Festival Poet Bios – 2026

Naomi Shihab Nye is an acclaimed Palestinian-American poet, essayist, and novelist known for her empathetic, cross-cultural writing that explores identity and finds beauty in everyday moments. Born in 1952, she spent her adolescence in Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas. She is the currentYoung People’s Poet Laureate. She is the author and/or editor of more than 30 volumes. Her books of poetry include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, A Maze Me: Poems for Girls, Red Suitcase, Words Under the Words, Fuel, and You & Yours (a bestselling poetry book of 2006). Her recent novel for children, The Turtle of Oman, was chosen as both a Best Book of 2014 by the Horn Book and a 2015 Notable Children’s Book by the American Library Association. Naomi Shihab Nye is Professor of Creative Writing – Poetry at Texas State University. She lives in San Antonio, Texas. Her most recent collection is Everything Comes Next.

Samar Abulhassan is a poet and teaching artist whose work explores memory, migration, language, ancestry, and the landscapes that shape us. Born to Lebanese immigrants and raised with multiple languages, she is interested in the ways stories travel across generations—through family, place, objects, dreams, and the words we inherit. Recently, she has been listening for the summons of the Litani River, a river from her parents’ homeland that continues to call through memory and imagination.

For the past 15 years, Samar has been part of the Skagit River Poetry Foundation community, where she has shared poems, taught in schools throughout the Skagit Valley, and collaborated with fellow writers. For nearly two decades, she has also worked with Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools program, creating poems with young people and helping students discover their own creative voices.

Samar holds an MFA from Colorado State University, is a Jack Straw Writer, and is the author of several chapbooks. Her work has appeared in literary journals and includes Ocean Radish: A Correspondence, a collaboration with Sierra Nelson featured in Palette Poetry; Pandemic Artifacts / from the Zoomshell, published by Turtle Disco Disability Culture Production; and Dreaming Ecosystems, a collaborative poetry film featuring her words and artwork.

Samar’s poems are often guided by questions of belonging, longing, inheritance, and the ways memory lives in the body. Drawn to music, dance, and the healing possibilities of creative practice, she believes poems can travel between languages, generations, classrooms, and communities—and that attention and play are forms of love.

Kelli Russell Agodon (she/her) is a bi/queer poet and editor whose newest collection is Accidental Devotions (Copper Canyon Press, 2026). Kelli is the author of five collections of poems, including the award-winning Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), Hourglass Museum, and Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, which won the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Prize in Poetry, as well as a Goodreads Best Books of the Year in Poetry award. She also coedited Demystifying the Manuscript: Essays & Interviews on Creating a Book of Poems with Susan Rich and coauthored The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice with Martha Silano. She cofounded Two Sylvias Press and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program, the Rainier Writing Workshop. She also cohosts the poetry series Poems You Need with Melissa Studdard. She has received awards, fellowships, and grants from the Poetry Society of America, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund, the Puffin Foundation, Artist Trust, Centrum, and others. Kelli lives in a sleepy seaside town in the Pacific Northwest, where she is an avid paddleboarder and hiker. www.agodon.com / www.twosylviaspress.com / www.youtube.com/@PoemsYouNeed

Kelli Russell Agodon (she/her) is the author of Accidental Devotions, her fifth collection of poems, published by Copper Canyon Press in May 2026. An award-winning bi/queer poet, editor, and cofounder of Two Sylvias Press, she teaches at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop and cohosts the poetry series Poems You Need with Melissa Studdard. She lives in a sleepy seaside town in the Pacific Northwest, where she keeps company with old typewriters, blue herons, and the occasional ghost of Emily Dickinson. Find her at www.agodon.com or write to her directly at kelli@agodon.com.

Roberto Ascalon is a NYC-born poet who teaches across the Northwest.
His residencies and multimedia exhibitions span the Frye Art Museum,
Seattle Art Museum, MOHAI and the Henry Art Gallery. He was 2013 Poet
Planner for the City of Seattle, an Artist Trust, Kundiman and Jack
Straw Fellow, a 2025 Hermitage Artist in Residence, and a two-time
Seattle Slam Team member. His poem “The Fire This Time, or, How Come
Some Brown Boys Get Blazed Right Before Class and Other Questions
Without Marks” won the 2013 Rattle Poetry Prize and led to an
invitation to the White House, where he and his students shook hands
with President Obama.

Subhaga Crystal Bacon (they/them), is the author of five collections of poetry including, A Brief History of My Sex Life, from Lily Poetry Review Books, 2026; the Lambda Literary finalist, Transitory, 2023, winner of the BOA Editions, Ltd. Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry; Surrender of Water in Hidden Places, winner of the Red Flag Poetry Chapbook Prize, 2023, released in an expanded second edition in the summer of 2024.  A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, Subhaga is an AWP Writer to Writer mentor and teaching artist working in schools and libraries with youth and adults, as well as private students. Their work appears or is forthcoming in a variety of print and online journals including Terrain, West Trestle, Cider Press Review, Prairie Schooner, Nelle and others. www.subhagacrystalbacon.com

Subhaga lives in the shrub-steppe above the Twisp River where they walk, read, and write in all weather. They are a poet and a teaching artist working with local youth as well as private students both in person and online. Their work focuses on making meaning from life, drawing from the mundane and the unexpected, the personal and the universal: a poetry of discovery.

Janée J. Baugher, MFA (writer, editor, lecturer) is the author of The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction (McFarland, 2020) and The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles (Tupelo Press, 2026). www.JaneeBaugher.com

Janée J. Baugher is the author of four books, including The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles, winner of the Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press, 2026), as well the only craft book of its kind, The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction (McFarland, 2020). She lives in Seattle and teaches at Writers.com. www.JaneeBaugher.com

Kara Briggs is a writer and poet, whose work is founded in themes of her American Indian tribes, Sauk-Suiattle and Yakama. She recently completed her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Art, her second master’s degree. Her first poetry book, Rivers in My Veins (Saint Julian Press), uses calm elegance and precise language to tells the stories of her tribes, connects readers to the earth. She received the 2024 James Welch Prize from Poetry Northwest. You and I, and Spilyáy, is her second poetry book. 

Her poetry has been featured in numerous anthologies and events, including a pop-up display of poetry and art on hiking and biking trails in the Columbia River Gorge, in a sun print exhibition in Portland, Ore., in the 25th Anniversary magazine Vice Versa from the University of Hawai’i, and in Unsinkable: Poems Inspired by the Titanic published by Salmon Press, the Rocky Mountains Literary Field Guide and Reclaiming the Cascades: A Native Anthology from Hawkeye Press, and the 2026 edition of Ms. Aligned. 

Born in Honolulu, she lived outside San Francisco as a young child in the Civil Rights era, and she lived in Spokane, calling Spirit Lake, Idaho her home for most of her life. She has worked in New York City, the Great Lakes Region, Spokane, Wash., Portland, Ore., Washington, D.C., Seattle, Wash., before building a home on the Tulalip Reservation north of Seattle. She is a former board president of the Indigenous Journalists Association, then the Native American Journalists Association, of Unity: Journalists of Color, and the Center for Women and Democracy.

She is Sauk-Suiattle Tribal Citizen and Direct Yakama Descendant on her mother’s side and descended mostly from Irish matriarchs on her father’s side. 

She and her husband tend a forest farm on their forested acreage, part of an original allotment that belonged to his grandfather. They live in sight of the Cascades Mountain snow-capped volcanoes a couple of miles from the Salish Sea, an hour south of Canada, where she spends a lot of time looking at the sky and keeping company with wild birds in the yard and trained truffle hunting dogs. 

Paul Hlava Ceballos is the author of banana [ ], which won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. banana [ ] also was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Washington State Book Award. The book traces the often brutal history of bananas in the Americas, and was called by the National Book Critics “an exquisite feat of documentary poetics.” His collaborative book of poems and visual art, Banana [ ] / we pilot the blood, shares pages with Quenton Baker and Christina Sharpe. He has a fellowship from CantoMundo, and has been featured on the Poetry Magazine podcast and Seattle’s newspaper The Stranger. Currently, he is the poetry editor of the Seattle Met and works in cardiology, practicing echocardiography. More can be found at: https://www.paulhlava.com/.

Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of Shiny City, recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) and The Heart’s Traffic: a novel in poems as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. They are a Kelsey Street Press collective member, Airlie Press editor and Nonfiction Coordinator for Best of the Net. They serve on the Governing Council of Seattle’s Cultural Space Agency and on the board of Seattle City of Literature. They received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center, EmergeNYC, Intercultural Leadership Institute and the Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They serve as Pacific Northwest chapter co-lead for Kundiman and also on the national Kundiman board. They collaborate with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation and environmental justice. They teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell. They can be found at www.chinginchen.com

Blas Falconer is the author of four poetry collections, including Rara Avis (Four Way Books, 2024), winner of the 2025 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and Forgive the Body This Failure (Four Way Books, 2018). His work often explores queerness, family, migration, spirituality, desire, and the natural world, drawing from both lyric and narrative traditions. He recently translated Mariano Zaro’s Padre Tierra: A Poem in 50 Sections from the Spanish (Artepoética Press, 2025).

Falconer is also the coeditor of two anthologies, Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets and The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity, a collection that challenges reductive notions of Latinidad and identity in contemporary American literature. He is the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as a Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers.

He teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University and serves as editor-in-chief of Poetry International Online.

Tess Gallagher, the author of eleven books of poetry, lives and writes in her hometown of Port Angeles, Washington, and in her cottage in Co. Sligo, Ireland.  She is the only American to have been honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award for her poetry from the Foundation of Rome, which she received in 2023. Her most recent poetry collection Is, Is Not, published by Graywolf press, won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award.  Gallagher participated in BIRDMAN and SHORT CUTS, films centered on the work of her late husband Raymond Carver’s stories.  Her own collection, The Man from Kinvara: Selected Stories, published in 2009, is the basis for film episodes under development.  She was privileged to speak and read in celebration of Theodore Roethke at the Bloedel Reserve in September 2024.

Edward Harkness grew up in Seattle. He is the author of five full-length collections: Saying the Necessary (2000), Beautiful Passing Lives (2010), The Law of the Unforeseen (2018), Avalanche: A Survival Guide (2023), and most recently Creek Water: New & Selected Poems (Empty Bowl Press, 2025).

“Reading these poems,” writes novelist David Long in his introduction to Creek Water: New & Selected Poems, “you’re reminded how crucial it is to be specific, to understand that, truly, something happens only once—look away and you miss it. You never find Harkness hiding in generalities—he’s on Timberwolf Mountain, Meek’s Table, or Quang Tin Province; those aren’t birds, they’re pine siskins or water ouzels. He makes us hear the names—lupine, shooting star, monkshood; he makes us see what he sees. What a gift.”

Ed lives with his wife and cycling partner, Linda, in Shoreline, Washington. For more information about Ed, go to his author website at https://harkness01.wixsite.com/harkness

Lorraine Healy is an Argentinean poet and analogue photographer who has been published extensively. Nominated for Pushcart prizes in 2004 and twice in 2018, she has a M.F.A from the New England College and a post-MFA from Antioch University LA. Her works include “The Habit of Buenos Aires” (Tebot Bach), “Mostly Luck. Odes & other poems of praise,” (MoonPath), and chapbooks “The Farthest South”,” The Archipelago” and “The Voices of Abraham”. Lorraine has long lived on Whidbey Island, where she has taught advanced poetry seminars and works as a fine-arts photographer. Her website is www.Lorrainehealy.net.

Jill McCabe Johnson (she, they) is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Tangled in Vow & Beseech (Moonpath, 2024). Her debut memoir, Learning to Spar, about a single mom defending herself against a series of predatory men and a broken legal system in the epicenter of what one FBI profiler called America’s Killing Fields, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. Jill grew up in the Pacific Northwest and spent her childhood digging for clams and geoducks, harvesting wild berries, and reading in poor light. Jill writes poetry and narrative nonfiction, plus occasional forays into fiction, with a deep social conscience and even deeper roots in nature and the natural sciences. Honors include Nautilus Awards in Poetry and Nature Writing, Longreads’ Best of 2021 Stories, eight Pushcart nominations, and support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Artist Trust, and Hedgebrook. Jill holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University and a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Wandering Aengus Press and its imprint, Trail to Table Press. https://jillmccabejohnson.com

Jill McCabe Johnson is the author of four poetry collections and the memoir, Learning to Spar, forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. Jill is editor-in-chief of Wandering Aengus Press and its imprint, Trail to Table Press. She spends her free time writing, hiking, and cooking for guests at her B&B in the San Juan Islands.

Danusha Laméris, a poet and essayist, was raised in Northern California, born to a Dutch father and Barbadian mother. Danusha is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize and was honored by the 2020 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. She served as the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California. Some of her work has been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Orion, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. Her poem Small Kindnesses has been translated to multiple languages, quoted in O Magazine, turned into a short film, and was recently read by actress Helena Bonham Carter. Her first book, The Moons of August (2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Her second book, Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series), was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Award and recipient of the 2021 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her third and newest collection, Blade by Blade (2024) is now available through Copper Canyon Press. Laméris has taught in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University. She is now the founder of Litfield Writers, where she teaches and leads the community.

Gary Copeland Lilley is the author of nine books of poetry, the most recent being Raven on the Moaners’ Bench, Four Way Books (2025), and The Hog Killing, Blue Horse Press (2018), and The Bushman’s Medicine Show, Lost Horse Press (2017). Originally from North Carolina he lives now in the Pacific Northwest. He has received the DC Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry, the Warren Wilson College Joan Beebe Fellowship, and he is a Cave Canem Fellow. He is the Artistic Director of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference.

Peter Ludwin is the award-winning author of four books of poetry.  His newest collection, An Altar of Tides, won the 2024 Trail to Table Editors’ Award in Poetry from Trail to Table Press.  His previous book, Gone to Gold Mountain, which addressed the little-known massacre of over thirty Chinese gold miners in Hells Canyon in 1887, was nominated for an American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation.  In addition to receiving a 2007 Literary Fellowship from Artist Trust, he won the 2016 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award from The Comstock Review for his poem “Wolf Concerto,” judged by Marge Piercy, and the W.D. Snodgrass Award for Endeavor and Excellence in Poetry from the San Miguel Poetry Week in Mexico, where he was a longtime participant and sharpened his craft under such noted poets as Mark Doty, Tony Hoagland, Joseph Stroud and Robert Wrigley.  An adventurer who has traveled from the Amazon to Morocco to Tibet, poems from which appear in his second book, Rumors of Fallible Gods—a finalist for the Gival Press Literary Award in 2010 and 2011— he is particularly focused on history/social justice, physical and spiritual aspects of the natural world and different cultures.  He lives in Kent, Washington.  Find him at www.peterludwin.com.  

Jory Mickelson is an award-winning writer and educator living in Xwotʼqom / Whatcom / Bellingham on the homelands of the Lummi and Nooksack peoples. They are the author of three books of poetry: Picturing (2025), All This Divide (2024), and Wilderness//Kingdom (2019) which won a 2020 High Plains Book Award. Their work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest DIAGRAM, Jubilat, and other journals in the US, Canada, and the UK. They are the recipient of numerous fellowships and residencies, most recently from the Montana Open AIR program, the Tongue River Artist Residency, and the Sitka Center of Art and Ecology.  You can read more about them and their work at www.jorymickelson.com

Sati Mookherjee’s third collection, Deś, based on conversations with her Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani immigrant family and friends in their shared corner of the Pacific Northwest, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press (May 2027). Previous books are Eye (Ravenna Press, 2022) and Ways of Being (Albiso Award, MoonPath Press, 2023). Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Best Spiritual Literature (2025), Poetry Northwest, Gulf Coast Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, and DIAGRAM. She is a former Artist Trust Fellow. Her collaborations with contemporary classical composers have been performed and recorded by solo and ensemble musicians (The Esoterics, Contemporary Chamber Composers and Players). Sati has appeared with Skagit Symphony as guest poet (2024) and narrator (2026). She was (founding) COO of Sendan Center for over a decade, was a founding board member of CommunityWise Bellingham, and is a past member of the Corporate Board of the Boys and Girls Club of Whatcom County, past Board Chair of the Whatcom Community Foundation and former Vice President of the CASCADIA International Women’s Film Festival. Sati is passionate about sharing the pleasures of this unique art form with diverse audiences, leading workshops and giving talks to readers and writers of all ages and experience levels.

Jeffrey Morgan is the author of two poetry collections, Crying Shame and The Last Note Becomes Its Listener, winner of the Mind’s on Fire Prize. Twice a National Poetry Series finalist, his poems appear in Bennington Review, Copper Nickel, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, and West Branch. He is a much-requested teacher for Poets in the Schools for the Skagit River Poetry Foundation. He lives in Bellingham, Washington with his family.

Jed Myers is a Philadelphian who’s lived in Seattle more than half his life. He studied poetry at Tufts University, then trained in psychiatry and maintained a solo therapy practice until his recent retirement. His fourth book of poetry, Can’t Be Far (MoonPath Press, 2026), was a finalist for the Sally Albiso Award. His prior collections are Learning to Hold (2024, winner of the Wandering Aengus Press Editors’ Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press, 2019), Watching the Perseids (2014, winner of the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), and six chapbooks. Recent awards include Southern Humanities Review’s Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, Columbia Journal’s Online Poetry Prize, and First Prize in Common Ground Review’s Poetry Contest. Poems have appeared in Rattle, RHINO, Poetry Northwest, Southern Indiana Review, The Southeast Review, Greensboro Review, and other journals and anthologies. He’s Editor of the journal Bracken, and lives near the shore of Lake Washington where he loves to walk the local wetlands.

Matthew Nienow’s most recent collection, If Nothing (Alice James Books, 2025), was recommended by the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book Club, Publishers Weekly, and Poetry Northwest. He is also the author of House of Water (Alice James Books, 2016) and three earlier chapbooks. His poems and essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, Lit Hub, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, and have been recognized with fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Artist Trust. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington, with his wife and sons, where he works as a mental health counselor.

Rena Priest is a citizen of the Lhaq’temish [Lummi] Nation. Priest served as Washington State’s sixth Poet Laureate (2021-2023), and was the first Indigenous person to hold the position. In this role, she championed poetry that celebrated the ecological gifts of her ancestral homelands, the bioregion. She is an Academy of American Poets Fellow, an Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow, a Maxine Cushing Gray Distinguished Writer, and winner of a Washington State Book Award for poetry. Her new essay collection, Positively Uncivilized, was published (October 2025) as the inaugural winner of the Keepers of the Fire Award from Raven Chronicles Press. It has also been recognized with a Silver Nautilus Award and was selected as one of two titles to represent the State of Washington at the National Book Festival in 2026. She splits time between Bellingham, Washington and Vancouver, British Columbia.

Award winning poet and essayist Susan Rich has lived and worked on four continents as is evident from her first book The Cartographer’s Tongue/Poems of the World (White Pine Press), which won the PEN USA Award to her most recent book of poems, Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press), finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She has published six collections of award winning poetry and is editor/co-editor of three anthologies including Demystifying the Manuscript: How to Create a Book of Poems with Kelli Russell Agodon. Recently, as the editor of Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds she hasushered 90+ new poems by 90+ poets into the world. Her seventh book of poems, A Compass or a Companion, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in April 2029!  www.poetsusanrich.com

Susan teaches Creative Writing and Film Studies at Highline College. She is the director of Poets on the Coast: A Weekend Writing Retreat for Women, now in its 16th year. Susan has presented her work and taught in France, India, Ireland, Spain, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates.

Originally from Southside Virginia, Caitlin Scarano is a poet and writer based in Bellingham, Washington. Her second full-length collection, The Necessity of Wildfire (Blair, 2022), was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the Wren Poetry Prize, won a 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award, and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her debut collection, Do Not Bring Him Water, was published by Write Bloody in 2017.
She was a 2024-2025 Watershed Fellow with the Public Humanities Collaboratory in Oregon,  where she is developing a poetry manuscript about the Skagit watershed. Her recent honors include winning CutBank’s 2024 Genre Contest in Poetry and LitMag’s 2024 Chekhov Award for Flash Fiction. She was selected as a participant in the NSF’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program and spent November 2018 at McMurdo Station. She is a member of the Washington Wolf Advisory Group and has a long-standing collaborative practice at the intersection of poetry, science, and conservation.
Scarano holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She teaches creative writing through Writers.com and offers one-on-one coaching and editing. Find her at caitlinscarano.com

Derek Sheffield is the 8th poet laureate of Washington State. His books include Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, winner of a 2024 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, Not for Luck, selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, Through the Second Skin, runner-up for the Emily Dickinson First Book Award, and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy. A two-time finalist for the Washington State Book Award, his other awards include the Foreword Reviews Indies Book of the Year in Nature Writing and the James Hearst Poetry Prize judged by Li-Young Lee.  He teaches at Wenatchee Valley College, edits poetry for Terrain.org, and can often be found in the woods along the eastern slopes of the Cascade Range near Leavenworth, Washington.

Link to website: https://www.dereksheffield.com/

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); Praising the Paradox (Red Hen Press, 2019) which was 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 the curator and 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, a Pushcart nomination, 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, and Crab Creek Review as well as an editors’ choice recognition in the Allen Ginsberg Award. She serves as the 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, Nimrod, Parabola, Palabra, Paterson Literary Review, Poetry Daily, Rattle, Southern Humanities Review, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily, and read on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac.  www.tinaschumann.com

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is the author of three books of poetry: Something About Living (UAkron, 2024), winner of the 2024 National Book Award and winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry; Kaan & Her Sisters (Trio House Press, 2023), finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award and honorable mention for the 2024 Arab American Book Award; and Water & Salt (Red Hen, 2017), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award and honorable mention for the 2018 Arab American Award. Her writing has appeared in journals including Los Angeles Review of Books, Michigan Quarterly Review, the Nation, Poets.org, Protean, Prairie Schooner, and many others. Tuffaha’s work has also been anthologized widely, including in The Long Devotion (Georgia Press), We Call to the Eye and the Night (Persea Press), and Gaza Unsilenced (Just World Books). She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington and an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop. Tuffaha lives with her family in Redmond, Washington.

Jeremy Voigt’s poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Gulf Coast, Post Road, Willow Springs, The Bellingham Review, 2River Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, BPJ, and other magazines. His chapbook, Neither Rising nor Falling, was featured on The Writer’s Almanac. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by judge Robert Wrigley, and was a runner-up for the 2019 Discovery Poetry Prize from the 92nd St Y. His manuscript has been a semi-finalist for the Dorset Prize, The Crab Orchard first book prize, the Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes, and finalist for the Miller Williams prize, and is now forthcoming from Elixir Press. He has published two chapbooks and in several anthologies. He is an assistant poetry editor for Terrain.org, and a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Birmingham. He lives, writes, reads, parents, runs, and lives by a large lake in western Washington. 

Joe Wilkins is the author of two novels, The Entire Sky and Fall Back Down When I Die; a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers; and five collections of poetry, including Pastoral, 1994 and When We Were Birds. A finalist for the First Novel Prize from the Center For Fiction, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and the Orion Book Award, Wilkins has won the Oregon Book Award, the Montana Book Award, the GLCA New Writers Award, the Pushcart Prize, and four High Plains Book Awards. His latest book is Every Sky at Home: Essays on Landscape and Family. Born and raised north of the Bull Mountains of eastern Montana, he lives with his family in the foothills of the Coast Range of Oregon. You can find him online at https://joewilkins.org/ and https://joewilkinswriter.substack.com/. 

Jane Wong is the author of the memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023). She also wrote two poetry collections: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, Ucross, Loghaven, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and others. She grew up in a Chinese American take-out restaurant on the Jersey shore and is an Associate Professor at Western Washington University. Her poetry installations which engage haunting and nourishment have been exhibited at the Frye Art Museum, the Richmond Art Gallery, and the Asian Art Museum. Learn more at: https://janewongwriter.com/