About

Tickets On Sale Now! Go to our Tickets page for full information.

Welcome to the homepage of the Skagit River Poetry Project, the umbrella organization for the Skagit River Poetry Festival, May 20-22, 2010.

We are counting down the days! 

Opening night this year we will be hosting a Gala Poets' Table Dinner Thursday, May 20th, with a poetry sampler for dessert!  All this before "Sherman Alexie Unplugged" -- an evening with the creator of "Smoke Signals" and "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian." THis evening with Sherman may contain adult materials and not susitable for children.

The Skagit River Poetry Project’s mission is to bring together students, teachers, poets and community to celebrate diverse poetic voices in our rural Northwest community. For the past eleven years we have done this. Students are our heart.

Imagine: It is May in La Conner, Washington. Downtown streets are filled with high school students chattering, comparing notes and deciding whom to see next. They are not talking about last week’s date or ball game; they are discussing poetry. And why not? Since September, their teachers and Project resident poets have prepared them for this day.

U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins uses the scoreboard in the La Conner High School gym to create an impromptu haiku and in the intimate upstairs mezzanine of the Next Chapter Bookstore he discusses poetry with area high school seniors; Jimmy Santiago Baca, National Hispanic Heritage Award winning poet and HBO scriptwriter, tells stories of dead bodies in car trunks and his experiences with inmates in Southwest prisons;  Ekiwah Adler-Belendez, an eighteen year old Mexican-born poet with cerebral palsy, agrees to sing one of his poems if a Mount Vernon High School musician/poet will accompany him.

This is magic, this poetry we hear and make during the Skagit River Poetry Project and at the biennial Skagit River Poetry Festival. We have been doing the work of poetry since 1998.Since then, the Project board, made up of school and community volunteers, has honed activities that infuse diverse voices into area classrooms from September through May. We bring poetic voices to our rural community that reflect diverse multi-ethnic and multi-generational populations, voices that these students recognize because they have read and studied them in their textbooks. The Skagit River Poetry Project board believes poetry is a living and breathing language, not something created by dead men and women hundreds of years ago. Our students think so, too. Each school year begins with students and teachers asking administrators when they can schedule poet collaborations. These weeklong residencies, organized by the Skagit River Poetry Project board, puts professional poets in area classrooms. This last year poets were in local schools grades K-14 for more than 75 days and worked with over 3,000 students and teachers. Cuban born poet Jose Kozer, performance poet Kurtis Lamkin and Washington State poet laureate, Samuel Green, are just three examples of poets who spent time in our schools and communities.