Sherman J. Alexie Jr. is a novelist, screenwriter and stand-up comic – but first of all, he’s a poet. He grew up on the

Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. Despite struggles with childhood illnesses, he began reading serious literature at an early age. He excelled at writing, and with encouragement from poetry teacher Alex Kuo , he found his new path.

Shortly after graduating from Washington State University with a B.A. in American Studies, Alexie received the Washington State Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship in 1991 and the National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 1992. Not long after receiving his second fellowship, and just one year after he left WSU, his first two poetry collections, The Business of Fancydancing and I Would Steal Horses, were published.

Known for his deep well of humor and sharp wit, Alexie made his stand-up debut at the Foolproof Northwest Comedy Festival in Seattle in April 1999. He has been featured on “Politically Incorrect”; “60 Minutes II”; and “NOW with Bill Moyers,” for which he wrote a special segment on insomnia and his writing process called "Up All Night.” In October 2008., he went head-to-head with Stephen Colbert on “The Colbert Report.”

Alexie's most recent books are Flight, released in April 2007 by Grove/Atlantic, the National Book Award-winning The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, published in September 2007 by Little, Brown, and “War Dances,” a mix of poems and short stories published by Grove Press. Hanging Loose Press released a new collection of his poems, Face, in March 2009.

Sherman Alexie lives in Seattle, Washington, with his wife and two sons.

www.fallsapart.com

Elizabeth Austen spent her teens and twenties working as an actor and director. After a six-month solo walkabout in the Andes region of South America, she began writing poetry. Since then, her poems have appeared online and in journals including Verse Daily, Willow Springs, Bellingham Review, Swivel, the Seattle Review, DMQ Review, and the anthologies Poets Against the War and In the Telling. She served as the Washington “roadshow” poet for 2007, giving readings and workshops in rural areas around the state. In 2009, she received a commission from Richard Hugo House for their annual Literary Series. Her author interviews and recordings of Seattle-area poetry readings can be heard on KUOW, 94.9, public radio, and an audio CD of her poems (“skin prayers”) is available at elizabethausten.org. She makes her living as a communications specialist at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

Mary Cornish was a writer and illustrator of children’s books who decided to explore new literary forms after developing a progressive illness in her drawing hand. At the age of 50, she went back to school at Sarah Lawrence College in creative non-fiction. A professor recognized something she hadn’t: “Are you sure you’re not a poet?” the teacher asked. Cornish realized she was, and had always been.

She continued her studies at Stanford University, on a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and has published works in such prestigious publications as Poetry magazine, Poetry Northwest, and the New England Review. She currently teaches creative writing at Western Washington University. Former national poet laureate Billy Collins was mentor for her thesis. He writes of her work: “…her poems can braid together sight and feeling so as to produce a delicacy rarely found in contemporary poetry.”

She lives in Bellingham, Washington.

One of Canada’s most popular poets, Lorna Crozier is a native of Saskatchewan who now lives on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. A poet of keen insight and ready wit, she teaches writing at the University of Victoria, where she is a Distinguished Professor and the Chair of the Department of Writing.

Her first collection, Inside in the Sky, was published in 1976. Since then, she has authored 14 books of poetry. Her Inventing the Hawk, published in 1992, received all three of Canada’s national poetry awards: the Governor General's Award, the Pat Lowther Award for the Best Book of Poetry by a Canadian Woman and the Canadian Authors’ Association Award for poetry. In 2005, she read at a command performance for Queen Elizabeth II to celebrate Saskatchewan’s centennial.

She lives on Vancouver Island with her poet husband, Patrick Lane.

www.lornacrozier.ca

Dublin-born Tony Curtis studied literature at Essex University and Trinity College Dublin. A poet of big heart and lyric grace, he is the author of many warmly received collections of poetry, the latest being The Well in the Rain: New and Selected Poems (Arc, 2006). Other collections include The Shifting of Stones, Three Songs of Home, Behind the Green Curtain, and This Far North.

Curtis, a favorite visitor in the Skagit River Poetry Project’s poets-in-schools program, is currently working on An Elephant Called Rex: an A to Z of Poems for Children. One of the most popular poets of his generation, Curtis has been awarded The National Poetry Prize and is a member of Aosdana, the Irish academy of the arts.

He lives in Dublin, Ireland.

A remarkable young writer, Matthew Dickman won American Poetry Review’s Honickman First Book Prize for his work All-American Poem in 2008. The book, chosen by Tony Hoagland and published by Copper Canyon Press, plumbs the ecstatic nature of daily life, where pop culture and sacred longing go hand in hand. The work is expansive and intimate, with a fluid, unstoppable energy.

“We turn loose such poets in our culture so that they can provoke the rest of us into saying everything on our minds,” said Tony Hoagland, judge for the American Poetry Review prize.

Dickman’s poems have appeared in a wide range of publications, including The New Yorker and Tin House. He has received fellowships for his work from the Michener Center for Writers, the Vermont Studio Centers and the Fine Arts Work Center. Dickman has been profiled in Poets and Writers and The New Yorker; with his twin brother, poet Michael Dickman.

He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Michael Dickman, twin brother of poet Matthew Dickman, began writing poems "after accidentally reading a Neruda ode." His first collection is The End of the West (2009) from Copper Canyon Press. Poet Franz Wright calls him a young poetic genius with a "style like no one else's": "With the utmost gravity as well as a kind of cosmic wit, Michael Dickman's poems give a voice to the real life sorrows, horrors, and indomitable joys which bind together the vast human family."

Dickman was born and raised in the Lents neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. He has received fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, the Fine Arts Work Center and the Vermont Studio Center. He won the 2008 Narrative Prize. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Field, Tin House, Narrative Magazine and others. He has been profiled in Poets and Writers and The New Yorker, with his brother Matthew.

Michael Dickman, who lives in Portland, has been awarded a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton for 2009-2010.

Chris Dombrowski is the author of By Cold Water, a collection of poems, and Fragments with Dusk in Them, a chapbook.  His poems have appeared in numerous journals including Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Poetry, and Orion, and have been anthologized in Joyful Noise and Making Poems.  The recipient of a writing fellowship from the UCROSS Foundation, and the Intro Award from the Associated Writing Programs, he has taught poetry at the University of Montana and Interlochen Center for the Arts, where he served as writer-in-residence.  A native of Michigan, Dombrowski has also worked as a freelance writer, poet-in-the-schools and river-guide. Chris  currently lives with his family in Missoula, Montana .

Lorraine Ferra, a native of the San Francisco Bay area, was a nun in California for seven years, majoring in theology and education. After leaving the convent, she pursued seminars in poetry and creative writing under the directorship of Robert Mezey at the University of Utah.

Ferra has served as a visiting poet in schools throughout the country. Her poems, prose, and translations of Portuguese poetry have appeared in journals such as Bellowing Ark, CutBank, the Florida Review and Quarterly West.

She is the author of Eating Bread, a chapbook of eighteen poems, and A Crow Doesn’t Need A Shadow: A Guide To Writing Poetry From Nature.

She lives in Port Townsend, Washington.

Samuel Green was born in Sedro-Woolley, Washington, and raised in the nearby fishing and mill town of Anacortes. After four years in the military, including service in Antarctica and South Vietnam, he attended college under the Veterans Vocational Rehabilitation Program, earning degrees from Highline Community College and Western Washington University (B.A. & M.A.). A 34-year veteran of the Poetry-in-the-Schools program, he has taught in literally hundreds of classrooms around Washington State. He has also served seven winter terms as Distinguished Visiting Northwest Writer at Seattle University, as well as seven summers in Ireland. Poems have appeared in hundreds of journals, including Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Poet & Critic. Among his ten collections of poems are Vertebrae: Poems 1972-1994 (Eastern Washington University Press) and The Grace of Necessity (Carnegie-Mellon University Press), which won the 2008 Washington State Book Award for Poetry. He has lived for 27 years off the grid on remote Waldron Island off the Washington coast in a log house he built himself. He is, with his wife, Sally, Co-Editor of the award-winning Brooding Heron Press, which produces fine, letterpressed volumes. In December, 2007, he was named by Governor Christine Gregoire to a two-year term as the first Poet Laureate for the State of Washington, and in January of 2009, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.

Jean Hallingstad was born and raised in Anacortes and lives with her family in a house her grandparents built.  She says,” I have an overgrown garden full of ducks & chickens—but no slugs, thanks to the ducks!  I’m obsessed by mushrooms in October, and in February I’m obsessed by tomatoes, so there’s a lot of that sort of thing in my poetry.” She   received her MFA from Warren Wilson College and is published in several magazines and in the Eleven Skagit Poets Anthology.  She has taught high school Spanish for the last twenty-four years at Anacortes High School and has a small farm with a lemon orchard in Ecuador, where she and her family goes whenever they can. 

Terrance Hayes was born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1971. He is the author of Lighthead (2010), Wind in a Box (2006), which was named one of the best 100 books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly and was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Muscular Music (1999), which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Hip Logic (2002), which won the National Poetry Series Open Competition and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the James Laughlin Award.

About his work, Cornelius Eady has said: "First you'll marvel at his skill, his near-perfect pitch, his disarming humor, his brilliant turns of phrase. Then you'll notice the grace, the tenderness, the unblinking truth-telling just beneath his lines, the open and generous way he takes in our world."

Other honors include a profile on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, a Whiting Writers Award, three Best American Poetry selections, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a professor of creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his family.

Lucas Howell received his MFA from the University of Idaho in 2007 and has had poems published in The Atlantic, Poetry, Slate.com, and other publications. His first chapbook, The Lonesome Crowded West, was released by Finishing Line Press.

Howell grew up in Tacoma, Washington, with a “hard-working and hard-playing family,” and spent time fishing, backpacking, and doing physical labor and mechanical work in Big Sky country. A student of nature, he can turn grit and sweat into art, meditating on gutting fish by a riverbank, hauling in grain from half-cut fields or the “steely purl” of pumping oil rigs.

A member with Teach For America, Howell is currently teaching fourth-grade language arts at St. Helena Central Elementary in Greensburg, Louisiana.

Ted Kooser is one of the nation’s most highly regarded poets and served as the United States poet laureate consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. During his second term he won the Pulitzer Prize for his book of poems, Delights and Shadows (Copper Canyon Press, 2004). Poetry Daily commented on the award: “Throughout a long and distinguished writing career, he has worked toward clarity and accessibility, making poetry as fresh and spontaneous as a good watercolor.”

A Presidential Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Kooser is the author of twelve full-length collections of poetry. Over the years his works have appeared in many periodicals including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and Antioch Review. Koosers’ poems are included in textbooks and anthologies used in both secondary schools and college classrooms across the country. He has received two NEA fellowships in poetry and many other national and regional awards.

Born in 1939 in Ames, Iowa, Kooser earned a B.S. at Iowa State University in 1962 and an M.A. at the University of Nebraska in 1968. He has received several honorary doctorates. He is a former vice-president of Lincoln Benefit Life Company, where he worked for many years.

He lives on an acreage near the town of Garland, Nebraska, with his wife, Kathleen Rutledge, and their dogs, Alice and Howard. He has a son, Jeff, and a granddaughter, Margaret.

www.tedkooser.net

Patrick Lane is a prolific poet, with more than twenty books to his name. He has received most of Canada's top literary awards, including the Governor General's Award and two National Magazine Awards. His poetry appears in all major Canadian anthologies of English literature.

Lane’s poetry often deals with humanity's harsh treatment of the earth, as well as the harsh realities of human interrelations. His memoir, titled There is a Season, received the 2005 British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction award.

He lives near Victoria, British Columbia, with his wife, poet Lorna Crozier.

www.patricklane.ca

Tim McNulty is a Northwest poet, essayist and nature writer. He is the author of two collections of poetry, In Blue Mountain Dusk (Pleasure Boat Studio) and Pawtracks (Copper Canyon Press). He has also published nine chapbooks, including Some Ducks: A Cycle of Poems for My Daughter (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2009), Cloud Studies (Empty Bowl, 2008), Through High Still Air: A Season at Sourdough Mountain (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2005), Last Year's Poverty (Brooding Heron Press), and Reflected Light: Poems on Paintings by Morris Graves (Tangram).

McNulty’s award-winning books on nature include The Art of Nature, Washington's Wild Rivers, Olympic National Park: A Natural History, Washington's Mount Rainier National Park and Grand Canyon: Window on the River of Time. Tim has received the Washington Governor's Writers Award and the National Outdoor Book Award.

He lives with his family in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains.

The Irish Times describes Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort as a “rising star of the international poetry world.” Mort is famed throughout Europe -- and now in the U.S. -- for her vibrant reading performances. Born in Minsk, Belarus (former Soviet Union) in 1981, she made her American debut in 2008 with a poetry collection Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press), co-translated by the husband-and-wife team of Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Pultizer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright.

There is an urgency and vitality to Mort’s poems. The New Yorker writes: “Mort strives to be an envoy for her native country, writing with almost alarming vociferousness about the struggle to establish a clear identity for Belarus and its language.” Library Journal described Mort's vision as ”visceral, wistful, bittersweet and dark,“ and Midwest Book Review calls Factory of Tears ”a one-of-a-kind work of passion and insight.“

Mort, who reads her poems aloud in both Belarusian and English, received the Crystal of Vilenica award in Slovenia in 2005 and the Burda Poetry Prize in Germany in 2008. She has been a resident poet at Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin, Germany, and has received a fellowship at Gaude Polonia, Warsaw. Her English translations of Eastern-European poets are presented in the anthology, New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008). Factory of Tears has been translated into Swedish and German.

Mort has the distinction of being the youngest person to ever be on the cover of Poets and Writers magazine. She lives in Washington, D.C.

A resident of the Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California, William O’Daly is a poet, translator, and fiction writer. His published works include eight books of the late and posthumous poetry of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day, The Separate Rose, Winter Garden, The Sea and the Bells, The Yellow Heart, The Book of Questions, The Hands of Day, and World’s End), and a chapbook of his own poems, The Whale in the Web. O’Daly was a finalist for the 2006 Quill Award in Poetry for Still Another Day and was profiled on NBC’s The Today Show. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, he has worked as a literary and technical editor, a college professor, and an instructional designer; his poems, translations, essays, and reviews have been published in a wide range of magazines and anthologies. He is a board member of Poets Against War and co-founder of Copper Canyon Press. With co-author Han-ping Chin, he recently completed a historical novel, This Earthly Life, based on the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Alicia Ostriker, a poet and critic, has published twelve volumes of poetry, including No Heaven and The Book of Seventy.  Her anti-war sequence The Mother/Child Papers was recently re-issued.  Her most recent critical work is Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic.

Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Ontario Review, The Nation and many other journals and anthologies. Twice a National Book Award finalist, she has also received awards from the Poetry Society of America, the San Francisco Poetry Center and the Paterson Poetry Center.

Ostriker lives in Princeton, is Professor emerita of English at Rutgers University, and currently teaches in the low-residency Poetry MFA program of Drew University.

www.rci.rutgers.edu/~ostriker/home.htm

Nancy Pagh is the author of No Sweeter Fat (Autumn House Press, 2007) and After (Floating Bridge Press, 2008), and her poems appear in many publications, including Crab Creek Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Fourth River, The Bellingham Review, O magazine, and When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poems by American Women.  She is the recipient of an Artist Trust Fellowship and has been the D. H. Lawrence Fellow at the Taos Summer Writers Conference.  She teaches at Western Washington University.

Susan Rich spent her twenties living in England, Scotland, and West Africa. Her thirties were lived in Bosnia Herzegovina, Gaza, and South Africa before setting down in Seattle at forty. Working as a bartender, Peace Corps Volunteer, Electoral Supervisor, Red Cross famine relief worker and master pizza maker has all influenced Susan’s poems that often focus on themes of travel, food, and the pressing issues of war, of what it means to live in this world.

It wasn’t until she was thirty-four that Susan decided to believe in herself as a poet. She quit her job with Amnesty International, traveled across the United States, and began the MFA Program at the University of Oregon. This was the start of her love affair with the Pacific Northwest. This was when she fully embraced poetry and The Cartographer’s Tongue / Poems of the World (White Pine Press, 2000) which won the PEN Poetry Award and the Peace Corps Writers Award soon followed. Cures Include Travel (White Pine Press, 2006) came next with a poem that was inspired by the 2004 Skagit River Poetry Festival “At the Corner of Washington and Third” which is now a poetry broadside by peasandcuespress. Other prestigious publications include the Alaska Quarterly Review, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, and The Southern Review.

This spring, her third collection, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, arrives. Poet Carolyn Forche remarks, “This is art in the light of conscience," as Marina Tsvetaeva has written, " voicing the sufferings of Somalia, Sarajevo and Screbrenica, history and its black ash of question marks yet it is also an art of praise." Jane Hirshfield comments, “Kaleidoscopic curiosity, powerfully kinesthetic, language, and an encompassing compassion...”

Susan Rich lives in Seattle, WA and teaches at Highline Community College.

Alberto Álvaro Ríos, born in 1952 in Nogales, Arizona, is the author of ten books and chapbooks of poetry, three collections of short stories and a memoir. Recent books of poems include The Dangerous Shirt and The Theater of Night, winner of the 2007 PEN/Beyond Margins Award. This was preceded by The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, a finalist for the National Book Award, Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses, The Lime Orchard Woman, The Warrington Poems, Five Indiscretions and Whispering to Fool the Wind.

His three most recent collections of short stories are The Curtain of Trees, Pig Cookies, and The Iguana Killer. His memoir about growing up on the Mexico-Arizona border -- called Capirotada --won the Latino Literary Hall of Fame Award and, most recently, was designated as the One Book Arizona choice for 2009.

Ríos is the recipient of the Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award, the Arizona Governor’s Arts Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Walt Whitman Award, the Western States Book Award for Fiction, six Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and fiction, and inclusion in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, as well as more than 250 other national and international literary anthologies. His work is regularly taught and translated, and has been adapted to dance and both classical and popular music.

Ríos is a Regents’ Professor at Arizona State University, where he has taught for more than two decades, and where he holds the further distinction of the Katharine C. Turner Endowed Chair in English. He lives in Chandler, Arizona.

www.public.asu.edu/~aarios/

Poet and critic Susan Stewart’s honors include a Lila Wallace Individual Writer's Award, two grants in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pew Fellowship for the Arts and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. She received her B.A. in English and Anthropology from Dickinson College, an M.A. in poetics from John Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania.

She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Columbarium (University of Chicago Press, 2003), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Forest (1995), which received the Literary Award of the Philadelphia Atheneum; The Hive (1987); and Yellow Stars and Ice (1981). Her collection The Open Studio: Essays in Art and Aesthetics, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2004. Her Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002) received both the 2002 Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism from Phi Beta Kappa and the 2004 Truman Capote Award in Literary Criticism. Other works include Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (1991), Nonsense (1989) and On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1984).

Stewart also co-translated Euripides' Andromache with Wesley Smith, and the poetry and selected prose of the Scuola Romana painter Scipione with Brunella Antomarini. She collaborated with composer James Primosch on a song cycle commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. About her work, the poet and critic Allen Grossman wrote: "Stewart has built a poetic syntax capable of conveying an utterly singular account of consciousness, by the light of which it is possible to see the structure of the human world with a new clarity and an unforeseen precision, possible only in her presence and by means of her art."

Stewart is currently Professor of English at Princeton University, where she teaches the history of poetry and aesthetics. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2005 She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Poet Molly Tenenbaum is the author of Now (Bear Star Press, 2007) and By a Thread (Van West & Co, 2000). Her chapbooks are Blue Willow, Old Voile, and Story. She was a 2007 resident at Hedgebrook, a 2007 Jack Straw Writer, and is the recipient of a 2009 Artist Trust Fellowship. She is plays old-time Appalachian string-band music: her band, The Queen City Bulldogs; her CD, Instead of a Pony. She teaches English at North Seattle Community College, and gives music lessons at home.  She lives in Seattle.

Robert Wrigley was born in 1951 in East St. Louis, Illinois, and grew up not far away in Collinsville, a coal-mining town. He was the first member of his family to graduate from college and the first male in many generations never to work in a coal mine. His collections of poetry include Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006); Lives of the Animals (2003); Reign of Snakes (1999), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award; In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (1995), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and Lenore Marshall Award finalist; What My Father Believed (1991); Moon in a Mason Jar (1986); and The Sinking of Clay City (1979).

Wrigley attended Southern Illinois University and the University of Montana, where he studied with the late Richard Hugo. Since 1977 he has lived in Idaho, teaching first at Lewis-Clark State College and since 1999 at the University of Idaho, where he teaches and directs the MFA program in creative writing.

He lives with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes, and their children near Moscow, Idaho.