," was selected by Marilyn Nelson for the Samuel Washington Allen Prize (New England Poetry Club). Cindy received an MFA from the University of Oregon where she was a Graduate Teaching Fellow and an assistant poetry editor for Northwest Review. She is co-poetry editor of MER (Mom Egg Review).
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November 25, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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December 2, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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December 9, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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December 16, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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December 23, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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December 30, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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See you in 2025
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