PoetsWest Directory: Who's Who in Northwest Poetry

The PoetsWest Directory includes biographical profiles of well known Northwest poets and those not well enough known. While many of the poets have achieved recognition, PoetsWest also acknowledges the strengths and special gifts of other poets. Like so many of us living in the Pacific Northwest, many poets, especially those of an earlier generation, migrated here from other regions. Poets living and writing in the Northwest are often influenced by the expansive landscape, the water, and the weather (rain, usually). They recognize humanity's ambivalent relationship with the region and are witnesses to the effects of environmental destruction and unchecked urbanization. Their poetry often reveals a spiritual connection to the Native American and Asian cultures. The associations with the environment and other cultures, however, are more contemplative or subconscious, so there is not, as one might expect, a "regional" style of poetry. Each poet, including the Native American and Asian American, has his or her own style and distinctive voice. Links to individual web sites are highlighted. The list also includes those who have died. PoetsWest owes a debt of gratitude to Cory Hutzell, Western Washington University class of 2008, for his invaluable editorial assistance in providing updates of biographical profiles of the poets and writers in these pages. The listing will expand as we compile the information.

Click on letter corresponding to last name: A B C D | E F G H I J K L | M N O P Q | R S T U V W X Y Z

Jarold Ramsey
Is universally regarded as the most important scholar of Native American folklore in Oregon, and one of the most important in the nation. He was raised on his family's homestead near Madras, Oregon. He is the author or editor of six books, including Coyote Was Going There: Indian Literature of the Oregon Country, which was voted by the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission as one of the 100 most important books about Oregon of the past 200 years. Ramsey earned a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Washington, went on to a distinguished teaching career at the University of Rochester in New York State, was the founder of the University of Rochester Summer Writers Workshop and the Storytelling Conference. His book, New Era, covers, in a series of essays, the homesteaders of his native central Oregon. An author of both non-fiction and fiction, he has also written essays on Shakespeare, modern poetry, American Indian literature and plays. Ramsey is a frequent presenter at writing workshops and seminars. He has published six books with the U. of Oregon Press and U. of Washington Press. His poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, Quarterly Review, and other magazines. His four books of poems have been published internationally. His newest book, The Piper of Cloone: Father Keegan and the Early Gaelic Revival, was published in 2005. He lives on the family homestead with his wife, Dorothy.

Belle Randall (1940 - )
Born in Ellensburg, Washington, Belle Randall grew up in Northern California, where her family moved around a lot--she went to 12 different public schools--mostly in the Bay Area. She graduated from Berkeley High in 1957. Stage struck in her teens, she won the role of St. Joan in The Lark at the University of San Francisco in a city-wide competition (1958). As an undergraduate at Berkeley and a student of Thom Gunn's, she published her first poems in Poetry (1961),and won Third Prize in the anthology The Best Poems of 1961. After living in Greenwich Village, she returned to Berkeley and, with the guitarist John Stauber, opened the Jabberwock, a cabaret. In 1969, she was awarded a Wallace Stegner fellowship to Stanford, where she was later named Jones Lecturer in Poetry Writing. Her first book of poems was 101 Different Ways of Playing Solitaire and Other Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973). Since then she has published chapbooks with Copper Canyon Press (The Orpheus Sedan), Wood Works Press, (Drop Dead Beautiful and True Love) and D-Press (The Wax Museum). Her poetry and essays have appeared in many magazines, including The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, The Threepenny Review, and PN Review (England), and, most recently, in the anthology Berkeley Daze: Berkeley poets of the 1960s. She taught for over twenty years at Cornish College of the Arts and in the University of Washington Extension Writers' Certificate Program. In 2005-7, she was awarded a National Endowment of the Arts grant in Poetry. The Coast Starlight, a new collection of poems (David Robert Books) is scheduled for release in 2010. She lives in Seattle with her husband Joe Edwards.

William M. Ransom (1945- )
A novelist, science fiction writer and poet, Bill Ransom was born in Puyallup, Washington "before the bomb, the Pentagon or Israel." He attended Washington State University on track and boxing scholarships. From 1965 to 1970 Ransom worked on building and repairing military and commercial jet engines. He has worked as a firefighter and advanced EMT. He received his B.A. in Sociology and English Education from the University of Washington in 1970 and M.A. in English from Utah State University. He studied American Minority Literature and Old and Middle English at the University of Nevada, Reno, then began a pilot project with the Poetry in the Schools program in Washington state. He founded and directed the popular Port Townsend Writers Conference and appeared in two films: An Officer and a Gentleman and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (CBS).

Bill Ransom was nominated for a National Book Award and a Pulitzer in 1974 for Finding True North and Critter, a collection of poems published by Copper Canyon Press in 1973. Three of his short stories have been selections of the PEN/NEA Syndicated Fiction Project, often called "The Pulitzer Prize of the Short Story": "Uncle Hungry," "What Elena Said" and "Learning the Ropes." His novel Jaguar was #1 for Alexandria Digital Literature in 2000 and its popularity led to its re-release as a trade paper/hardcover from Wildside Press in April 2001. Far Cry Press published his limited edition poetry chapbook, Sleight of Hand, in July, 2000. He is a long-time member of PEN's Freedom to Write Committee which helped to gain the release of imprisoned writers in China and Cuba. Bill Ransom lives in western Washington and teaches creative writing for The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Check his web site for more information www.sfwa.org/members/ransom.

Dan Raphael
Lives in Portland but performs throughout the Pacific Northwest. His newest collection When a Flying City Falls was published in 2003.

Philip Red Eagle (1945- )
The co-founder of Raven Chronicles, Philip writes poetry, fiction and essays. He was born in Tacoma, Washington and educated at the University of Washington. He received a B.F.A. in 1983 and B.A. in Journalism in 1987. Visit the web site of this award-winning and influential poet, writer, essayist, visual artist, and journalist at www.hanksville.org/storytellers/redeagle.

Carlos Reyes
Grew up in the Pacific Northwest and spent many years working in its logging camps, fisheries, and fields. He also holds advanced degrees in Romance Languages and has taught at Portland State University and the University of Maine. For thirty years he has been editor for Trask House Books, an independent publisher of poetry and fiction. He teaches poetry writing in the Artist-in-Schools program. He lives in Portland, Oregon, but also has a home in County Clare, Ireland. A finalist for the Hazel Hall Poetry Award. He has a collection of poems in English about Ireland titled Oilean Agus Oilean Eile (Two Islands) and published in 2000 by Salmon Publishing in Ireland .
His collections include:
A Suitcase Full of Crows, Bluestem, 1995 (a finalist in the Oregon Book Awards)
Nightmarks, 1990
The Shingle Weaver's Journal, Lynx House Press, 1980
At Doolin Quay (chapbook), 1980
The Orange Letters (chapbook), 1976
The Prisoner (chapbook), 1973

Susan Rich
Susan's poetry comes from her varied experiences as a member of the Peace Corps and her activities in Amnesty International. Her work has taken her to South Africa, Niger in West Africa, Gaza, and Bosnia. Recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to South Africa, Rich taught at the University of Cape Town. Her first collection of poetry The Cartographer's Tongue (White Pine Press, 2000) won the 2001 PEN West/Poetry Award and the Peace Corps Readers and Writers Award. Her poems have also appeared in PoetsWest, Christian Science Monitor, DoubleTake, Harvard Magazine, Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, Massachusetts Review, and Prism International. Awards for her poetry include the Rella Lossy Award (San Francisco Poetry Center), Ruben Rose Award (Israel), William Stafford Award, and a grant from the Academy of American Poets of Greenwall Fund. She lives in Seattle and teaches at Highline Community College in Des Moines, WA. For more information, check her web site www.susanrich.net.

Charles P. Ries
Charles lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His narrative poems, short stories, interviews and poetry reviews have appeared in over 120 print and electronic publications. He has received three Pushcart Prize nominations for his writing and most recently read his poetry on National Public Radio's Theme and Variations, a program that is broadcast over seventy NPR affiliates. He is the author of The Fathers We Find, a novel based on memory. Ries is also the author of five books of poetry - the most recent entitled, The Last Time which was released by The Moon Press in Tucson, Arizona. He is the poetry editor for Word Riot (www.wordriot.org) and Pass Port Journal (www.passportjournal.org). He is on the board of the Woodland Pattern Bookstore in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Most recently he has been appointed to the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. You may find additional samples of his work by going to: http://www.literarti.net/Ries/.

David Ritchie
Founder of the Bone River poetry performance group, David has performed at most branches of Barnes & Noble, libraries, bookstores, and was selected as a poetry performer by the city of Seattle for the celebration of the opening of the new Key Arena. His poetry and prose have appeared in over thirty national literary publications, in print and on-line, including Serpentine, Free Cuisenart, Piedmont Literary Review, The Mountaineers Magazine, Pinehurst Literary Journal, Parnassus Journal, and he was the blue ribbon award winner for the Southern Poets Association. His poetry has appeared in the United States, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Denmark, and Japan. David was the keynote speaker for the 1994 Haiku Society of America national conference. He has been poetry editor for L'Intrigue magazine and The BlueWater Journal. Teaching poetry, he was selected as a Top Ten teacher of the year for Discover U, is a member of Nature Writer's workgroup at the University of Virginia, and is a member of Advanced Poetry workshop through Penn State University. He has hosted many poetry events in the state of Washington. Short Stories Magazine recently published his first short fiction.

RaynRoberts
RaynRoberts, a poet who writes about peace, war, political and social issues was born in Jacksonville, NC and is a long-time resident of San Diego and a graduate of the University of San Diego where he studied English Literature and Religion. He currently teaches in South Korea. He’s published three books. His latest, published by Poetic Matrix Press in August 2006 is Of One and Many Worlds. The Fires of Spring, a collection of Buddhist poems, is reviewed by editors at The Golden Lantern and Poetic Voices. In 2006 he was included by Evolving Editions in their interfaith understanding series Illuminations.

His work appears in the printed anthologies: The Book of Hope and The World Healing Book from Beyond Borders Press ~ In the Arms of Words: Poems for Disaster Relief by Foothills Publishing and Sherman Asher and The Philosophical Library of Escondido California's New Anthology entitled Paths. He is also found in Journals Chronogram, The Golden Lantern, Sauce Box, Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry, Rattle, Rattapallax, Retort Magazine, City Works, The Sow's Ear Review, Poetic Voices, Voices in Wartime, PoetsWest, Thunder Sandwich, The Pedestal Magazine, Fireweed, Poet's Corner in Fieralingue and others. He toured the country in 2003 to promote a collection of experimental and traditional forms, Jazz Cocktails and Soapbox Songs. His books are available on Amazon and Poetic Matrix Press: www.poeticmatrix.com. For more info., just google the name RaynRoberts.

Judith Roche
Judith received her B.A.from Eastern Michigan University and her M.A. from the New College of California. She is well known as an organizer and collaborater for the arts, including Bumbershoot. She was co-editor of First Fish, First People, Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim, U of Washington Press, 1998 (winner of The American Book Award). Her poetry books include Myrrh: My Life As a Screamer, Black Heron Press, 1993, and Ghosts. Her poetry, articles and reviews have appeared in numerous national and local publications.

J. Andrew Rodriguez
Is the author of Robins Facing South from Red Mountain Press www.RedMountainPress.com. Born and raised near Corpus Christi, Texas, Rodriquez spent seven of his most formative adult years in Oklahoma, where he went to study law at the University of Oklahoma College of Law soon after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin. A job in El Paso to work in the undocumented alien legalization program in the mid-1980s led Rodriquez to travel throughout the United States. This included the Pacific Northwest, where he returned permanently in 1990 after ending his active practice of law. Another job, this time with state government, again led to travel which allowed Rodriquez to explore the various and diverse regions of Washington State. An extensive consulting assignment in Mississippi in 1992 led to life-changing encounters with the cultures and peoples of the deep South. Rodriquez continues to write poetry and fiction, in addition to essays and commentaries. Rodriquez's commentaries have appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (one had to do with the death of his friends in the terrorist bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building). A guest commentary also aired on National Public Radio affiliate KPLU (Tacoma-Seattle). Rodriquez lives and writes in Seattle.

Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)
Roethke's influence as a master craftsman in poetry and demanding teacher continues to resonate among Northwest poets. The Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Reading, begun in 1964, is usually held on a date near his birthday (May 25). This free annual event is held in Roethke Auditorium on the University of Washington campus.
Roethke was born and raised in Saginaw, Michigan, where his father, Otto Roethke, ran a greenhouse until his death when Roethke was fourteen years old. The greenhouse, where the young Roethke was expected to make himself useful, and his father's death figure prominently in much of Roethke's poetry, especially in The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948), Praise to the End! (1951) and The Far Field (1964). After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1929, he did a brief stint at Harvard before returning to Michigan for his master's degree. Always popular with his students, he taught at Bennington College in Vermont and Lafayette College in Pennsylvania before coming to the University of Washington in the fall of 1947. During these years he was plagued by a series of mental breakdowns complicated by hard drinking.

His many awards and honors include a Guggenheim fellowship twice, the Pulitzer in 1954 for The Waking: Poems 1933-1953, both the Bollingen (1958) and the National Book Award (1959) for Words for the Wind, D.Litt. in 1962 from the University of Michigan, the Shelley Memorial Award and the Poetry Society of America Prize (both in 1962), and the National Book Award (1965) for The Far Field. Well known both in Europe and the United States, he was at his creative peak when he died of a heart attack while swimming in a friend's pool on Bainbridge Island, Washington. The accompanying list is only a representative selection of his writings:

The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, Doubleday, 1966
The Far Field, Doubleday, 1964
I Am! Says the Lamb, Doubleday, 1961
Words for the Wind, Doubleday, 1958
The Waking: Poems 1933-1953, Doubleday, 1953
Praise to the End!, Doubleday, 1951
The Lost Son and Other Poems, Doubleday, 1948
Open House, Knopf, 1941.

Marjorie Rommel
Born in 1943 in Auburn, where she still lives, graduated from Auburn High School in 1961, attended Green River and Highline colleges, University of Washington, and Pacific Lutheran University. Graduated Rainier Writing Workshop Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU in 2007. Former logging truck driver, logging camp cook, hash house waitress, newspaper reporter-photographer-editor, publicist, creative writing instructor at Highline and Pierce colleges, visiting lecturer at Pacific Lutheran University. Willard R. Espy Literary Foundation resident, 2000; Adam Family Foundation White Bridge Traveling Fellowship to live and write in Teton Valley, 2001. Co-founder The Northwest Renaissance, a nonprofit coalition of poets and writers continuously active in the Puget Sound area since the mid-70s. Coordinated the Kent Arts Commission-funded NWR program, Poets at the Kent Canterbury Faire, an annual August reading/workshop and chapbook series, through the Faire's 20-year run. The series continues with Kent Arts Commission sponsorship as Poets@Kent Cornucopia! in July. Her work has appeared in PoetsWest, Arnazella's Reading List, The Duckabush Journal, Signal International, Mr. Cogito, Stone Drum, Images, The Written Arts, Washington Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, Writer's Northwest Handbook (Media Weavers 1991), Voices in the Trees (Evergreen Press 1989), and (GodZillah Gospel Press 1995). Contact: mrommel@qwest.net.

Rachel Rose
Currently living in Vancouver, B.C, she holds dual US/Canadian citizenship. Her poetry collection, Giving My Body to Science (McGill/Queen's University Press) won the 2000 A.M. Klein Poetry Award from the Quebec Writers' Federation. The book also was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award, Pat Lowther Award and the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal. Her work has also been published in The Best American Poetry 2001, The Seattle Review, Poetry, Verse, The Malahat Review, and The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Eugene Ruggles (1935-2004)
Poet and activist, known for his "deep image" verse and for organizing poetry reading benefits in San Francisco, Petaluma and Sonoma County, California. Born Dec. 4, 1935 in Pontiac, Michigan, he moved to San Francisco in the early 1960s and became a regular in North Beach bars and cafes. His work appeared in numerous literary journals, and his only book, Lifeguard in the Snow, (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1977) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize." Ruggles often wrote about his upbringing on a Michigan dairy farm, his children, the downtrodden and the need for justice. His many causes included Amnesty International, Vietnam War opponents and the Native Americans of Alcatraz. He died June 3, 2004.

Cathy Ruiz
Has has shared her work in print and on stage with several venues, including PoetsSpeak, KUOW Radio, a poetry performance group, The Sound of Three Hawks, WPA's 2004 Burning Word Festival, and elsewhere. Her poems have appeared in Raven Chronicles, Chrysanthemum, PoetsWest, and in three poetry anthologies. She is also a published travel essayist and novelist. Has a Master's degree in the Humanities. Recipient of the 2004 Native Writer's Circle of the America's (US and Canada) Her first poetry book, Stirring up the Waters, is due in print in the fall of 2007 from Salt Publishing, Ltd. Of Canadian Metis (Cree & Scottish-French) ancestry on her mother's side and of Mexican-American ancestry on her father's. She currently teaches at College of the Siskiyous in Mt. Shasta, California.

Vern Rutsala
Of Finnish descent, Vern Rutsala is a native of Idaho. He was educated at Reed College (B.A., 1956) and the University of Iowa (M.F.A., 1960). He lives in Oregon and taught Modern British literature, modern poetry, poetry and fiction writing at Lewis & Clark College before retiring. Widely published, he has been the recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship 1982), a fellowship twice from the National Endowment for the Arts (1975, 1979), the Carolyn Kizer Poetry Prize, and a masters fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission.
A partial list of his titles includes:
Little Known Sports, Massachusetts, 1994 (Winner of the Juniper Prize)
Selected Poems, Story Line Press, Brownsville, Oregon, 1991
Ruined Cities, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1987
Backtracking, Story Line Press, 1985
Walking Home From the Icehouse, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1981
Paragraphs (Prose poems), Wesleyan, 1978
The Journey Begins, University of Georgia Press, 1976
The Window: Poems, Wesleyan University Press, 1964.

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Florence Sage
A college social sciences teacher and counselor, she founded the Monday Mike for spoken word at The River Theater in Astoria, Oregon, where she lives. She performs her poetry for theater and radio productions, co-coordinates the annual Fisher Poets Gathering, hosting its open mikes, is the first poetry editor for hipfish arts & culture monthly, and writes reviews and columns for coastal publications. She has read with OSPA winners at Powell's, and read and hosted readings at Barnes & Noble in Portland. Her publication credits include PoetsWest, Rain Magazine, hipfish, Verseworks, and Award-Winning Poetry2000 of Seattle Pen Women. She has received awards from OSPA and the Washington Poets Association.

Ralph Salisbury
Born with a bi-cultural heritage (Cherokee father and Irish American mother), he grew up hunting and trapping and working on the family farm that had no electricity or running water. A veteran of World War II, he has had a long and distinguished career in teaching, writing and translating. Besides the University of Oregon, Salisbury taught at Drake University, Texas A & M University, and he has been a Fulbright Professor in Germany and Norway. He has been featured on radio and television, and he has given many readings and workshops for universities, public schools and cultural organizations across the United States and abroad. and is currently Professor Emeritus of the University of Oregon.

His poems and stories have been widely published in the U.S., Great Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy, Norway, France, and India. Salisbury is the author of two books of short fiction and nine books of poetry. His most recent work is Blind Pumper at the Well, published in 2008. His translations include the poetry of Sami poet Nils-Aslak Valkeapaa, published as The Trekways of the Wind (University of Arizona, 1994) and The Sun, My Father, also by Valkeapaa and co-translated with Lars Nordstrom and Harald Gaski (University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1997. Spirit Beast Chant has been translated into Hindi, Urdu and Bengali; another work, Poesie Da Un Retaggio Cherokee appeared in Italian.
His awards include the Rockefeller Bellagio Award in fiction, the Northwest Poetry Award, the Chapelbrook Award, two Fulbright professorships, to Germany and Norway; and an Amparts (USIS) lectureship in India. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Northwest Review from 1965-1970 and Editor of A Nation Within, an anthology of American Indian writing, Outriggers Press, New Zealand, 1983.

His other publications include:
War in the Genes (poems), Cherry Grove Editions, 2005
Rainbow of Stone (poems), University of Arizona Press, 2000, Oregon Book Award finalist
The Last Rattlesnake Throw (stories), University of Oklahoma Press, 1998
One Indian and Two Chiefs (stories), Navajo C. College Press, 1993
A White Rainbow: Poems of a Cherokee Heritage, Blue Cloud Press, 1985
Going to the Water, Pacific House Books, 1983
Spirit Beast Chant, Blue Cloud Press, 1982
Pointing at the Rainbow, Blue Cloud Press, 1982
Ghost Grapefruit and Other Poems, Ithaca House, 1972
Poesie Da Un Retaggio Cherokee, Multimedia Edizioni Salerno, Italy 1995, Tr. Prof. Fedora Giordano.

Willa Schenberg
A poet, essayist and artist, she won the Hazel Hall Award for Poetry at the 2002 Oregon Book Awards for her second book In The Margins Of The World. Some of the poems incorporate Yiddish words, Israeli sites, Hebrew history and ethnic oppression. Willa's poems have been widely published in literary journals including American Poetry Review, Tikkun, Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends, Salmagundi, Michigan Quarterly Review, Southern Poetry Review, Exquisite Corpse, DoubleTake, and Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust, and in the anthologies Claiming The Spirit Within: A Source book of Women's Poetry from Beacon Press, and Rage Before Pardon: Poets of the World Bear Witness to the Holocaust published by Northwestern University Press. Her poem "Biscuits" was read a by Garrison Keillor in "The Writers Almanac."

She has lived in Boston, Knoxville, Israel and Halifax, and now makes her home in Portland, Oregon. She spent 1992 to 1993 in Cambodia, working for the UN Transitional Authority. She has been a poetry fellow at Yaddo and MacDowell, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and served as poet-in-residence at the Tyrone Gutherie Center in Ireland. Willa is also a clay sculptor, photographer and social worker in private practice. She has won two Oregon Literary Arts fellowships in poetry, and received a grant from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her first volume of poetry Box Poems was published by alicejamesbooks. Her third collection of poetry Storytelling In Cambodia was published by Calyx Books in 2006. A poem about her father returning as a ghost appears in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror 2006, Nineteenth Annual Collection, St. Martin's Press.

Victory Lee Schouten

Originally from Central Washington's Yakima Valley, Victory Lee Schouten has made her home on Whidbey Island for the past nineteen years. While both places strongly inform her poetry, it is the human experiences that imbue her work with the warmth and insights for which she is known.

Victory has been in poetry's thrall for most of her life, but totally fell as a high schooler after hearing Gary Snyder read and speak at Colorado State University. She suddenly knew she'd stumbled upon her path and her passion. Many years later the path remains true. Long engaged in serving poetry and community, Victory has served two terms as Vice President and two terms as President of the Washington Poets Association, and was one of the founders of the WPA's annual Burning Word poetry festival. She is the recipient of the 2008 Faith Beamer Cooke Award from the WPA for her service to the poetry community.

Schouten's work has appeared in a number of anthologies, she has recorded two spoken word CDs Selections from Wolf Love and Here to Have Words with You, and published two poetry chapbooks, Wolf Love, and Snapshots from a Moving Life. She has been a featured reader at Seattle's Frye Museum, Tacoma's Distinguished Writers Series, and at many other regional venues. She can be reached at victory@robschouten.net.

Douglas Schuder
Douglas Schuder, native of Virginia, served in the US Army Security Agency in Berlin, Germany, just before the "Wall" was erected. He has a B.A. in English from SUNY at Buffalo and M.A. in English from the University of Washington. He has lived in Seattle since 1968 and has been writing since 1993. He is a fly-fisher, mycologist, student of yoga. He admits to a preference for the more formal properties of language (as regards diction, syntax, overall tone) apart from rhyme, regular meter, or genre. His book of poems, To Enter the Stillness, was published June, 2000 by Rose Alley Press, Seattle.

Tina Schumann (1964- )
Is past vice-president of the board of directors for Seattle Poetry Festival/Eleventh Hour Productions. Her work has appeared in various publications including Synapse, Chrysanthemum, Cranky Literary Journal, PoetsWest, Enopoetica: A Collection of Poetry Inspired by Wine, Pontoon # 4, an Anthology of Washington State Poets (Floating Bridge Press), and Snow Monkey. She is a degree candidate in the MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University and a graduate of the University of Washington's certificate program in Advanced Poetry Writing. She has been a featured reader at Wit's End, Open Books-A Poem Emporium, the First Friday Readings in Bremerton and the It's About Time Poetry Readings.

Leonard Schwartz
Is the author of several collections of poetry, including Ear And Ethos (Talisman House, 2005), The Tower of Diverse Shores (Talisman House, 2003), Words Before the Articulate: New and Selected Poems (Talisman House), Gnostic Blessing (Goats and Compasses), Meditation (Cloud House), Objects of Thought, Attempts at Speech (Gnosis Press) and Exiles: Ends (Red Dust Press), and a collection of essays, A Flicker At The Edge Of Things: Essays on Poetics 1987-97 (Spuyten Duyvil). In recent years he has read from his work at international festivals, conferences, and universities in China, Turkey, France, Belgium, Portugal, Russia, Argentina, and Peru. In 1997 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Currently teaches at The Evergreen State College in Olympia WA, where he hosts Cross-Cultural Poetics on KAOS radio.

Stephen Scobie (1943- )

James Scofield(1941- )
Born in Seattle, James Scofield now lives in Olympia, Washington. He has been writing poetry for thirty-three years. He has been published throughout the United States, with his poems appearing in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Boston Literary Review, Owen Wister Review, Yellow Silk, Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, and his essays in Harper's magazine and The Wilson Quarterly. His poems have been published in England by The University of Hull and The University of Bath, and in Canada, France, and India.

"I wrote every day for six years, producing only twenty-six poems. I then threw them away as I felt they had not reflected maturity as a poet. The habit of writing every day, and producing poems very slowly continues to this day. After almost twenty-five years of so writing, I finally produced thirty poems I wanted to keep. They became my first book of poems, Thirty Poems. One reason I produce slowly is that it is my discipline to subject each poem to about 100 drafts, and then to let the poem set unread for six months to a year at which time I do a last draft and release it. Most of my poems have been influenced by the belief that one of our society's deepest repressions is that of our mortality, and of the sufferings of the poor. Therefore, they are, for the most part, poems of darkness and death. An example would be "The Children's Corner" or "Anne" from Thirty Poems."

Thirty Poems, published by Sulphur River Literary Review Press, Austin, Texas, in 1998, was nominated for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize. The book is available from University Book Store in Seattle and Open Books: A Poem Emporium.

James Scofield has now completed his second book of poems, Remember Me, Whispers the Dust, consisting largely of poems begun during those twenty-six years he talks about. His first book publisher retired after almost twenty years of publishing, so Scofield is hunting for a new publisher. He is also at work on a collection of essays titled,God in the Land of Wheaties."

Peter Sears
Is the author of two books of poetry: The Brink, the winning manuscript of a national competition sponsored by Gibbs Smith Publisher; and Tour: New & Selected Poems from Breitenbush Books. He has also written four chapbooks of poetry. His work has been widely published and has appeared in The Atlantic, Zyzzyva, Northwest Review, Rolling Stone, Southern Poetry Review, Mother Jones, Antioch Review, Poetry Northwest, Mademoiselle, Poetry Now, Iowa Review, New Letters, and The New York Times. In 1999 Sears was awarded the Steward H. Holbrook Award from Literary Arts, Inc. He currently resides in Corvallis, Oregon.

Roy R. Seitz
Drew the pirate and never heard back from the arts institute, so he fell over sideways, into poetry. In a past life, he was a journeyman carpenter, and currently is a lab-rat for a medical study. His poems have been published in Voices in Wartime and on the Poets Against the War web site. A member of PoetsWest and the WPA and a veteran of Vietnam, he lives in Index, Washington. R. R. Seitz's debut collection, Right Here Right Now (Brass Weight Press, 2006), is based on his experiences as a sniper in Vietnam. He appears frequently at readings throughout Puget Sound and features at the Veterans for Peace conference the summer of 2007.

Martha Silano
Born and raised in New Jersey. Is the author of two books of poems, Blue Positive (Steel Toe Books, 2006) and What the Truth Tastes Like, 1998 winner of the William and Kingman Page Poetry Book Award and published by Nightshade Press. Her poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Green Mountains Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Cincinnati Review, as well as anthologies such as American Poetry: the Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon U. Press 1999) and Not for Mother's Only: On Child-Getting and Child Rearing (Fence Books 2007). She has been nominated for four Pushcart Awards and is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP award. She has been a writer in residence at the Millay Colony, the Arizona Poetry Center, the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts, and the Marjorey Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Retreat. A graduate of Grinnell College and the University of Washington, Martha lives in Seattle, WA with her husband, Langdon Cook. Her website is http://www.marthasilano.com.

Sarah Singer
The author of three books of poetry, Sarah Singer has won more than fifty awards for her poetry. She was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. and educated at New York University. She has had a long and distinguished career in poetry circles—president of the Seattle branch of The National League of American Pen Women from 1992 to 1994; executive director of the Reading Series for The Poetry Society of America from 1979 to 1983; consulting editor from 1976 to 1981 for Poet Lore; and vice-president of The Poetry Society of America from 1974 to 1978. She is a member of The Poetry Society of America, PEN, Poets & Writers, and a board member of the Washington Poets Association and PoetsWest. She is listed in numerous directories, including Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, Who's Who of American Women, Who's Who in the West, Who's Who in Entertainment, PEN, and Poets & Writers.

Her most recent awards include:
2003 Lifetime Achievement Award from PoetsWest
Spring, 2002 — First place Carl Aden Award from the Washington Poets Association
Spring, 2001 — Second place and honorable mention Carl Aden Award from the Washington Poets Association
Spring, 2000 — First place Della Crowder Memorial Award (for a Petrarchan Sonnet)
Spring, 2000 — First place Della Crowder Memorial Free Verse Award
Spring, 2000 — Third place Marion Doyle Poetry Memorial Award
Spring, 2000 — Third place Catherine Cushman Leach Poetry Award

She also received honorable mentions in the Anita Marie Boggs Memorial Award and the Anna Marx Sestina Award (2000). She won first prize in the structured verse category in the international contest sponsored by the Palomar Branch of the National League of American Pen Women (1999), an honorable mention (2000) and first prize (1998) in the Carlin Aden Award given by the Washington Poets Association. More recently she was among the top ten winners in the structured verse category in a contest sponsored by Writers Digest. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies including American Women Poets, International Who's Who in Poetry, Diamond Anthology of The Poetry Society of America, Filtered Images, PoetsWest, and in newspapers and periodicals including The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor,Commentary, Yankee, McCall's, The Fiddlehead, The Lyric, etc.

Sarah Singer's poetry collections are:
The Gathering, William L. Bauhan Publisher, New Hampshire, 1992
Of Love and Shoes, William L. Bauhan, 1987
After the Beginning, William L. Bauhan, 1975.

Robin Skelton (1925-1997)
One of Canada's most distinguished (or eccentric, according to one's point of view) poets and critics, he taught creative writing at the University of Victoria, B.C. Born in England, he served in the R.A.F. during WWII, then immigrated to British Columbia in the early sixties. The author (and/or editor) of perhaps a hundred books, he served for several years as editor of The Malahat Review. He was a scholar with many different interests, literary and other, including the occult. He was a good friend of Charles Lillard.

Robin Skelton's collections of poetry include:
One Leaf Shaking: Collected Later Poems 1977-1990, Beach Holme Publishers,1996
Lens of Crystal, Old Stile Press,1996
Ballad of Billy Barker, Reference West,1995
The Edge of Time, Ronsdale Press,1995
Patmos and Other Poems, Routledge & Kegan Paul,1995
Three for Nick, Pharos Press, Victoria,1995
Wrestling the Angel: Collected Shorter Poems, 1947-1977, Beach Holme Publishers,1994
I Am Me, Sono Nis Press, Victoria,1994
The Secret, Adlar Publications, Victoria,1994
Islands, Ekstasis Editions, Victoria,1994
Distances, Porcupine's Quill, Erin, Ontario,1985
Georges Zuk, Porcupine's Quill,1982
Musebook, Pharos Press, Victoria,1972
The Hunting Dark, McClelland and Stewart/André Deutsch,1971
The Irish Album, Dolmen Press, Dublin,1969
Selected poems,1947-1967, McClelland & Stewart,1968
An Irish Gathering, Dolmen Press, Dublin,1964
Poetry, English Universities Press, London,1962
Begging the Dialect, Oxford University Press, London,1960.

A partial list of his other writings include:
The Shapes of Our Singing: A Guide to the Metres and Set Forms of the World, Eastern Washington University Press,
Celtic Contrairies, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse,1990
Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Pre-Christian and Pagan Elements in British Songs, Rhymes and Ballads (with Margaret Blackwood), Arkana, London,1990
Memoirs of a Literary Blockhead (autobiography),1988
Six Poets of British Columbia, Sono Nis, Victoria, B.C.,1980
Two Hundred Poems from the Greek Anthology (selected and translated by Robin Skelton), University of Washington Press, Seattle,1971
The Writings of J.M. Synge, Thames and Hudson, London,1971
The Cavalier Poets, Oxford University Press, New York,1970
Five Poets of the Pacific Northwest, University of Washington Press, Seattle,1964
Six Irish Poets, Oxford University Press,1962
The Poetic Pattern, University of California Press, Berkeley,1956.

Judith Skillman (1954- )
Judith was born in Syracuse, New York, holds an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Maryland, and has done postgraduate work in Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. Skillman is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, The King County Arts Commission, and the Washington State Arts Commission. She has had residencies at Centrum and Hedgebrook Cottages for Women.

Currently she is an adjunct faculty member at City University. Many Northwest poets have influenced Skillman. Beth Bentley's workshops in verse writing at the University of Washington were tremendously important to her. Free verse is her preferred mode of writing, but she attempts to conform words to music using a three or four beat line in stanzas of equal length. In addition to writing poems, she is a closet violinist.

In 1998 her book, Storm, published by Blue Begonia Press, received the Eric Mathieu King Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her recent book, Latticework, was inspired by the quilts of Erika Carter. Her tenth book Heat Lightning, New and Selected Poems 1986 -2006, was published by Silverfish Review Press. The Carnival of All or Nothing was a finalist in the American Poetry Journal contest and is forthcoming from Cervéna Barva Press. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, FIELD, JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, and many other journals. An educator, editor, and translator, Judith lives with her husband in Kennydale, Washington. Please see www.judithskillman.com for more information.

Judy Skillman's books:
The Carnival of All or Nothing, Cervéna Barva Press, forthcoming March, 2009
Anne Marie Derése in Translation & The Green Parrot, Ahadada Books, 2008
The Body of Pain, Lily Press, 2007
Heat Lightning: New and Selected Poems 1986 2006, Silverfish Review Press, 2006
Coppelia, Certain Digressions, David Robert Books, 2006
Opalescence, David Robert Books, 2005
Latticework, David Robert Books, 2004
Circe's Island, Silverfish Review Press, 2003
Red Town, Silverfish Review Press, 2001
Sweetbrier, Blue Begonia Working Signs Series, 2001
Storm, Blue Begonia, 1998
Beethoven and the Birds, Blue Begonia Press, 1996
Worship of the Visible Spectrum, Breitenbush Books, 1988

Knute Skinner
Skinner taught literature and poetry writing at Western Washington University, where he is an Emeritus Professor of English. He has taught poetry workshops for the Washington Poets Association and at a number of American universities. Readings at over 100 universities, high schools, festivals, etc., including Columbia University, University of Connecticut, Tufts University, SUNY-Brockport, SUNY-Binghamton, SUNY-Oneonta, Colgate University, Lewis and Clark College, Wheelock College, Hiram College, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, University of Wisconsin-Parkside, Highline Community College, The Big Horror Poetry Series (Binghamton, NY), Ennis Arts Festival, Colorado State University, The New University of Ulster, Eastern Washington University, Jr. College of Albany, Moorhead State University, and A Poetry Event (Longview, WA). Honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Governor's Invitational Writers' Day Certificate of Recognition (Washington State), and residencies awarded by the Huntington Hartford Foundation, Fundación Valparaíso, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Founding editor of The Bellingham Review. Director of and book editor for the Signpost Press Inc., 1977-1995. Skinner also maintains a home in Killaspuglanane, County Clare, with his spouse, Edna Faye Kiel, who is the subject of a number of his poems.

BOOKS OF POETRY:
Stretches, Salmon Publishing (Ireland), 2002
The Cold Irish Earth: Selected Poems of Ireland, 1965-1995, Salmon Publishing (Ireland), 1996
What Trudy Knows and Other Poems, Salmon Publishing (Ireland), 1994
The Bears and Other Poems, Salmon Publishing (Ireland), 1991
Learning to Spell Zucchini, Salmon Publishing (Ireland), 1988
Selected Poems, Aquila Press (England), 1985
Hearing of the Hard Times, Northwoods Press, 1981
A Close Sky Over Killaspuglonane, Dolmen Press (Ireland), 1968; 2nd ed., Burton
International, 1975

POETRY CHAPBOOKS:
Greatest Hits 1964-2000, Pudding House Publications, 2001
An Afternoon Quiet and Other Poems, Pudding House Publications, 1998
The Cold Irish Earth, Trask House, 1993
The Flame Room, The Folly Press, 1983
The Sorcerers: A Laotian Tale, Goliards Press, 1972
In Dinosaur Country, Pierian Press, 1969

OTHER PUBLICATIONS:
Poems in about fifty anthologies, including A Geography of Poets, PoetsWest, Irish Poetry Now: Other Voices, An Introduction to Poetry, Light Year, and Strong Measures. Poems in about 700 issues of periodicals, including The New Republic, Shenandoah, Chicago Review, Sewanee Review, Colorado Quarterly, Antioch Review, Prism International, New Statesman, Poetry Australia, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry NOW, Cambridge Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry Seattle, Mid-American Review, Ohio Review, London Review of Books, The London Magazine, The Florida Review, The Hollins Critic, New Irish Writing, and The Quarterly. Fiction in Limbo, Quartet, Short Story & Poetry Yearbook, Midland Review, The Salmon, and Famous Reporter.

Tom Smario
Is the author of seven books of poetry and makes his living as an orthopedic technician at Kaiser Hospital in Portland. A chance encounter at a reading of Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, turned him into a lifelong appreciator of poetry and poet. Then, while working as a teacher's aid at San Quentin, Smario was asked to act as a cornerman for a classmate from Laney College in Oakland. A cornerman does whatever it takes to address the wounds of the fighter before the next bell rings. The classmate was fighting in an exhibition game against inmates in San Quentin, and Smario's two callings merged. Smario has worked 147 professional bouts over the last thirteen years, including seven world championships and numerous title fights. Smario's two most recent collections of poetry are Notes of a Cornerman (2000) and Knuckle Sandwiches. In addition to writing poetry, working his full-time job, and ministering to boxing lacerations, Smario trains fighters at the Grand Avenue Gym in Portland, Oregon.

James Snydal (1949- )
His poetry collections include Blueberry Pie (1998), Living in America (1997), Flower in a Guardsman's Gun (1996), and Near the Cathedral (1995).

Kristen Spexarth
Born in Dayton, Ohio, she was transplanted to Mercer Island, Washington when she was eleven. She went to Japan as an exchange student and then the University of Chicago. She graduated with a BA from Vassar College and an MA from the University of California, at Berkeley (UCB) in Asian Studies. Settling in El Cerrito, California, she did volunteer work in the community and raised a family. Wanting a career in horticulture, she resumed her studies in the community college system. Starting with landscape design and installation, she broadened her working experience at the organic vegetable and native plant gardens of Mudd's Restaurant/Crow Canyon Gardens in San Ramon, California. Another shift in focus to estate gardening brought her to UCB's Blake Garden in Kensington, California and then back to the Northwest where she joined the Grounds Maintenance staff at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Her desire to find self-expression through the written word began during her year in Japan in 1965 and the inspired instruction of her freshman English teacher at the University of Chicago, the poet Henry Rago. Throughout the years, Kristen continued to write. With her eldest son's traumatic death, the foundations of her life were torn away and writing was all that was left. Events following Colby's suicide taught her that she needed to reach out to others who were grieving, and thus Passing Reflections www.passingreflections.com was born.

Ann Spiers
Holds a B.A. in English Literature and M.A. in Creative Writing and Literature both from the UW, and Certificate in Environmental Project Management, also from the UW. and is a multi-talented writer of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and plays. She is also a teacher, performer, and active organizer and juror in the arts community.

Her books of poetry include:
Long Climb into Grace (Foothills Publishing, 2007)
Volcano Blue ((May Day Press, Vashon Island, 1999)
Tide Turn (1996)
The Herodotus Poems (Brooding Heron Press, Waldron Island, 1989)
The Mixer (Wholly Names Press, Seattle, 1976)

Her work has also been widely published in numerous journals and anthologies. She was founding co-editor (1980) and cover editor (1978-85) of The Seattle Review, University of Washington, and also co-founder of Pioneer Playwright's Lab (1984). She hosted and co-produced the radio production Iamb Said the Lamb (KRAB, 1976-1982). She has served as a member of the King County Arts Commission and has done extensive work as a performance playwright. As well as teaching, Ann Spiers manages environmental and stewardship projects for land trusts. She is a recipient of many awards and grants, including a 2002 Writers Residency at the Willard R. Espy Foundation in Oysterville, Washington State Arts Commission (1991, 1988, 1987, 1986), 1983 Bumbershoot Fiction Fellowship, 1979 King County Arts Commission Works-in-Progress, and others.

Kim Stafford
Kim Stafford, the son of William and Dorothy Stafford, is an award-winning poet and writer of songs as well as prose. His book of essays, Having Everything Right: Essays of Place, won a Western States Book Award citation for excellence in 1986. A graduate of the University of Oregon (B.A., 1971; M.A., 1973; Ph.D., 1979), he teaches at Lewis & Clark College in Portland and is Artist in Residence and Director of its Northwest Writing Institute. He also is the Literary Executor for the William Stafford Archive. Well known throughout the Pacific Northwest and California as a speaker, story-teller, singer-performer, and oral historian, Kim celebrates "human experience, the quiet voices of local life everywhere." His most recent volume of poetry, A Thousand Friends of Rain: New & Selected Poems, was published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press in 1999. His most recent book, Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford (memoir) received a PNBA award in 2003. Visit Kim Stafford's World of Affinities at www.lclark.edu/~krs.

William Stafford (1914-1993)
His friend, Marvin Bell, described William Stafford as a "genuinely admirable man, with a life made out of whole cloth." One of the most loved Northwest poets, William Stafford was born in Kansas and was graduated from the University of Kansas in 1937. A conscientious objector and peace-loving man, he served in a civilian capacity at forestry camps and social agencies during WWII. After the war he earned his master's degree at the U of Kansas, and in 1948 began his long teaching career in the English Department at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. During the teaching years he earned his Ph.D. from the U of Iowa, raised a family, and produced an impressive amount of writing—more than sixty volumes of poetry and nonfiction, as well as contributions to anthologies and reviews. His first book of poetry, West of Your City, was published in 1960. He taught and traveled widely throughout the central and western U.S. and lectured for the U.S. Information Agency in the Middle East. The recipient of many awards, he was Oregon's Poet Laureate. Click on the Friends of William Stafford web site - a rich resource to the life and work of William Stafford as well as to other poetry and literary resources.

Joannie Kervran Stangeland
A Jack Straw artist-in-residence in 2003, her work has appeared in Seattle Review, Crab Creek Review, Tulane Review, Illya's Honey, Pontoon, and on the buses. Her first chapbook, A Steady Longing for Flight, won the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award in 1995. Her second poetry collection, Weathered Steps, was published in 2002 by Rose Alley Press. Her poetry has also appeared in PoetsWest, Fine Madness, Seattle Review, Rattapallax, Crab Creek Review, and more recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Chaffin Journal and Plainsongs. She lives with her family in Seattle.

Clemens Starck (1937-)
Clemens Starck was born in Rochester, New York. After dropping out of Princeton, he continued his education on the road, riding freight trains and working at a variety of jobs around the country. He has been a ranch hand in eastern Oregon, a newspaper reporter on Wall Street, a door to door salesman, and a merchant seaman. For forty years he worked construction up and down the West Coast, as a carpenter and carpenter foreman on projects of all kinds, from bridge-building to cabinet-making. Starck retired from Oregon State University's Facilities Services in 1996. He has three grown children and lives with his wife on forty-three acres in the foothills of the Coast Range, outside of Dallas, Oregon.

As a poet he has received a scholarship from the Breadloaf Writers Conference as well as a grant and year-long residence at the Helene V. Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. In 1998 he was the Witter Bynner Fellow and poet-in-residence at Willamette University, where he taught on several previous occasions.

His poems have appeared in numerous magazines over the years, and in anthologies ranging from Walter Lowenfels' Where is Vietnam? (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1966) to the recent compilation of work writing, A Richer Harvest: the Literature of Work in the Pacific Northwest (OSU Press, 1999). He has given readings in San Francisco and throughout the Northwest. A collection of his work, Journeyman's Wages, was published by Story Line Press in 1995. The book received the William Stafford Memorial Poetry Award from the Pacific Northwest Bookseller's Association and the 1996 Oregon Book Award for Poetry.

Studying Russian on Company Time, an account in verse and prose of his involvement with Russia and the Russian language, was published in 1999 by Silverfish Review Press and was a finalist for the 1999 Oregon Book Award. His full-length collection of poems, China Basin, published by Story Line Press in 2002, was a finalist for the 2003 Oregon Book Award. His latest collection, Traveling Incognito, was published in 2003 by Wood Works.

Ann Coleman Stevenson
Is a graduate of the Folklore Institute at Indiana University. She also holds a Master's in Writing from Portland State University where she is an adjunct instructor in the English Department, teaching poetry writing workshops and literature courses. In 2002 she was Assistant Editor of The Portland Review and Coordinator for PSU's Literary Art Council. Her poems have appeared in The Portland Review and Born Magazine, and forthcoming in Louisiana Literature, Mid-American Review, Southern Indiana Review, and Fireweed.

Primus St. John
Dreamer, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1990
Love Is Not a Consolation; It Is a Light, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1982

Robert Sund (1929-2001)
A beloved native Northwest poet, Sund was considered by many to be the region's unofficial poet laureate. Sund was an exacting craftsman, not only in his writing, but also in his painting, music (autoharp), and calligraphy. He was also a master at woodworking. His aesthetic standards kept his published collections to a minimum; they include two small volumes, As Though the Word Blue Had Been Dropped Into the Water and The Hides of White Horses Shedding Rain. His two books include the award-winning Ish River, a celebration of rivers in western Washington with names ending in "ish."
Ish River: Poems, North Point Press, 1983, (Winner of Washington State Governor's Award, 1984)
Bunch Grass, U of Washington Press, 1969. Poems from Ish River Country, a collection of his work, was published in 2004 by Shoemaker and Hoard. Robert Sund's last will and testament established a trust, with a board of trustees, to receive and oversee his work, and to build his long cherished vision of a "poet's house" with three separate residences for visiting artists-a poet, a potter, and a calligrapher. Check the Robert Sund Poet's House web site for poetry and biographical information www.poetshousetrust.org.

Christine Swanberg
Christine Swanberg has been writing, publishing, and recycling her poetry for two decades. She believes that each poem should reach as many people as possible through the written venue and through vibrant oral readings. She writes about everything that stirs her; married life, loss, adventure, gardening, horses, memories....She has chosen the path of poetry because it is a contemplative, musical, sensual, and intellectual art that never ceases to challenge her. Her past career as an English teacher as well as the many wild and wacky jobs, places, people, and coincidences that have happened to her have shaped her poetry. She earned a C.A.S. with distinction in Writing from Northern Illinois University and attended the post-graduate seminar at Vermont College. Over 200 of her poems have been published in numerous journals including PoetsWest, Spoon River Review, Creative Woman, I Am Becoming the Woman I've Wanted,Snowy Egret, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Mid-America Poetry Review, and Prairie Winds. She was creative editor of Confluence, A Living Literary Legacy of the Rock River Valley (Illinois), published in 2000. Her latest collection, The Red Lacquer Room, was published by Chiron Press in St. John, Kansas.

Christine Swanberg's collections include:
Who Walks Among the Trees With Charity, Wind Publications, 2005
The Red Lacquer Room, Chiron Press; St. John, Kansas, 2001
The Tenderness of Memory, Plainview Press, 1994
Slow Miracle, Lake Shore Publishing, 1992
Invisible String, Erie Street Press, 1990
Bread Upon the Waters, Windfall Prophets Press; U of Wisconsin, 1990
Tonight On This Late Road, Erie Street Press, 1984.

Ford Swetnam (1942-2002)
Poet, essayist and mentor to many poets, Swetnam taught in the English Department at Idaho State University since 1976. His collections of poetry include Offer a Cup to a Friend, Another Tough Hop, 301, and Ghostholders Know. The Ford Swetnam Award for the best undergraduate writing is given by Idaho State University.

Joan Swift
Has B.A. from Duke University (1948) and M.A. in Creative Writing from University of Washington (1965). Joan is the author of Brackett's Landing, A History of Early Edmonds, Washington State American Revolution Bicentennial Commission, published in 1975.

She has published five books of poetry:
The Tiger Iris, BOA Editions Ltd., Rochester, NY, 1999 (Winner of 2000 Wa. State Governor's Award)
Intricate Moves, Poems About Rape, Chicory Blue Press, Goshen, CT, 1997
The Dark Path of Our Names, Dragon Gate, Inc., Port Townsend, WA,1985 (Won 1986 Wa. State Governor's Award.)
Parts of Speech, Confluence Press, Lewiston, Idaho, 1978
This Element, Alan Swallow, Denver, 1965.

Her poems have appeared in over fifty publications, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry Northwest, The Yale Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, DoubleTake, The Iowa Review, The Amicus Journal, Calyx, and The Iowa Review.

Joan Swift's poems have also been published in more than twenty anthologies, including The New Yorker Book of Poems, Viking Press,1969, New York; Fifty Contemporary Poets, The Creative Process, David McKay,1977, New York; Extended Outlooks: The Iowa Review Collection of Contemporary Women Writers, Macmillan Publishing Co., 1982, New York; Strong Measures, Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms, Harper & Row, 1986, New York; The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses 1989-90, The Pushcart Press,1990; From Daughters to Mothers: I've Always Meant To Tell You, Pocket Books, Scribner's,1997; Poetry Comes Up Where It Can: Poems from The Amicus Journal, University of Utah Press, 2000; Urban Nature, Milkweed Editions, 2000.

She has received three National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships (1982, 1990, 1995), King County Publication Award (1984); Ingram Merrill Writing Grant (1985); Washington State Writer's Award (1989), Pushcart Prize (1989-1990); Washington State Governors Award (1986).

Born in Rochester, New York, she grew up there and in northern Pennsylvania. She has lived in both Iowa and the Bay Area of northern California and presently lives in Edmonds, WA. More information and poems can be found on http://joanswift.com.

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Geronimo Tagatac
His father was from northern Luzon in the Philippines. His mother was a Russian Jew. His stepmother is a Cajun from Happy Jack, Louisiana. He is one of six children. During the Vietnam War, Geronimo was a demolitions specialist on a 5th Special Forces A-team. He has a BA and an MA in history, and has done Ph.D work in political science. Geronimo has worked as a legislative consultant, a university instructor, a container ship cargo planner, a dishwasher, fry cook, folksinger, computer system planner, and a roofer. He's also been a performing modern and jazz dancer. Geronimo has lived on Taiwan and in Hong Kong. He's traveled in western and eastern Europe, the Philippines, The People's Republic of China, Turkey, Mexico, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. He's wandered, with his teenage daughter, through England, Scotland, France, and Ireland. Geronimo's short fiction has appeared in Writers Forum, The Northwest Review, Mississippi Mud, The River Oak Review, Alternatives Magazine, Orion Magazine, The Clackamas Literary Review, and The Chautauqua Literary Journal. Geronimo has been the recipient of an Oregon Literary Arts fellowship (1997), and a Fishtrap Fellowship. He's taught short fiction, poetry, nonfiction, songwriting, publishing, and magical realism at the Fishtrap summer writers' conference. Portland State University's Ooligan Press recently published his first book-length collection of short stories, The Weight of the Sun, which was a finalist for the 2006 Oregon Book Award. He lives and writes in Salem, Oregon.

Mary TallMountain (1918-1994)
A Native Alaskan writer and elder, Mary TallMountain was born in Nulato, a village on the Yukon River in Alaska, to a Koyukon/Athabaskan mother and a Scots/Irish father. Mary's mother and brother Billy became terminally ill with tuberculosis and later died of the disease. Before they died, however, Mary was adopted by a non-Native couple (the attending physician and his wife) and taken away from her village. At the age of six, Mary and her adoptive family moved to Oregon, and then to Unalaska on the Aleutian chain, where Mary felt more at home. Her adopted mother taught her literature and she began writing. Her first story was published when she was ten.

Mary was in her early teens when the family moved to central California. Two marriages and divorce followed graduation from high school. In 1945 she moved to Las Vegas where she worked as a legal secretary. She then moved back to California and lived in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, supporting herself by working in law offices. All the time she continued to write. On a camping trip to the mountains, she came up with her pen name TallMountain, after a mountain near the Yukon River that she remembered from her childhood.

Suffering the loss of her family and homeland, and alienated by mainstream American culture, she felt she could only go home again by writing. Writing helped her to reclaim her ancestry, family and homeland, and claim her own native voice. Her stories and poems portray life along the Yukon River and her removal from that land. Her work also captures images of street life in inner city San Francisco.

For more than twenty years, TallMountain was active in the Native American literature renaissance. Her work is used in teaching Native American Studies at colleges and universities throughout the United States. Mary TallMountain encouraged struggling writers of all ages and backgrounds, from San Francisco to remote villages in Alaska where she taught poetry to children in her later years. For the last eight years of her life, Mary TallMountain was closely associated with the Tenderloin Reflection and Education Center (TREC), a community-based cultural center in San Francisco. She was its poet in residence in 1991-92 and participated in its workshops and performances. For many years she also wrote a column called "Meditations for Wayfarers" in the bi-monthly Franciscan publication, The Way of St. Francis (Friars Press, San Francisco). She died in 1994.

Her will stipulated that the proceeds from her published works go to benefit low-income writers, particularly Native Americans and writers living in San Francisco's Tenderloin District. The TallMountain Circle publishes, promotes and distributes her literary works, and carries out the goals of her will. Its Advisory Board selects the annual TallMountain Awards for Creative Writing and Community Service. Her papers and journals have been collected at Rasmuson Library Archives of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. For more information check http://www.freedomvoices.org/.

Mary TallMountain's collections include:
Listen To the Night (posthumous collection). San Francisco: Freedom Voices Publications, 1995 A Quick Brush of Wings, San Francisco: Freedom Voices Publications, 1991 Matrilineal Cycle, Oakland, CA: Red Star Black Rose Printing, 1990. (Reprinted from Open Heart Press, 1988) The Light on the Tent Wall: A Bridging (poetry), Los Angeles: UCLA Press, American Indian Studies Center, 1990 Continuum, Marvin, SD: Blue Cloud Quarterly Press, 1988 Green March Moons, Berkeley: New Seed Press, 1987 There Is No Word for Goodbye (poetry), Marvin, SD: Blue Cloud Quarterly Press, 1981 Nine Poems, San Francisco: Friars Press, 1977

Her poems, stories and essays have been published in dozens of anthologies and periodicals nationwide. Several are listed here:
Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native Women's Writings of North America, eds. Joy Harjo & Gloria Bird, NY: Norton, 1997
Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals, eds. Linda Hogan, Deena Metzger & Brenda Peterson, NY: Ballantine, 1997
Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making, ed. John Fox, Berkeley, CA: Putnam, 1997
Native American Literature, ed. Lawana Trout, NTC Publishing, 1997
Songs of the Turtle: American Indian Literature, 1974 - 1994, ed. Paula Gunn Allen, NY: Ballantine, 1996
Fierce With Reality: An Anthology of Literature on Aging, ed. Margaret Cruikshank, St. Cloud, NM: North Star Press, 1996
The Last New Land: Stories of Alaska Past and Present, ed. Wayne Mergler, Seattle Alaska Northwest, 1996
Listen to the Night: Poems to the Animal Spirits of Mother Earth, San Francisco: Freedom Voices Publications, 1995, Edited by Ben Clarke, Introduction by Kitty Costello
The Language of Life, A Festival of Poets, Bill Moyers series, (Interview and poetry), NY: Doubleday, 1995
Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle and Other Modern Verse by Stephen Dunning and Edward Lueders, Glenview, IL: ScottForesman (HarperCollins), 1995
Raven Tells Stories: An Anthology of Alaska Native Writing, Greenfield, NY: Greenfield Review Press, 1991
And a Deer's Ear, Eagle's Song and Bear's Grace: Animals and Women, ed. Theresa Corrigan and Stephanie Hoppe, SF: Cleis Press, 1990
Circle of Motion: Arizona Anthology of Contemporary American Indian Literature, ed. Kathleen Mullen Sands; Tempe, AZ: Arizona Historical Society, 1990
Dancing on the Rim of the World: An Anthology of Contemporary Northwest Native American Writing, ed. Andrea Lerner, Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1990
Season of Dead Water, ed. Helen Frost; Portland: Breitenbush Books, Inc., 1990
Poesie Amerindienne: Les Cahiers de Poesie Recontres, ed. & French translation Manuel Van Thienen, 1989
Harper's Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry, ed. Duane Niatum; San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988
In the Dreamlight, Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1984.

Molly Tenenbaum
Old Viole (New Michigan Press, 2004)
By a Thread

Leonard L. Tews
Was born on a dairy farm in central Wisconsin and went to a one-room schoolhouse through his first eight grades. Currently he is divorced with four children and seven grandchildren. After he retired as a professor of biology, he began writing poetry as a legacy to his descendants. This interest culminated in a chapbook called Family Poems.

The pursuit of poetry has become something more serious and he has published in Fox Cry, PoetsWest, Point Counter Point, Seattle Art Museum's Program Guide and Member News, Bellowing Ark, Poets Table Anthology, and in the Wisconsin Academy. In 2000 he won third prize in a contest sponsored by the Seattle Chapter of The Association of American Pen Women. His second collection of poems Dance Steps is about personalities in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle where he lives. His third chapbook, The Moon Is Not Yet, reflects his deep connection to nature. Buddhism, nature and genealogy are important influences in his writing. Len Tews has a feel for language that is precise and economic. There are no extra or unneeded words. His poems show intelligence and a keen sense of observation. The clarity of his thought fuses with precision of language so that the emotional power of the poem is indistinguishable from its structure. He serves on the Advisory Board of PoetsWest.

Sharon Thesen (1946- )

Stephen Thomas

Gary Thompson

Eve Triem (1902-1992 )
Born in New York City, but raised in California, Eve Triem had a long and distinguished career as a poet. She married the writer, Paul Ellsworth Triem, while studying at the University of California, Berkeley. In the 1950s she took up the study of classic Greek at the University of Dubuque, Iowa. By 1960 she and Paul Triem had settled in Seattle, and she continued her Greek studies at the University of Washington. Widely published in periodicals and anthologies, she conducted workshops and readings across the country and was the recipient of several awards from foundations, including the Charlotte Arthur Foundation, National Institute of Arts and Letters, National Endowment for the Arts, Hart Crane Memorial Fund, and the Western States Arts Federation.
Eve Triem's publications include:
Nobody Dies in the Summer: Selected Poems, Broken Moon Press, Seattle, 1993
New as a Wave: A Retrospective, 1937-1983 (edited by Ethel Fortner), Dragon Gate, Inc., Seattle, 1984
Midsummer Rites (with preface by Denise Levertov), Seal Press, 1982
Dark to Glow (written as a tribute to her husband, Paul Triem, after his death in 1976 at the age of 94; includes a brief preface by Denise Levertov), Querencia Books, Seattle, 1979
The Process: Poems, 1960-1975 (with an introduction by Stanley Kunitz), Querencia Books, Seattle, 1976
E.E. Cummings, University of Minnesota pamphlets on American Writers, no. 87 (no. 86-90), 1969
Heliodora: Translations from the Greek Anthology, Olivant Press, 1967
Poems, Alan Swallow Press, Denver, 1965
Parade of Doves, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1946.

Arthur Tulee

Brian Turner
Earned an MFA in Creative Writing (poetry) from the University of Oregon, and then joined the US Army for seven years. He was an infantry team leader in Iraq for a year beginning November 2003 and served with the Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division. He has published poetry in several literary reviews, and his book Here, Bullet was the winner of the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books. Brian Turner has also been awarded one of the five 2006 Writing Fellowships from the Lannan Foundation for his poetry collection Here, Bullet and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship.

George Venn
Raised in western Washington and Spirit Lake, Idaho. Earned his B.A. in English Literature from the College of Idaho, spent academic years in Ecuador, Spain, and England, and completed his M.F.A. in 1970 at the University of Montana. Poet, writer, literary historian, editor, linguist, and educator, Venn is an eclectic, complex and distinguished figure in Northwest American literature. As one university press editor described him, "Venn's blend of creativity and scholarship is unique...."

He has received a Pushcart Prize (1980), the Andres Berger Award in Poetry (1995), the Stewart Holbrook Award (1995), and a Multi-cultural Publishing Award (1995) from the National Council of Teachers of English. The last two awards recognized his designing and serving as General Editor of the Oregon Literature Series (OSU Press), a six-volume, 2,000-page historical anthology of Oregon writing from pre-settlement to post-modern. His 1999 poetry collection West Of Paradise: New Poems (wordcraftoforegon.com) has received rave reviews and was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award. Except for teaching at Changsha Railway University in 1981-1982, he served for thirty-two years as Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Eastern Oregon University. Taught all levels of creative writing, English-as-a-Second-Language, American Literature, Literature of the West and Northwest, and Native American Literature.

His distinguished and eclectic literary practice may be best affirmed by his 1987 book Marking the Magic Circle (OSU Press), a collection of fiction, poetry, essays, Chinese translations, and Jan Boles photographs. In 1988, this 200-page volume won a Special Oregon Book Award and a silver medal from Literary Arts; in 2005, the same book was selected by the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission as one of the 100 best Oregon books in the two centuries. His poems and stories have been widely published in regional periodicals and anthologized in seventeen different state, regional, and national collections such as Teaching with Fire: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Teach (2003) and Deer Drink the Moon: Poems of Oregon (2007). His work has been included in the national Poetry in Motion program, carved in stone at the New Oregon Zoo, and featured in the Ron Finne film Tamanawis Illahee. His lyrics have been set to music by three different composers and performed in concerts across the Pacific Northwest. Over sixty articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in over thirty-two different periodicals, most recently in Northwest Review 50th Anniversary Issue (2008) and Idaho Yesterdays (Spring 2008). His prose has been anthologized in nine different collections including World Views and the American West (2000). He has edited seventeen books and has authored five, most recently the literary monograph Soldier To Advocate: C.E.S. Wood's 1877 Legacy (wordcraftoforegon.com). His other poetry collections include Off the Main Road (1978) and Sunday Afternoon: Grande Ronde (1975)-both still available. For further information, please see www.georgevenn.com and Contemporary Authors 231(2005).

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David Wagoner (1926- )
A widely-respected and influential poet and novelist, David Wagoner was born in Massillon, Ohio and educated at U of Pennsylvania (B.A.) and Indiana University (M.A.). Moving to Seattle in the midfifties, he began his long teaching career in the English Department at the University of Washington. He retired in June 2000. A long-time editor of Poetry Northwest (ceased publication with Spring 2002 issue) and winner of numerous prestigious awards, including the Lilly Prize, two nominations for a National Book Award and one for a Pulitzer, he has produced an impressive amount of writing in both fiction and poetry. David Wagoner has published seventeen books of poems and has been published more often in the prestigious journal Poetry than anyone else.

Selected poetry publications include:
Good Morning and Good Night, Univ. of Illinois Press, 2006
The House of Song, Univ. of Illinois Press, 2002
Traveling Light, Univ. of Illinois Press, 1999
Walt Whitman, Bathing, Univ. of Illinois Press, 1996
Through the Forest: New and Selected Poems, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987
First Light, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1983
Landfall, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1981
In Broken Country, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1979
Who Shall Be the Sun?, Indiana Univ. Press, 1978
Collected Poems: 1956-1976, Indiana Univ. Press, 1976
Sleeping in the Woods, Indiana Univ. Press, 1974
Riverbed, Indiana Univ. Press, 1972
Working Against Time: Poems, Rapp & Whiting (London), 1970
New and Selected Poems, Indiana Univ. Press, 1969
Staying Alive, Indiana Univ. Press, 1966
The Nesting Ground, 1963
A Place to Stand, 1958
Dry Sun, Dry Wind, 1953.

Connie Walle
Connie is president of the Puget Sound Poetry Connection and coordinates the Distinguished Writer Series in Tacoma. She began writing about 1970 when she created special greeting cards with special poems. She was first published in a Tacoma literary quarterly named Aristos, and since then her poems have been published in multiple local, national, and international publications, including Womankind, Raven Chronicles, PoetsWest, Talus and Scree, A Small Garlic Press, Dark Orchid, Writing for Our Lives, Tahoma West, The Reporter, Green Tricycle, Apricorn, the American Journal of Pain (under the Journal of the American Medical Association), and The Raven Chronicles. She has also been published in the following anthologies and books: Ars Veritatis (anthology from The Philosophy Club of the U of Maine), Through the Year with Feelings, Heart Rise (Windstar Foundation). She is also published in two books of hers, Not For Children, and Checking My Pockets for Mustard. She has been president and the driving force behind Puget Sound Poetry Connection. She also runs the teen contest, "In Our Own Words" with the Pierce County Library, and Pierce Transit. She is the 2003 winner of the Faith Beamer Cooke Award from the Washington Poets Association for service to the poetry community.

Francine E. Walls
F.E. Walls has been published in such magazines as Pontoon, Arnazella, Dragonfly Review and the Red-Wing Poetry Anthology. Her poem, "Kalahari," was selected for the book, Writing Across Cultures.

Ellen Waterston
Founder and director of the Writing Ranch, which supports the craft and careers of writers through workshops, retreats and seminars. She also is the founder and director of The Nature of Words held in Bend, Oregon the first weekend of November. Waterston's poetry chapbook I Am Madagascar (Ice River Press 2004) won the 2005 WILLA Award in poetry. Her memoir Then There Was No Mountain (Rowman and Littlefield 2003) was selected as one of the ten best books in the Northwest for 2003, was a Foreword magazine and WILLA finalist in 2004 and earned her an appearance on Good Morning America with Diane Sawyer. Waterston's poetry, short stories and essays have appeared in numerous reviews, anthologies and journals. She is also the published author of two children's books. Waterston has been awarded eight writing residencies, most recently the 2005 Fishtrap Writer-In-Residence. She is the 2003 recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship. Web site www.writingranch.com.

Klyd Watkins
Born in Tennessee nine months to the day after the Pearl Harbor attack (i.e., September 7, 1942). He broke into poetry publishing in Red Clay Reader, Poem and other magazines of the sixties. In the late sixties Peter Harleman, a St. Louis poet, persuaded him that they should make poetry on tape rather than paper. Throughout the seventies they did just that, pretty strictly improvising onto tape, solo or in a group, bypassing text. (This phase of his work is covered at http://www.volcanictongue.com/ then search for poetry out loud.). By the eighties he was tired of the avant garde and began playing bass guitar in Nashville honky tonk bands, singing a few Outlaw Country songs when the real singer wanted a break. He broke from creative work altogether for a while in the late eighties. Then he went back to writing poetry on paper. This time around he published in (among others) Southern Poetry Review, Poem again, Cumberland Poetry Review, and especially in Charlie Potts' The Temple. He found that the crooked path he had taken had prepared him to work very well with music, guitar especially. This led to the CDs Listen the Night and Harp All Made of Gold. See his web site at The Time Garden.

Michael Dylan Welch
Cofounder of the American Haiku Archives and founding president of the Tanka Society of America. Contributing editor of Spring: The Journal of the E.E. Cummings Society. His poems have appeared in hundreds of journals in a dozen countries and in numerous anthologies from Norton, Tuttle, Kodansha, and others. In addition to editing for Microsoft, he edits and publishes Tundra: The Journal of the Short Poem and award-winning haiku and tanka books with his publishing company, Press Here. His poems have appeared in anthologies from W. W. Norton, Andrews McMeel, Kodansha, Tuttle, and other publishers, and more than 2,500 of his poems have appeared in hundreds of magazines in ten languages. Michael publishes essays, book reviews and academic articles (on E. E. Cummings, Lewis Carroll, and other topics), and has edited 200+ trade books as a senior editor for major publishers. Co-translated the waka poetry in the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, or One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets, compiled 800 years ago by Fujiwara no Teika. The book, with photographs, will be published in 2008 by PIE Books in Japan.

Curates the monthly SoulFood Poetry Night in Redmond, serves as coordinator of the Haiku Northwest group (celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2008), board member of the Washington Poets Association, edits software documentation at Microsoft. In 1991 he co-founded the biennial Haiku North America conference. A selection of his haiku and photography, "Open Window," was published online in 2000 by Brooks Books, and he has also published numerous chapbooks and edited several anthologies of haiku and tanka poetry. Lives with his wife and two children in Sammamish, Washington.

Ingrid Wendt
Ingrid Wendt's books of poems include Surgeonfish (winner of the 2004 Editions Prize), The Angle of Sharpest Ascending (winner of the 2003 Yellowglen Award), Blow the Candle Out, Singing the Mozart Requiem (Oregon Book Award), and Moving the House. She co-edited the anthologies In Her Own Image: Women Working in the Arts and From Here We Speak: An Anthology of Oregon Poetry. Her book Starting With Little Things: A Guide to Teaching Poetry in the Classroom, is in its 6th printing. Selections from her second book of poems have been translated into Italian, and published under the title Cantando Il Requiem Di Mozart, Anna Riccardi, translator, Multimedia Edizioni, Salerno, Italy, 1995.

Ingrid Wendt has taught for over thirty years at all educational levels, including the MFA program of Antioch University Los Angeles, at teacher-training institutes throughout the United States and in Germany, and in hundreds of public school classrooms, grades K-12, in the States and abroad. Part of the consultant network of the National Council of Teachers of English, and a resident of Eugene, Oregon, she has been a three-time Fulbright professor in Germany, and guest lecturer at several international universities. She is an avid scuba diver, photographer, the grandmother of Gemma Mariuccia (born in June of 2003). Ingrid also sings second alto with The Motet Singers, a women's a cappella ensemble of 12. You may find her on the web at http://www.ingridwendt.com and http://www.ncte.org/profdev/onsite/consultants/wendt. Listen to the Motet Singers at http://www.singers.com/choral/motetsingers.html.

Finn Wilcox
For a number of years (1980 to 1998), Finn Wilcox was editor and publisher of Empty Bowl Press. He is co-producer of the collection of Northwest writing,Working the Woods Working the Sea. He is included in the anthology, The Clouds Should Know Me By Now, edited by Red Pine and Mike O'Connor.
His own writings include:
Here Among the Sacrificed (poems and prose) with photographs by Steve R. Johnson, Empty Bowl Press, 1984.

Laura Winter (1958- )
This poet and artist was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1979, she bought a one way plane ticket to Portland, Oregon where she currently resides.

Laura Winter's poetry collections include:
sleeping leaves, Mountains and Rivers Press, 2002 (Eugene, OR)
not gone / just not here, 2001 (Portland, OR)
No Gravy Baby, unnum Press, 2000 (Portland, OR)
Skin into Dust, 26 Books, 1994 (Portland, OR)
Co-author of Stone Fog, Membrane Press, 1987 (Milwaukee, WI)
Broadside: "Two Poems For Cid Corman's Passing March 2004", Mountains and Rivers Press 2005 (Eugene, OR). Printed by Swamp Press, MA

Winter has been widely published and her work has appeared in numerous periodicals, including A Change In Weather: Anthology of Midwest Women Poets, High/Coo, Boom, Cream City Review, Anemone, Poetic Space, Portland Review, Mr. Cogito, Z Miscellaneous, Perceptions, Pointed Circle, Fireweed, Portlander, Plazm, Rain City Review, Talus And Scree, Northwest Literary Forum, Portlandia Review Of Books, Hummingbird, and The Temple.

Her poems have been used as liner notes for CDs and set to music by composers. She appears on educational interactive software, Writing for Readers by Pierian Spring. Winter currently publishes TAKE OUT, a bag-a-zine of art, writing and music.

William Witherup (1935- )
Born in Kansas City, Missouri , William Witherup was raised in Richland,Washington in the shadow of the Hanford Atomic Energy facility. The family moved there in 1944 when his father went to work on the Manhattan Project at the Hanford Atomic Works. By chance and luck, the young Witherup got into Theodore Roethke's class at the University of Washington. Witherup then moved on to the University of Oregon where he studied with James B. Hall. He has translated the works of Hispanic poets Vicente Huidobro, Enrique Lihn, and especially that of Antonio Machado. His writing is perhaps better known for its sensitivity and feeling for the Western landscape and the poet's skepticism for what man has done to that landscape. He also connects with the oral tradition in Native American culture. He is contributing editor to Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond To The Nuclear Age (Coffee House Press, 1995), and to Learning To Glow: A Nuclear Reader (2000). Witherup has been an anti-nuclear activist as well as a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility since 1990. He is on the board of Secular Humanists of Washington and is the director of the Gene Debs Labor Ensemble, a theatre troupe. See www.debslaborensemble.org. He taught creative writing in California's Soledad Prison during the 1970s and as a result of those experiences, he remains active in issues concerning prison reform.

He writes front and center on topics and events in contemporary society: the role of science and technology, environment, racism, and homelessness. "The influences on my writing are manifold and include growing up in Hanford, living in San Francisco during the Sixties, teaching at Soledad in the early Seventies, as well as the work of writer/poets Theodore Roethke, Robert Bly, James B. Hall, Fred Whitehead, and Sterling Bunnell."

His poetry collections and other writings include:
Review of James B. Hall's "Extreme Stories + 3," Northwest Review, v. XXXX, 2002
Down Wind, Down River: New and Selected Poems, West End Press, 1996, 2000
Men At Work, Ahsahta Press, Boise, ID, 1989 (dedicated to his father)
Black Ash, Orange Fire: Collected Poems 1959-1985, Floating Island Publications, 1986
Co-edited and wrote the Introduction to Joseph Bruchac's Words from the House of the Dead : Prison Writings from Soledad, Crossing Press, 1974
I Go Dreaming Roads: Selections from Antonio Machado (Co-translator with Carmen Scholis), Peters Gate Press, 1973
Arctic Poems by Vicente Huidobro (Co-translator with Serge Echeverria), Desert Review Press, 1973
This Endless Menace: 25 Poems by Enrique Lihn (Co-translator with Serge Echeverria), Lillabulero, 1970.

"In an a further effort to promote my collected poems in Down Wind, Down River: New and Selected Poems(2002), the publisher has released a hundred copies to me for resale to literary people and institutions that I designate. If you are able to buy one or more copies to send to a friend, or donate to a city, county, state, or university library, I will sell the copies at $15 which will include mailing cost. (DWDR retails at $16.95.) Poems from my manuscript-in-progress, BLOOD ALGEBRA , are in pemmican.com; Sierra Journal; poetswest.com; and counterpunch.com. I am the featured poet in July/August Speakeasy. A selection from DWDR was in the April 2003 political Affairs, and I have a poem from DWDR, "Robert Bly at Point Lobos" in the anthology, DANCING ON THE BRINK OF THE WORLD, poems of Pt. Lobos, edited by Deborah Streeter."

Sara Jorgenson Woodbury (1944-2006)
Sara studied poetry at the University of Washington with Nelson Bentley, at the University of Idaho and Eastern Washington University. She wrote poetry since the age of eleven, and despite suffering from schizophrenia, published some 1000 poems, in numerous literary magazines, including The Archer, Nostoc, Cripes, Poetalk, Night Roses, Pegasus, and Sweet Annie Review. She also published sixteen chapbooks which are archived in the Kennedy Library at Eastern Washington University.

She thought of herself as a poetess for the ordinary person and sold her books on the streets of Spokane. Her poetry was brief with an astute voice describing the flora and fauna around her. Sara is survived by a son serving in the Navy in Germany and a daughter back East, and lost a daughter around the year 2000. She had worked as a secretary with Morgan & Morgan and in the US House of Representatives. She loved music and poetry.
Her publications include:
Love: Beginning and Ending: A Selection of Poetry, Writer's Works, 2006
Bright Beginnings, Strange Endings (poetry), Kindred Spirit Press, 2005
Autumn Love (chapbook), Writer's Works 2004
In Praise of Birds (poetry), Writer's Works, 2004
Strange Luck (poetry), Writer's Works, 2003
A Field, A Mountain, (poetry w/ title from poetry of John Hollander), Writer's Works, 2001
Ways of Silence (poetry), Writer's Works, 2000
Edge of Night (poetry), Writer's Works, 200?

She has been listed in a number of Who's Whos including the Marquis Who's Who in America, the International Who's Who in Poetry and Poets' Encyclopedia (2001-2002)

[Courtesy of Randall Brock.]

George Woodcock (1912-1995)

Koon Woon (1949- )
Koon Woon was born near Canton, China and immigrated to the U.S. in 1960. He lives in Seattle's International District and is the editor of Chrysanthemum, a quarterly magazine publishing "all fronts" of poetry. His poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals. Read what Michael Magee has said about Koon Woon's own recent collection of poetry, The Truth in Rented Rooms, published in 1998 by Kaya, New York. His chapbook, The Burden of Sanity, also was published in 1998.

Carolyne Wright
A graduate of Seattle University's Humanities Honors Program with a doctorate in English and Creative Writing from Syracuse University, Wright has received awards from the Poetry Society of America, Seattle Arts Commission, and the New York State Council on the Arts, and she has been a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. A visiting professor at colleges, universities and writers' conferences around the country, Carolyne has recently returned to write and teach in her native Seattle. She is presently teaching at the Whidbey Writers Workshop and Richard Hugo House.

She has published eight books and chapbooks of poetry, including poetry translated from Spanish and Bengali:
A Change of Maps (Lost Horse Press, 2006, Idaho Prize 2nd)
Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire (Eastern Washington UP/Lynx House Books, 2nd edition 2005, winner Blue Lynx Prize, Oklahoma Book Award in Poetry, and American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation)
Premonitions of an Uneasy Guest (AWP Award Series)
Stealing the Children (Ahsahta Press)
Carolyne Wright: Greatest Hits 1975-2001 (Pudding House)
A Choice of Fidelities: Lectures and Readings from a Writer's Life (Ashland Poetry Press)
Majestic Nights: Love Poems by Bengali Women (White Pine Press, 2007)
The Road to Isla Negra (investigative memoir of her experiences in Chile on a Fulbright Study Grant during the presidency of Salvador Allende) received the PEN/Jerard Fund Award and the Crossing Boundaries Award from International Quarterly.

Other works in process: The Ten-Armed Goddess, the Lifted Veil, is a narrative of women's lives and literature in Bengal. Carolyne spent four years on Indo-U.S. Subcommission and Fulbright Senior Research fellowships in Calcutta and Dhaka, Bangladesh, collecting and translating the work of Bengali women poets and writers for an anthology in progress, A Bouquet of Roses on the Burning Ground, which received a Witter Bynner Foundation Grant and an NEA Fellowship in Translation, as well as a Fellowship from the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College.

Robert Wrigley (1951)
Was born in East St. Louis, Illinois, and grew up 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, in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Wales, and Germany, never to work in a coal mine. In 1971, he was inducted into the U.S. Army, but after four months, he filed for discharge on the grounds of conscientious objection. He then spent the next five months at Ft Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas and in November of that year, he was honorably discharged.

Wrigley attended Southern Illinois University and the University of Montana, where he studied with the late Richard Hugo, as well as with Madeline DeFrees and John Haines, and where he developed a love for the western wilderness. Since 1977 he has lived in Idaho, teaching first at Lewis-Clark State College, in Lewiston, and since 1999, at the University of Idaho, where he teaches in and directs the MFA program in creative writing. He has also taught at the University of Oregon, where he served as acting director of the MFA program, and twice at the University of Montana, where he returned to hold the Richard Hugo Chair in Poetry. He has also taught in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, in North Carolina. He lives with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes, and their children, near Moscow, Idaho.

He has published six books of poetry:
Lives of the Animals (Penguin, 2003)
Reign of Snakes (Penguin Putnam, 1999)awarded the 2000 Kingsley Tufts Award in poetry
In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (Penguin, 1995)
What My Father Believed (Illinois, 1991)
Moon In a Mason Jar (University of Illinois, 1986)
The Sinking of Clay City (Copper Canyon Press, 1979).

He is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as two fellowships from the Idaho Commission on the Arts. In 1987-88, he served as the state of Idaho's Writer-in-Residence. Among his awards are the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize, as well as the Frederick Bock Prize, from Poetry magazine, the Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America, and three Pushcart Prizes. His poem "Clemency" was selected for reprint in Best American Poetry 2003. In the Bank of Beautiful Sins received the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award for 1996; it was, in addition, one of five finalists for the Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy of American Poets. He is the 1997 recipient of the Theodore Roethke Award from Poetry Northwest. In 1996, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Margo Wyckoff
Margo Wyckoff received her B.A., M.S.W., and Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Now retired from her clinical psychology practice, she lives in Seattle and on Hood Canal. She is the author of numerous articles for medical and scientific journals. She has had poems published inPoetsWest, the Bremerton Sun, Washington Commission for the Humanities Quarterly, and Seattle Writer's Association Anthology.

Bill Yake
Bill Yake's poetry springs from place (the Pacific Northwest), wild nature and water. He was born and raised in Spokane; received degrees in Zoology, Environmental Science and Environmental Engineering from WSU; and worked as an environmental scientist for the Washington State Department of Ecology for twenty-four years. Earlier work included stints as a forest fire-fighter, fire lookout in Glacier National Park, and laborer. For the past eight years he has lived with his wife, Jeannette Barreca, just north of Olympia on the verge of Green Cove Creek Ravine - its forest a century into regrowth.

Bill's poems have been published widely in literary magazines (Willow Springs, Puerto del Sol, The Seattle Review), in magazines serving the environmental community (Wilderness, Wild Earth, The Bear Deluxe), and in anthologies (Under a Silver Sky - An Anthology of Pacific Northwest Poetry, March Hares - Best Poems from Fine Madness). Bill's first full-length collection of poetry, This Old Riddle: Cormorants and Rain www.scattercreek.com.~yake/riddle1.htm was recently published by Radiolarian Press (2004). His chapbooks include Confluence (Radiolarian Press, 1995), (Givin' Critters) Short Shrift (Radiolarian Press, 1996), and Faces of Birds (Scattercreek Press, 1997).

Of his poetry, Bill writes, "Out of living over half a century in the Pacific Northwest an obsession with - and respect for - water, critters, and place has grown, as has the unease (even fear) that our species is irreversibly shredding the natural world. Perhaps poetry - to the extent that it helps us attend to imagination and perishable wonders - can remedy a little of this heavy handedness."

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Greg Young-Ing
A member of the Opasquiak Cree Nation, he holds an M.A. from the Institute of Canadian Studies at Carleton University. He is the former editor of Gatherings: The En'owkin Journal of First North American Peoples and former teacher at the En'owkin School of Writing. He lives in Penticton, British Columbia. The Random Flow of Blood and Flowers (Ekstasis Editions, 1996) is his first full-length collection of poetry. His essays and other writings have been published in Fuse Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Quill and Quire, Canadian Journal of Native Education, Paragraph Magazine, etc.

Gaea Yudron
Author of the best-selling book Growing and Using the Healing Herbs (Rodale Press, Wing Press) and of the chapbook Words Themselves Are Medicine. Her poetry appears in Best American Erotica 2006, Raising Our Voices: An Anthology of Oregon Poets Against the War and in journals and magazines including For Now, The Little Magazine, East West, North Country Star, Evergreen Review, Provincetown Review, Kuksu and others. Her nonfiction, mostly centered on nature, spirit and healing, has appeared in books including The Holistic Health Handbook, The Grassroots Primer, and Yoga for People over 50, and magazines such as Berkeley Monthly, New Age, Yoga Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Sentient Times, Vajradhatu Sun, The Oregonian, Quark4 and others.

Gaea has a vivid interest in bringing the mythic and sacred dimensions of sound, poetry and language to life. She developed an experimental totem theatre at the San Francisco Ecology Center in the 1970s with a grant from the California Arts Commission. In Ashland, Oregon, she developed and produced two one-woman shows. My Heart of Silk is Filled with Light featured poems by Dylan Thomas, Lorca, Shakespeare and William Blake, set to music. Forces of Nature featured Gaea's own poetry, stories and songs.

Pieter Zilinsky
A native of New York City, he was a teacher for three decades before moving to the Northwest. He has spent the past seventeen years in Seattle working as a translator, interpreter and editor, and has collaborated in developing museum youth programs. He is affiliated with PoetsWest, Poets Table, Eleventh Hour Productions, ArtsWest, and is a former board member and past president of the Washington Poets Association. His poems appear in PoetsWest and the Poets Table Anthology (SCW Publications, 2002). He is the recipient of the 2002 Faith Beamer Cooke Award by Washington Poets Association in recognition of his many services to the poetry community of Washington State. He is married to the novelist, Ursula Zilinsky. "The diversity of the human and natural landscapes of the Northwest provides the stimulus to move from the mundane to the mystical through poetry, especially spoken poetry." He strongly believes that "the listener's grasp should exceed the poet's speech, or what's a reading for." In his distinctive poetry, there is an intermingling of people and place, and exquisite detail in the smallest of events, like the gentle trail of rain on the window pane or the dead mole on the driveway. A keen observer of the landscape, his images convey the changes worked by nature and by man.

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