Festival Poet Bios

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.

Kelli Russell Agodon is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press where she works as an editor and book cover designer. Her most recent book, Hourglass Museum, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards and shortlisted for the Julie Suk Poetry Prize. Her second book, Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room was the winner of the Foreword Indies Book of the Year for poetry and also a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards. She’s received awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation, James Hearst Poetry Prize, Artist Trust, and the Puffin Foundation. She coauthored The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice, with poet Martha Silano and is the Co-Director of Poets on the Coast. She is an avid hiker and paddleboarder. Her next collection, Dialogues with Rising Tides, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2021. www.agodon.com / www.twosylviaspress.com

Samiya Bashir most recent book of poetry, Field Theories, which won the Oregon Book Award for poetry in 2018, wends its way through quantum mechanics, chicken wings and Newports, love and a shoulder’s chill, melding blackbody theory (idealized perfect absorption, as opposed to the whitebody’s idealized reflection) with real live Black bodies in poems that span lyric, narrative, dramatic, and multi-media experience, engaging their containers while pushing against their constraints. During the six months leading up to the release of Field Theories, Bashir created six short videopoems in collaboration with video artist Roland Dahwen Wu and dancer Keyon Gaskin to remix and reimagine the work through a new medium: sound & image & light. Bashir holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as Poet Laureate, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she received two Hopwood Poetry Awards. In October 2017 she was awarded the Regional Arts & Culture Council’s Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature in recognition of individual artistic achievement and excellence to sustain and enhance her creative process. http://samiyabashir.com/

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, is forthcoming 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.

An Officer of the Order of Canada, Lorna Crozier has been acknowledged for her contributions to Canadian literature, her teaching and her mentoring with five honourary doctorates, most recently from McGill and Simon Fraser Universities. Her books have received numerous national awards, including the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry. The Globe and Mail declared The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things one of its Top 100 Books of the Year, and Amazon chose her memoir as one of the 100 books you should read in your lifetime. A Professor Emerita at the University of Victoria, she has performed for Queen Elizabeth II and has read her poetry, which has been translated into several languages, on every continent except Antarctica. Her book, What the Soul Doesn’t Want, was nominated for the 2017 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. In 2018, Lorna Crozier received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. Steven Price called Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats), her latest nonfiction book, “one of the great love stories of our time.” Lorna Crozier lives on Vancouver Island.

Laura Da’ is a poet and teacher. A lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest, Da’ studied creative writing at the University of Washington and The Institute of American Indian Arts. Da’ is Eastern Shawnee. Da’ lives near Seattle with her husband and son. She is the author of the collections Instruments of the True Measure (University of Arizona Press, 2018), winner of the Washington State Book Award, and Tributaries (University of Arizona Press, 2015), winner of the 2016 American Book Award and the chapbook The Tecumseh Motel. Her work has appeared in the anthologies New Poets of Native Nations (Graywolf Press, 2018) and Effigies II (Salt Publishing, 2014). http://www.laurada.com/

Michael Daley is a poet and novelist. Born in Boston and a long-time resident and teacher in Skagit Valley, his work is set in the rural Northwest, New England, and Eastern Europe where he’s lived as a Fulbright scholar. “An artisan of the present moment,” as Joseph Stroud called him, his recent books include Reinhabited: New & Selected Poems (Dos Madres, 2022), Telemachus, (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2022), The Madrona Project (Empty Bowl, 2022) and forthcoming, True Heresies (Cervena Barva, 2022) “Some poets are born with an internalized muse…with a will of her own…Daley is one of these hosts” (Boston Small Press Poetry Scene).

Kathleen Flenniken is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Post Romantic (University of Washington Press, 2020), a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Plume (2012), a personal history in poems about the Hanford Nuclear Site, won the Washington State Book Award and was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Her first book, Famous (2006), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was named a notable book by the National Library Association. Kathleen served as Washington State Poet Laureate from 2012-2014.