Events

  Featuring Washington State Poet Laureate Sam Green, Jim Bertolino, Michael Daley, Oliver de la Paz, Nancy Pagh, and Jeremy Voigt These six Northwest Washington poets will read their “poems about place” at this event to raise awareness and support for the 2010 Skagit River Poetry Festival, which aims to “push poetry off the page and into the lives of rural audiences.”  • Washington State Poet Laureate Sam Green will emcee the evening and read from his work.  A 30-year veteran of Washington’s Poetry-in-the-Schools program who has taught in literally hundreds of classrooms, Green has also served five terms as Distinguished Visiting Northwest Writer at Seattle University.  His poems have appeared in hundreds of journals, and among his ten collections of poems are Vertebrae: Poems 1978-1994 and The Grace of Necessity. • Jim Bertolino is an award-winning poet whose recent collections include Finding Water, Holding Stone and Under A Silver Sky: Pacific Northwest Poetry. His poetry has been recognized with numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and has been widely published. • Michael Daley worked as a laborer, taxi driver, waiter, tree-planter, editor and poet-in-the-schools, and then became a high school English teacher and later a Fulbright Exchange teacher in Hungary. Twice the National Endowment of the Humanities has awarded his work, and his published works include To Curve, and a forthcoming title. • Oliver de la Paz, teaches creative writing at Western Washington University. His work has appeared in numerous journals, and in his award-winning books Names Above Houses and Furious Lullaby.  His third book, Requiem for the Orchard, is forthcoming in March. • Nancy Pagh's first book of poems, No Sweeter Fat (Autumn House Press 2007) won the publisher’s book award and her chapbook After won the 2008 Floating Bridge Press prize. Her work appears in numerous publications, she is a recipient of an Artist Trust Fellowship, and was the 2008 D. H. Lawrence Fellow at the Taos Summer Writers Conference. She teaches at Western Washington University. • Jeremy Voigt has worked as a janitor, a disc jockey, a saxophone instructor and a substitute teacher. He is the founding editor of a new online literary journal Arbutus. A graduate of WWU with a degree in creative writing focusing on poetry, he has a chapbook forthcoming. Co-sponsored by North Cascades Institute