Festival Poet Bios

Samar Abulhassan

Samar Abulhassan is a Jack Straw Writer and holds an M.F.A. from Colorado State University. She’s worked in California public schools for seven years. Born to Lebanese immigrants and raised with multiple languages, she is a 2006 Hedgebrook alum and the author of six chapbooks, including Farah and Nocturnal Temple. Samar has worked with Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools since 2008 and as a teaching artist for the Skagit River Poetry Foundation since 2010. Samar also participated in the 2018 Skagit River Poetry Festival. In 2016, Samar received a CityArtist grant to aid in completing a novel-in-poems reflecting on memory, longing, and the Arabic alphabet.

Roberto Carlos Ascalon

Originally hailing from NYC, Roberto Carlos Ascalon has lived in Seattle for over 25 years. He is a Kundiman, Jack Straw, and Artist Trust fellow, a two-time Seattle Slam Team member, and the winner of the 2013 Rattle Poetry Prize for the poem “The Fire This Time, or, How Come Some Brown Boys Get Blazed Right Before And Other Questions Without Marks”. His teaching artistry has exhibited in museums across Seattle and earned him a trip to the White House where he received the honor of shaking hands with President Obama. He currently teaches with The Greater Seattle Bureau of Fearless Ideas.

Elizabeth Austen

Elizabeth Austen is the author of Every Dress a Decision (Blue Begonia Press), and the chapbooks The Girl Who Goes Alone and Where Currents Meet. She’s performed in venues ranging from UNESCO in Paris alongside poets from a dozen nations to Poets House in NYC, to Holden Village (a remote former mining town-turned-spiritual-community in central Washington state). Her poems are featured in Cascadia: A Field Guide Through Art, Ecology and Poetry, the New England Review and Spirited Stone: Lessons from Kubota’s Garden, among others. journals and anthologies. Elizabeth teaches poetry and reflective writing for self-care to staff at Seattle Children’s Hospital, and has lectured at Virginia Mason, Kaiser Permanente and other healthcare institutions. She provided on-air poetry commentary for NPR affiliate KUOW for nearly 20 years, interviewing poets including W.S. Merwin, Jane Hirshfield, Mark Doty and Tim Seibles. Elizabeth served as the third Washington State Poet Laureate, 2014-16.

Ellen Bass

Ellen Bass’s most recent collection, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Among her other poetry books are Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Her poems appear frequently in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and many other journals. She co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! and her nonfiction books include the groundbreaking The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth. A Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, California jails, and teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University.

Elizabeth Bradfield

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Once Removed, Toward Antarctica, and Theorem, which is a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro. She is co-editor, with CMarie Fuhrman and Derek Sheffield, of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry and, with Miller Oberman and Alexandra Teague, Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic/Artistic Collaboration. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Sun, Kenyon Review, and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize in Poetry for her first book, Interpretive Work, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship.  Liz grew up in Tacoma, works as a naturalist and field assistant, teaches at Brandeis University, and runs Broadsided, the literary journal she founded in 2005. She lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Bill Carty

Originally from coastal Maine, Bill Carty now lives in Seattle, where he is Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest. He teaches at Hugo House, the UW Robinson Center for Young Scholars, and Edmonds College. Bill is the author of Huge Cloudy (Octopus Books, 2019), which was long-listed for The Believer Book Award, and We Sailed on the Lake, was published by Bunny Presse/Fonograf Editions in May 2023. He holds degrees from Dartmouth College (BA) and University of North Carolina-Wilmington (MFA), and he has received poetry fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Artist Trust, Hugo House, and Jack Straw Cultural Center. He was awarded the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, and His poems have appeared in the jubilat, Best American Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Iterant, Paperbag, The Kenyon Review, 32 Poems, and other journals. His website is billcarty.com.

Paul Hlava Ceballos

Paul Hlava Ceballos is the author of banana [ ], winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and WA State Book Award. His collaborative chapbook, banana [ ] / we pilot the blood, shares pages with Quenton Baker and Christina Sharpe. He has fellowships from CantoMundo, Artist Trust and the Poets House. He has been featured on the Poetry Magazine Podcast and Seattle’s The Stranger. He currently lives in Seattle with his family, where he practices echocardiography.

Chen Chen

Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (BOA Editions, 2022) and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. His work appears in many publications, including Poetry and three editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, the National Endowment for the Arts, and United States Artists. He was the 2018-2022 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University and currently teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College and Stonecoast. He lives with his partner, Jeff Gilbert, and their pug, Mr. Rupert Giles.

Rio Cortez

Rio Cortez is a poet and a New York Times bestselling author of picture books. Her debut poetry collection, Golden Ax (Penguin Books, 2022), was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award. Her chapbook, I Have Learned to Define a Field As a Space Between Mountains, won the 2015 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize. Her children’s books are the New York Times bestselling The ABCs of Black History (Workman, 2020) and the forthcoming The River Is My Sea (Simon & Schuster, 2024). She has received the Poets & Writers Amy Award and fellowships from Poet’s House, Cave Canem, the Jerome Foundation, and the CantoMundo Foundation. Cortez holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU. By day, she works in sales & marketing at HarperCollins, where she endeavors to amplify the voices and opportunities for BIPOC writers. Born and raised in Salt Lake City, she now lives, writes, and works in Harlem.

Lorna Crozier

The author of two memoirs and over twenty books of poetry, most recently After That, Lorna Crozier has received several of Canada’s top literary awards, including the prestigious Governor-General’s Award and three Pat Lowther Awards for the best book of poetry by a Canadian woman. She’s read her poetry on every continent except Antarctica, and her poems have been translated into several languages, including book-length volumes in French and Spanish. A Professor Emerita at the University of Victoria, where she chaired the Department of Writing for several years, she lives on Vancouver Island.

Tony Curtis

Tony Curtis was born in Dublin in 1955, he studied literature at the University of Essex and Trinity College, Dublin. As well as being available for readings at Irish and International festivals Tony Curtis is an experienced facilitator of poetry and creative writing workshops with both adults and children and is a regular contributor at the Clifden Arts Festival. In 1993, his poem The Dowser and the Child won the Poetry Ireland/Friends Provident National Poetry Competition, while These Hills won the Book Stop Poetry Prize. He also edited As the Poet Said (1997), a selection of quotations from Dennis O’Driscoll’s regular column in Poetry Ireland Review. In 2003 he was awarded the Varuna House Exchange Fellowship to Australia.

Michael Daley

Michael Daley, born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, has lived in the Pacific Northwest for fifty years. He taught in Skagit Valley schools for half that time. He founded Empty Bowl press, and now edits and publishes its Madrona Project anthology series. He’s the author of nine books including Reinhabited: New & Selected Poems (Dos Madres, 2022), Telemachus, a novel (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2022) and True Heresies (Cervena Barva, 2022).

Alice Derry

Alice Derry’s sixth collection of poetry is Asking from MoonPath Press, 2022. Raymond Carver chose her first manuscript, Stages of Twilight, for the King County Arts Award; her third collection, Strangers to Their Courage (LSU Press, 1997) was a finalist for the Washington Book Award.  She has three chapbooks, including transitions from the German poet, Rainer Rilke. With a colleague, she conducts a monthly workshop for area Native poets.  She was faculty at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, 2022 and 2023. With artist Fred Sharpe, she has produced two collections of essays on native plants around the Salish Sea. She lives and works on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.

Katie Farris

Katie is unable to attend the festival due to recent health issues.

Katie Farris is a poet, writer of hybrid forms, and translator. Her most recent book is Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Alice James Books, 2023), which Publishers Weekly named one of the Top Ten Books of 2023. She is also the author of the chapbook A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, which won the Chad Walsh Poetry Award from Beloit Poetry Journal. Her earlier collection is boysgirls (Tupelo Press), a hybrid-form book. Her awards include the Pushcart Prize, Orison Prize, and Anne Halley Prize from Massachusetts Review. She also is the award-winning translator of several books of poetry from the French, Ukrainian, Chinese, and Russian. In addition to her poetry and translations, Farris writes prose about cancer, the body, and its relationship to writing, such as in her recent, widely circulated essay in Oprah Daily. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Brown University, and currently lives and teaches in New Jersey.

CMarie Fuhrman

CMarie Fuhrman is a poet and author whose work is inspired by the Western landscape. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Camped Beneath the Dam, as well as the co-editor of two significant anthologies, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. She has poetry and nonfiction published or forthcoming in a variety of publications, including Terrain.org, Emergence Magazine, Platform Review, Northwest Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Poetry Northwest, and various anthologies.  CMarie is the director of the Elk River Writers Workshop and an award-winning columnist for the Inlander. She is the Associate Director and Poetry Director for Western Colorado University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing, where she teaches Nature Writing. CMarie is the host of Terra Firma, a Colorado Public Radio program. She is a former Idaho Writer in Residence and lives in the Salmon River Mountains of Idaho.

Matt Gano

Matt Gano is a poet and creative writing instructor, currently working as a Program Manager for The Bureau of Fearless Ideas in Seattle. Matt is the co-founder of the Seattle Youth Poet Laureate program and former Program Manager of Abbey Arts where he established NEXT STAGE, a training program for emerging artists. Matt has taught creative writing across Western Washington for two decades working as a senior level Writer-In-Residence for Seattle Arts & Lectures: Writers In The Schools, a lead instructor for the Young Writers Workshop at University of Washington and a traveling Teaching Artist for the Skagit River Poetry Foundation.

Samuel Green

Samuel Green has spent more than 40 years working in schools as a visiting poet in Washington and Wyoming. His many books include The Grace of Necessity (Washington Book Award, 2007) and, most recently, Disturbing the Light (2020). He has received Poetry Fellowships from the NEA and Washington’s Artist Trust, an honorary Doctorate from Seattle University, and served as Washington’s Inaugural Poet Laureate. He lives with his wife, Sally, in a hand-built log home on a remote island in the San Juans where they co-edit Brooding Heron Press.

Lorraine Healy

Lorraine Healy is an Argentinean poet 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. She is the first poet to have received a green card solely on the merits of her work. The 2009 winner of the Libby First Book Award, her book “The Habit of Buenos Aires was published by Tebot Bach. She has published three chapbooks, “The Farthest South” by New American Press, “The Archipelago” by Finishing Line, and “The Voices of Abraham” by World Enough Press. Her second full-length, “Mostly Luck. Odes & other poems of praise,” was published by MoonPath in 2018. Lorraine has long lived on Whidbey Island, where she has taught advanced poetry seminars and works as a fine-arts photographer.

Holly Hughes

Holly Hughes is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Hold Fast, coauthor of The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World, and editor of several anthologies, including Keep a Green Bough: Voices from the Heart of Cascadia. Her fine-art chapbook Passings received an American Book Award in 2017. She served on the staff of Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program and taught writing at the college level, as well as at the North Cascades Institute, Fishtrap, Litfuse, and Centrum. Currently, she is copublisher of Empty Bowl Press, directs Flying Squirrel Studio, which offers residencies for women, and consults as a writing coach. She divides her time between a log cabin in Indianola and her home in the Chimacum valley.

Ilya Kaminsky

Ilya is unable to attend the festival due to recent health issues.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union, in 1977, and arrived in the U.S. in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the US government. He is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) and co-editor and co-translator of many other books. His work was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, and Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, and was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and T.S. Eliot Prize (UK). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship. He currently teaches in Princeton and lives in New Jersey.

Gary Copeland Lilley

Gary Copeland Lilley is the author of eight books of poetry, the most recent being The Bushman’s Medicine Show, from Lost Horse Press (2017), and a chapbook, The Hog Killing, from Blue Horse Press (2018). He is originally from North Carolina and now lives in the Pacific Northwest. He has received the Washington DC Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. He has been published in numerous anthologies and journals, including Best American Poetry 2014, Willow Springs, The Swamp, Waxwing, the Taos International Journal of Poetry, and the African American Review. He is the Artistic Director of the Port Townsend Writers Conference and a Cave Canem Fellow. Gary Copeland Lilley teaches in the Western Colorado University Creative Writing MFA program.

Claudia Castro Luna

Claudia Castro Luna is an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate fellow (2019), WA State Poet Laureate (2018 – 2021) and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet (2015-2018). Castro Luna’s newest collection of poetry,Cipota Under the Moon, published in April 2022 from Tia Chucha Press. She is also the author of One River, A Thousand Voices (Chin Music Press), the Pushcart nominated  Killing Marías(Two Sylvias Press) also shortlisted for WA State 2018 Book Award in poetry, and the chapbook This City (Floating Bridge Press). Her most recent non-fiction is in There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis (Vintage). Born in El Salvador she came to the United States in 1981. Living in English and Spanish, Claudia writes and teaches in Seattle on unceded Duwamish lands where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.

Tim McNulty

Tim McNulty is a poet, essayist, and natural history writer. He is the author of three poetry collections: Ascendance, published by Pleasure Boat Studio, & In Blue Mountain Dusk (Pleasure Boat Studio), and Pawtracks (Copper Canyon), and ten poetry chapbooks.  Tim is also the author of twelve books on natural history, including Olympic National Park: A Natural History, (University of Washington Press), and Washington’s Mount Rainier National Park (The Mountaineers). Most recently, he has published Salmon, Cedar, Rock & Rain (Braided River) in collaboration with Native American writers from the Olympic Peninsula. Tim has received the Washington State Book Award and the National Outdoor Book Award.  He lives in the Dungeness River watershed, traditional territory of the S’Klallam people, in the foothills of Washington’s Olympic Mountains, and he remains active in Northwest environmental issues. His website is timmcnultypoet.com.

Carol Moldaw

Carol Moldaw’s seventh book of poetry, Go Figure, will be published by Four Way Books in September 2024. She is also the author of the novel, The Widening. Her work has been published widely in journals, including The New York Review of Books, Poem-A-Day, AGNI, FIELD, Harvard Review, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, Plume and On the Seawall, which also published Tyler Mill’s interview with her in 2020. Her work has been translated into Turkish, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. In 2025 a volume of her selected poems in Chinese translation will be published in Beijing. She has taught at several universities  Naropa University, The College of Santa Fe, and at Stonecoast, the University of Maine’s low-residency MFA program, and has been a recurrent Visiting Writer at the Vermont Studio Center. In 2011, she served as the Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Writer-in-Residence at Hollins College. Moldaw lives in Santa Fe, NM, and teaches privately

Sati Mookherjee

Bengali-American poet and lyricist, Sati Mookherjee, is the author of the poetry collections EYE (Ravenna Press, 2022) and WAYS OF BEING (winner of the Albiso Award, MoonPath Press, 2023). Her collaborations with contemporary classical composers have been performed or recorded by ensembles (The Esoterics, Contemporary Chamber Composers and Players) and solo musicians. (Hope Wechkin, LEANING TOWARD THE FIDDLER, Ravello Records). Her work appears in literary magazines and anthologies and has been awarded an Artist Trust/ Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship Award. 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. A lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest, she presently serves on the Board of Directors of the Cascadia International Women’s Film Festival. satimookherjee.com

Jeffrey Morgan

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.

Tawanda Mulalu

Tawanda Mulalu was born in Gaborone, Botswana. His first book, Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die was selected by Susan Stewart for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, and was listed as a best poetry collection of 2022 by The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and was a finalist for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. Tawanda’s poems appear in Brittle Paper, Lana Turner, Lolwe, The New England Review, The Paris Review and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, TX, where he is a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers.

Susan Rich

Susan Rich’s eight books include Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press), Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry), Cloud Pharmacy (White Pine Press) and others. She has earned awards from the Artists Trust, Fulbright Foundation, PEN USA, and the Times Literary Supplement of London. Susan’s poems have appeared in the Antioch Review, Bennington Review, Harvard Review, New England Review, Poetry Northwest and The Slowdown, among other journals. In 2023, she co-edited Demystifying the Manuscript: Creating a Book of Poem with Kelli Russell Agodon. Previously, Susan worked in human rights and lived on four continents. She now teaches Creative Writing and Film Studies at Highline College, outside Seattle, WA and directs Poets on the Coast: A Weekend Writing Retreat for Women. You can visit her at poetsusanrich.com

Caitlin Scarano

Caitlin Scarano is a writer based in Bellingham, Washington. She holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her second full length collection of poems, The Necessity of Wildfire, 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 WA State Book Award. Caitlin is a member of the Washington Wolf Advisory Group. She was selected as a participant in the NSF’s Antarctic Artists & Writers Program and spent November 2018 in McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Her work has appeared in Granta, Carve, Prairie Schooner, and Colorado Review. Find her at caitlinscarano.com

Derek Sheffield

Derek Sheffield received a 2024 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. His other collections include Not for Luck, selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, Through the Second Skin, finalist for the Washington State Book Award, and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy. He teaches in Western Colorado University’s low-residency MFA program, edits poetry for Terrain.org, and can often be found in the woods along the eastern slopes of the Cascade Range near Leavenworth, Washington.

Willa Schneberg

Willa Schneberg is a poet, ceramic sculptor, interdisciplinary artist and curator. The Naked Room, her latest, and sixth poetry collection, is a true synthesis of her life as a psychotherapist, and her life as a poet. Among her honors are the Oregon Book Award in Poetry, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award, Second Place in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards, residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Kathmandu, Nepal and Glasgow, Scotland, and poems on the Writer’s Almanac. Her poetry has been translated into Hebrew, Arabic, Nepali and Korean. She was a co-runner-up in the 2020 Phyllis L. Ennes Poetry Contest sponsored by the Skagit River Poetry Foundation.

M.L. Smoker

M.L. Smoker is Nakoda, Dakota and Lakota, an enrolled member of the Fort Peck Tribe. She served as Montana co-poet laureate from 2019-2021. She received an MFA from the University of Montana in Missoula. In 2019 she was recognized as an alumna of the year by the University and received an honorary doctorate in 2023. Her first collection of poems, Another Attempt at Rescue, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2005. She also coauthored a children’s graphic novel entitled Thunderous, published in 2022. She received a regional Emmy award for her work as a writer/consultant on the PBS documentary Indian Relay. She served as the Director of Indian Education for the state of Montana for almost ten years, was appointed to the National Advisory Council on Indian Education by President Barack Obama and currently works at Education Northwest providing support for Native education efforts around the country.

Arthur Sze

Arthur Sze has published eleven books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021); Sight Lines, which won the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry; Compass Rose, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light; Quipu; and The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998. A new collection, The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2024. Sze is the recipient of many honors, including a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the 2021 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Jackson Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Arianne True

Arianne True will be unable to attend the 2024 Skagit River Poetry Festival due to her severe case of Long Covid, and unfortunately recovery is difficult as there are still currently no approved treatments for this illness. We wish her well and look forward to opportunities for collaboration in the future.

Arianne True (Choctaw, Chickasaw) is a disabled queer poet and teaching artist from Seattle, and has spent most of her work time working with youth. She’s received fellowships and residencies from Jack Straw, Artist Trust, and the Seattle Repertory Theater, among others, and is a proud alum of Hedgebrook and of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives in Tacoma with her cat and is always questing for high-quality dairy-free baked goods. Arianne is the 2023-2025 Washington State Poet Laureate. Learn more at https://www.arts.wa.gov/washington-state-poet-laureate/ and follow her on Instagram at @wapoetlaureate and @ariannetrue.

Michael Dylan Welch

Michael Dylan Welch has published dozens of poetry books, anthologies, and translations from Japanese, including the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in 20+ languages in Hummingbird, Kyoto Journal, One Art, Rattle, Raven Chronicles, Writer’s Chronicle, Writer’s Digest, and elsewhere. Michael is president of the Redmond Association of Spokenword, curator of SoulFood Poetry Night, and was a Jack Straw Writer and poet laureate of Redmond, Washington. He founded or cofounded the Haiku North America conference, the American Haiku Archives, the Seabeck Haiku Getaway, the Tanka Society of America, and National Haiku Writing Month (www.nahaiwrimo.com). Visit www.graceguts.com.

Robert Wrigley

Robert Wrigley has published twelve books of poems, most recently The True Account of Myself As a Bird, as well as Nemerov’s Door, a collection of essays, mostly about poetry. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry; in Best American Poetry (five times) and seven times in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. A Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Idaho, he lives with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes, in the woods near Moscow, Idaho.