Featured Poets 2024
Booking poets all the time.
​​January 1, 2024
Happy New Years No Poetry Today.
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January 8, 2024
Becoming Christopher
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Chris is a writer, spoken word poet, and co-founder of the online creative community “The Heart Union”. He’s performed on the national stage, earning 6th place at the 2022 Canadian Poetry Slam. His personal development and experiences with mental illness bring both passion and inspiration to his writing.
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January 15, 2024
Ryler Dustin
Ryler Dustin is the author of Heavy Lead Birdsong from Write Bloody Publishing, and his forthcoming collection, Trailer Park Psalms, was selected for the University of Pittsburgh Press’s Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. He has represented Seattle on the final stage of the Individual World Poetry Slam, and his poems appear in outlets like American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, Gulf Coast, and The Best of Button Poetry. He holds an MFA from the University of Houston and a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and recently returned to his hometown of Bellingham after living in Michigan, Spain, Jack Kerouac's former home in Orlando, and an off-grid cabin in the Oregon wilderness.
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"Ryler Dustin’s poems achieve a clear and accessible quality, not through the simplicity of idea or emotion (for his poems are rich with surprising language and complex sentiment) but through his remarkable facility with syntax. Indeed, his elegant sentences convey feeling with vulnerability and sensitivity, while achieving what can only be called pure music. The ingenious metaphors in Trailer Park Psalms manage to contain the contradictory and conflicting emotions that come with loss, nostalgia, humor, and the effort to cope with the wounds of a complicated personal history."
- Kwame Dawes
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January 22, 2024
Mark Simpson
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Mark Simpson farms a few acres on Whidbey Island, Washington, raising what the climate and land allow. He has a Ph.D. but has never used it for the thing a Ph.D. is typically used for, although he feels it has informed his life in a way he can't quite put his finger on. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sleet (Pushcart Prize nominee), Broad River Review (Rash Award Finalist), Columbia Journal (Online), Third Wednesday, Backchannels Review, Flyway, and Cold Mountain Review. He is the author of "The Quieting" (2023, Pine Row Press) and the chapbook "Fat Chance" (2013, Finishing Line Press).
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Mark Simpson’s The Quieting is a deer stepping silently out of the wood, just down the road from the neighbor’s meth lab, an area on the map of the past that lives in the present—tornado alley held in a skein of rock n’ roll each night, netted by gridded roads, cowboy hot-rodders, the poet's fond yet weird memories of “Childhood,” always slightly off-kilter: ‘Mother fixed hamburgers and put them on a bun[,]” (where else would she put them?), while father strums an arcane and mournful instrument in the garden of the dead, (“My Continuation), and inmates at the institution learn not to tell staff when they have any thought—scenes in a phantasmagoric Joseph Cornell/Edward Albee shadow box. Simpson’s search takes his readers to where primeval thought dwells and we lean in to listen to the sound of fox fire winking where this poet was lost and found.
Greg Kosmicki, Founder, The Backwaters Press
In Mark Simpson’s debut collection, “The Quieting,” When your run is up, where does it leave you from the poem, “I was Lucky for a Change,” echoes with mortality’s kiss and curse found in places both emotional and physical. From rabbits, those small departures of fur to the Cows off I-5 by the Jesus Saves sign, pastoral redemption is nowhere to be found, only a world where the boy with a crewcut squints into the lens of the future, from the poem “Landscape with my Imprint.” In the end it’s the Nuthatches on the Fir tree that attempts to console both the poet and us, to hope that’s how we go, leaving, whatever from our going takes us.
Daniel Edward Moore, Waxing the Dents
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January 29, 2024
Billy Carty
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Bill Carty is the author of We Sailed on the Lake (Bunny Presse/Fonograf Editions, 2023) and Huge Cloudy (Octopus Books, 2019), which was longlisted for The Believer Book Award. Recent poems have appeared in jubilat, Best American Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Iterant, Paperbag, The Kenyon Review, 32 Poems, and other journals. Originally from midcoast Maine, Bill now lives in Seattle where he is Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest and teaches at Edmonds College and the Hugo House.
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Following up his The Believer Book Award nominated debut collection Huge Cloudy, Bill Carty's second poetry volume WE SAILED ON THE LAKE continues the poet's idiosyncratic poetic pursuit, one simultaneously concerned with family and commerce, the natural world and the urban landscape.
WE SAILED ON THE LAKE, Bill Carty's second collection of poetry, consists of lyrics of spiraling awareness. As a signal lamp, unused, mirrors the sky, these poems reflect approaching storms, near-misses, and the violence inherent in nature, country, and economy.
The poems in We Sailed on the Lake are closely observed, finding unexpected affinities within urban and natural environments alike. As one poem states, "to cross the lake / you've got to make each step / pertain the water," and these poems explore relationality in many forms, moving from gentrifying cities to coastal beaches, from the sculptures of antiquity to YouTube searches, cataloging passing days "of which light is the measure."
Alternating longer, occasionally narrative poems with short lyrics, this collection plays with time and ideas of promise, from youth to parenthood, noting how the self negotiates the artifices, be they technological or of self-design, that infringe upon reality and experience.
"Bill Carty is a poet of emotional depth and conceptual range--fluent in both Wordsworth and the sounds of a stranded seal--making poems that can feel simultaneously mythic and modern. This book is a gift, full of large-scale questions about being human ("I'm only as human as the last place I've slept," he writes) delivered with a voice that feels genuine, sharp, and full."--Matthew S. Olzmann
"Being inside a Bill Carty poem is like going on a walk to the corner store for a bag of chips and on the way getting an unexpected natural history lesson whose insights deftly link, sometimes with the hinge of a single word, this history to your life, which of course was never unrelated to begin with, and at once the connections between things sharpen, and perception tilts as you sense, more acutely, the shape of what had settled over you (for how long now?), as the poem speaks the temporary name of this shape aloud just before it shifts its form, and all of this feels somehow normal, and also sacred but not in an overdetermined way, and in the end you get your chips and they are just as good as you hoped. No, they're better."--Ari Banias
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February 5, 2024
Claudia Yaw
Claudia Yaw began writing as a reporter in the Puget Sound area. She left journalism to work outside, where she started writing poetry. Claudia draws inspiration from local rivers and their inclinations, as well as the countless critters that inhabit them. In her 2023 chapbook, “Extra-Slimy Earthworms on an Extra-Round Earth,” Claudia tries to bury herself with the bugs. The book’s visuals are meant to evoke a subterranean wonder.
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February 12, 2024
Daniel Edward Moore
Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island.
His work is forthcoming in Tar River Poetry Journal, Triggerfish
Critical Review and Watershed Review.
He is the author of two chapbooks, “Confessions of a Pentecostal Buddhist,”
and “Boys.” His book “Waxing the Dents,” is from Brick Road Poetry Press.
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February 19, 2024
Steve Sibra
STEVE SIBRA is pleased to make his first public reading appearance in over two years, and happy for the opportunity to read among old friends at Everett Poetry Night. Steve has been a frequent reader at EPN over the past several years prior to COVID and now, with a brand new book of poetry out (SHOES FOR BABY from Swallow Publishing) there is a plethora of new material, to be read in public for the first time.
Steve grew up on a small farm in eastern Montana and furthered his education at the University of Montana. His work has appeared in dozens of literary journals over the past three decades, along with newspaper articles and trade publications associated with his lifelong career in the collectible comic book hobby. Recent publications have included work in Chiron Review, Flint Hills Review, Dead Skunk, Art: One, and Dead Fern Press, among others.
In the course of compiling work for his new book, Steve had the amazing good fortune to become associated with a burgeoning writer and artist named Ayesha Khan. Ms. Khan, from Bangalore, India, has become a close friend and spiritual muse for Mr. Sibra and her influence has added a new level of intensity to his work.
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February 26, 2024
Jen Broadway
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An Everett Poetry Night regular features for the first time.
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March 4, 2024
Melanie Reed
Melanie Reed is a writer and visual artist with a creative writing BA from the University of Washington. Publication credits include prose poetry collection “Wholehearted Half-Truths” (Hiraeth Publishing, 2023) speculative fiction/psychological suspense novella "Every Other Day" (Hiraeth Publishing, 2021), and 2018 graphic novel/epic poem/soul collage book artwork "The Scrapbook of Dreams" (University of Washington's Suzzallo Library special collections).
She lives in Seattle, Washington.
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Wholehearted Half-Truths? Here’s one:
“I just couldn’t make these characters work the way I wanted them to. Right now I keep all my rough drafts inside this bottom drawer. Once in a while I hear some noise down there. They’re frustrated, half-finished, want some kind of resolution, but I’m tired. They will have to wait a few more centuries.”
There’s lots more inside…
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March 11, 2024
Nila Phillips
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Hi there! I'm Nila Phillips, or Ami, I'm a coming on sixteen year old indie author and poet~ The poetry I write is all mental health based, targeted at students, young adults, and what's not spoken about enough. I hope to advocate for mental health in the future and encourage other young authors to follow their ambitions. I love writing, it's always been a passion of mine, so I'm more than thrilled to be able to show you my heart and soul in words.
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March 18, 2024
Tom Prince
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March 25, 2024
Lennée Reid
Lennée Reid is a Creole, queer, disabled, poet, author, multimedia artist, activist, healer, and single mom on the spectrum, who doesn't like labels. They are published many places including her chapbooks, "Universal State of Mind" and "Qi Woo Mojo Juju". Lennée's spoken word albums, "The Second Coming of Matriarchy", "Crazy Thunder Medicine", and "Awareni", are available online. Lennée featured in "Artist's Among Us", "Dabbing with Washington Artists", and "Lean In Olympia". They are touring with UnityHenge, a social justice black light art installation that has shown at Luminata and numerous festivals. Follow @lenneereid and #TheQueenMystic online, and visit awareni.wordpress.com, for more information.
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April 1, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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April 8, 2024
Poets Table Group Reading
Featuring Nan Harty, Michael Magee, Darren Nordlie, Cathy Ross, Ken Schiovitz, and Sue Lovgren-Wade
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Poets Table was formed after a University of Washington certificate of poetry class decided to continue meeting after their class was over. The group has been meeting monthly for more than twenty years to share and critique poetry.
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Nan Harty is a community poet sharing her poems and listening to other poets in open mic venues throughout the Seattle area. She published The Telling of the Trees in 2021.
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Michael Magee's poems and plays have been produced and published in the United States, England, and Greece. His latest book is Terra Firma: Sacred Ground.
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Darren L. Nordlie is the 2022 first place winner in Poetry for EPIC Group Writers and his work has appeared on the Washington state poet laureate website. He serves as vice president of the Redmond Association of Spokenword.
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Cathy Ross's poems reflect a woman's journey through the middle years and often reveal unexpected layers within an ordinary life. Her latest book is What the Tulips Said.
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Ken Shiovitz, former animal behaviorist, real estate broker, and poetry venue host, has published birdsong research, essays, and poetry. Books are Rules of the Universe and Illuminating the Void.
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Sue Lovgren-Wade is a poet from Woodinville, Washington who writes what might best be described as miscellaneous poetry, ranging from centipedes to PTSD. Publishing seems to be a new adventure on the horizon.
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April 15, 2024
David Post
David Post has been a featured poet at BookTree in Kirkland, Duvall Poetry in Duvall and at PoetsWest venues in Seattle, Bothell and Woodinville.
He has been a guest reader at African American Writers Alliance venues in Seattle and Burien, and has read in Everett, Edmonds, Redmond, Lake Forest Park, Tacoma, Kenmore, Renton and Olympia. He was the last emcee for PoetsWest readings at Green Lake Library, Seattle and is co-emcee for Tsuga Poetry Group in Bothell and an admin for Western Washington Poets Network's Facebook page. He is a member of The Notion Club, a Christian writers group in Seattle. His poem "Brown Shoes" was published in the anthology "Poetic Impressions" by East Point West Press in 2021.
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April 22, 2024​
Subhaga Crystal Bacon
Subhaga Crystal Bacon is a Queer poet living in rural northcentral Washington on unceded Methow land. She is the author of four collections of poetry. Her latest book, Transitory is the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry, from BOA Editions, and was listed in the Publisher’s Weekly’s Top 50 Books of 2023.
She’s also the author of Surrender of Water in Hidden Places, 2023, winner of the Red Flag Poetry Chapbook Prize, Blue Hunger, Methow Press, 2020, and Elegy with a Glass of Whiskey, winner of the A. Poulin New Poetry America Prize, BOA Editions, 2004.
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A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, Subhaga is a teaching artist working in schools and libraries as well as with private students. Her work appears or is forthcoming in a variety of print and online journals including Diode, the Bellevue Literary Review, Indianapolis Review, Rise Up Review, Ghost City Review. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing: Poetry, from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
subhaga crystal bacon – Trust in Being
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April 29, 2024​
Jenny Liou
Jenny Liou (born 1983) is an English professor at Pierce College and a retired professional cage fighter. She lives and writes in Covington, Washington.
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May 6, 2024
Yvonne Higgins Leach
Yvonne Higgins Leach’s second collection of poems In the Spaces Between Us was published last fall by Kelsay Books. Her first collection Another Autumn was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2014. She spent decades balancing a career in communications and public relations, raising a family, and pursuing her love of writing poetry. Her latest passion is working with shelter dogs. She splits her time living on Vashon Island and in Spokane, Washington. For more information, visit www.yvonnehigginsleach.com
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May 13, 2024
Matthew Lane Brouwer
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May 20, 2024
Kelsey Taylor
Kelsey Taylor is a former figure skater with a fear of falling who has traded in her figure skates for poetry slams and leotards for leather jackets. When she’s not working her food service job, she is busy with her untitled hybrid memoir project based around her experiences of growing up with an alcoholic family member.
She currently splits her time between Marysville, WA and Portland OR. Sometimes the Silence Kills Me, her second poetry collection was released during the pandemic with the help of her cat Olivia, who loves to assist by laying on the keyboard.
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May 27, 2024
Jude Stratis
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June 3, 2024
Chris Jarmick
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June 10, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
​There will be a guest host.
Duane will be featuring out of state.
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June 17, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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June 24, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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July 1, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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July 8, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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July 15, 2024
Julene T. Weaver
Julene Tripp Weaver (formerly June Arlene Eggler) has her B.A. in Creative Writing from the City University of New York. She chose Hunter College as her main school so she could study with Audre Lorde. In the CUNY program she studied with Joan Larkin at Brooklyn College.
She moved to Seattle in 1989 and enrolled at The Leadership Institute of Seattle, an experiential, self-assessment learning program. She received her Masters in Applied Behavioral Science, orientated in Family of Origin therapy, in 1992. Since then she worked for 18 years in HIV/AIDS services, which included medical case management and adherence counseling.
Her poem, “death walk,” won third prize for poetry from the Unfinished Works Competition sponsored by AIDS Services Foundation Orange County. She traveled to California to read her poem on World AIDS Day, December 1, 2006, at their candlelight vigil and art opening.
Since November 2002, when she studied fiction writing with Tom Spanbauer and his team of Dangerous Writers TM, she also writes fiction and creative nonfiction.
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www.julenetrippweaver.com​​
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July 22, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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July 29, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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August 5, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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August 12, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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August 19, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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August 26, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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September 2, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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September 9, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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September 16, 2024
David Johnson
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David has been writing and recording music since 2003, performing since 2012, and he formed a duo with Christopher Gray in 2014. Christopher plays both electric and upright bass. His intuitive melodies add stories of their own to David's material. Colleagues who have worked with David in the studio have described his music as "vulnerable" (Conrad Uno of Seattle's former Egg Studios). Heartfelt, offbeat and occasionally visceral, his music lays his heart bare. His style has been likened to Nick Drake, Joan Baez, Elliot Smith, etc. With material that brings light to his own experiences while leaving room for listeners to draw parallels of their own, hearing his music is a unique experience.
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September 23, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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September 30, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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October 7, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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October 14, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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October 21, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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October 28, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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November 4, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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November 11, 2024
PETER LUDWIN
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Peter Ludwin is the recipient of a Literary Fellowship from Artist Trust and
the W.D. Snodgrass Award for Endeavor and Excellence in Poetry. His first
book, A Guest in All Your Houses, was published in 2009 by Word Walker
Press. His second collection is Rumors of Fallible Gods, a two-time finalist
for the Gival Press Poetry Award that was published in 2013 by Presa Press.
His third book, Gone to Gold Mountain, was published in 2016 by Moon-
Path Press and subsequently nominated for a Washington State Book Award.
In 2017 the Before Columbus Foundation nominated it for an American
Book Award. His most recent manuscript, Where the Silver Bullet Lies, was
a three-time finalist for the Wandering Aengus Press Book Award, and will
be published by Trail to Table Books in October, 2024.
A fourteen-year participant in Mexico’s San Miguel Poetry Week, where he
studied under such noted poets as Mark Doty, Tony Hoagland, Joseph
Stroud and Robert Wrigley, Ludwin won The Comstock Review’s 2016
Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award, judged by Marge Piercy. That same
year he was the Second Place winner of the Paulann Petersen Poetry Award,
and a finalist in poetry for both the Tucson Festival of Books Literary
Awards and the Pangaea Poetry Prize. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee,
he received nominations in 2016 from MoonPath Press and Connecticut
River Review.
His work has appeared in many journals, including Atlanta Review, The
Bitter Oleander, The Comstock Review, Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod,
North American Review and Prairie Schooner, to name a few. A world
traveler who has journeyed by canoe to visit remote Indian families in the
Amazon Basin of Ecuador, hiked in the Peruvian Andes, thumbed for rides
in Greece, bargained for goods in the markets of Marrakech and Istanbul and
survived debilitating illness in China and Tibet, he is also accomplished on
acoustic blues guitar and autoharp. He lives in Kent, Washington, where he
is currently writing a memoir/autobiography about growing up during the
Cold War and coming of age in the counterculture of the 1960s and ‘70s.
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November 18, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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November 25, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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December 2, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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December 9, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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December 16, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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December 23, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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December 30, 2024
Featured Poet: Everyone
An All Open Mic Evening
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See you in 2025......
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