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. 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

Carlin Aden

Kelli Russell Agodon
Born and raised in Seattle. Is the author of two books of poems, Small Knots (Cherry Grove Collections, 2004) and Geography, 2003 winner of the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. Her poems have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Prairie Schooner, Notre Dame Review, IMAGE, as well as anthologies such as Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times, Poets Against the War, and the newly released anthology of feminist poetry, Letters to the World. She was nominated for two Pushcart Awards and is the recipient of two Artist Trust GAP awards, The James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Carlin Adin Award for formal verse, the William Stafford Prize, a writing residency at Soapstone Writers Retreat in Oregon, and a Puffin Foundation grant for her poetry broadside series: The Making of Peace. A graduate of the University of Washington and Pacific Lutheran University where she received her MFA, Kelli currently lives in a small seaside community in the Northwest with her family.

John Akins (1947- )
Born in Helena Montana and raised in Seattle and Tacoma. Was about to be drafted out of college in 1967 so enlisted in the Marines (USMC 1967-69) and served as a rifleman in Vietnam, in Tet 1968. He was part of an infantry battalion and later worked with small teams called Combined Action Platoons. He was wounded and medevaced once. Was recommended for three medals and also for lower rank (the latter came about). After the military he worked at various occupations (construction electrician, welder, journalism, public affairs for Washington legislature and state agencies, including the Washington Conservation Commission, and high school teacher). Played rugby and competed rodeo rough stock to satisfy adrenalin addiction after Vietnam. Got married for the second time in Saigon in 2003. Has an 18-year-old son. He has written about his Vietnam experience in a collection of war poems in On the Way to Khe Sanh (2004) and in a memoir Nam Au Go Go (Vineyard Press, 2005).

Sherman Alexie (1966- )
Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, is an award-winning poet, writer of short stories and other fiction, playwright, and film-maker. He was educated at Gonzaga University and Washington State University. Sherman is a story-teller who reveals with dark humor the experiences of contemporary Native Americans, especially those living on reservations. His latest chapbook collection of poems is Dangerous Astronomy (Limberlost). His other collections include:
One Stick Song (Hanging Loose Press, 2000)
The Summer of Black Widows, Hanging Loose Press, 1996
The Business of Fancydancing
First Indian on the Moon
Old Shirts & New Skins

Jody Aliesan (1943- )
Born in Kansas City, Jody Aliesan moved from the center of the US through four of its corners before leaving for Canada in 2004. She traveled to California (Occidental College), Massachusetts (Brandeis University), was teaching in Alabama the year Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, and worked as media representative with the Vietnam Moratorium Committee in Washington DC and Chicago before continuing west to Puget Sound in 1970. Aliesan's 'Urban Homestead' environmental education project led to a bimonthly column in The Seattle Times. She was co-founder and first director of the PCC Farmland Trust. Deeply involved in the second wave of feminism in the Pacific Northwest, she continues to work against war and for social and environmental justice. Aliesan is a member of The Writers' Union of Canada and a contributing editor for The Raven Chronicles. Awards include a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1978). She lives in Vancouver, BC.

Her books and chapbooks include:
True North/Nord Vrai, Blue Begonia Press, 2007
Loving in Time of War, Blue Begonia Press, Yakima WA, 1999
Desperate for a Clearing, Grey Spider Press, Sedro Woolley WA, 1998
States of Grace, Grey Spider Press, 1992
Grief Sweat, Broken Moon Press, 1991
Desire: Poems 1978-1982, Empty Bowl Press, Port Townsend WA, 1985
Doing Least Harm, Brooding Heron Press, 1985
as if it will matter, Seal Press, 1978
Soul Claiming, Mulch Press, 1975
To Set Free: Poems, Second Moon Press, 1972.

Recordings:
Selections from Grief Sweat, Broken Moon Press, 1993
You'll Be Hearing More From Me, Tana, 1972

Jody Aliesan's papers are collected (to 2003) by University of Washington Libraries: http://www.lib.washington.edu/Specialcoll/findaids/docs/papersrecords/AliesanJody2272.xml.

Jane Alynn
This poet, essayist and fine art photographer was born in Portland, Oregon but grew up in New York City. She studied ballet with the New York City Ballet School, practiced psychotherapy in California and Seattle for thirty years, then retired to write, having earned her MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Antioch University Los Angeles.

Her poems have appeared in various journals including StringTown, The Pacific Review, Quercus Review, Manorborn, Snowy Egret, and Switched-on Gutenberg, as well as anthologies, including WPA's Mute Note Earthward and Tattoos on Cedar. Her chapbook of poems, Threads & Dust, was published in 2005 by Finishing Line Press. She received the 2004 William Stafford Award from the Washington Poets Association. Jane earned her MFA in Creative Writing with a poetry concentration from Antioch University Los Angeles. She currently lives in Anacortes where she organizes literary events. She can be reached at www.janealynn.com.

Ginger Andrews (1956- )
Was born in North Bend, Oregon. She has been published in The Hudson Review, Poetry, River Sedge, Fireweed, and The American Voice. In 1997, She is the 1997 winner of the Mary Schierman Award (Coos Bay Writers Conference) and the 1999 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize from Story Line Press.
Her publications include:
An Honest Answer
A Whole Life: Ginger Andrews

Pat Andrus
Born and raised on a farm in Michigan, moved to the Northwest in 1968. An MFA graduate (1989) of Goddard College in Vermont, her works have appeared in both local and national publications. Her collections include a letterpress work Daughter (Olivewood Pr., 1987) and an NEA-funded collection Old Woman of Irish Blood (Open Hand Publishing, 1997), in addition to a recording of her works with Northwest musician Mariana Van Blair and Texas poet Charles Dews in Beangan: The New Branch. An instructor of literature and writing at Bellevue Community College, Andrus also collaborates with visual artists and videographers.

Joseph Aprile
A Seattle resident, he was raised in the Bronx, New York, in a diverse environment that had a profound effect on his view of the world and humanity. He has published works of fiction, poetry and non-fiction. In addition, his work has appeared in literary magazines, anthologies and on the Internet. He has a diverse professional background encompassing education, the sciences and technology. Writing has always been an integral part of his creative life and telling stories the avenue through which he examines the dimensions of the human spirit. If there is an underlying theme in his work, it is to explore the many facets of the human experience. He also is an artist and photographer; his literary and art works can be viewed and purchased online, using the following links: http://lvau.com and http://artwanted.com/japrile.

His published works include:
The Human Equation- A collection of short stories, 2008
The Illusive Quality of Existence - Poetry, 2007
Impaled on Time's Illustrious Arrow - Anthology of Poetry, 2006
The Surprising Latitude of Fate - Novel, 2006
At the Fringes of Experience - Anthology of Novellas, 2005
Awakening from a Distant Dream - Novel, 2004
America and the Mythology of Greatness - Non-Fiction, 2004.

Jeannette Armstrong (1948- )
This Okanagan Indian poet, novelist, and artist was born on the Okanagan Reserve near Penticton in British Columbia. After receiving a B.F.A. from the University of Victoria in 1978, she worked at the En'owkin Center in Penticton, and in 1989 she co-founded and became the first director of the En'owkin International School of Writing, a school for Native American writers. Her poems and stories have appeared in numerous anthologies. She was the editor of the 1993 Orca publication, Looking at the Words of Our People: An Anthology of First Nation Literary Criticism. Her latest novel, Whispering in Shadows, was published in 2000 by Theytus Books. Theytus also published her novel about the American Indian Movement (AIM), Slash, in 1985 and its revised edition in 1988, as well as her collection of poetry, Breath Tracks, in 1991.

Tom Aslin

Jim Ayala
Originally from the San Francisco Bay area and graduated in 1974 from California College of Arts and Crafts with a major in Education and Fine Arts. Has lived in the Puget Sound region for the last twenty years. Jim's poetry has been deeply influenced by the works of the Persian mystical poets Jellaludin Rumi and Hafiz. In January of each year, Jim hosts and shares the poetry of these and other great Persian masters at the "Come to the Garden in Winter" series. In this venue, Jim is accompanied by flute, percussion and Whirling Dervishes. He has also been a featured poet at several venues in the greater Seattle area. In addition to poetry, Jim is busy with sculpture, drawing and photography projects. Jim's poetry and artwork can be viewed at www.ayalasculptures.com. Jim's poetry has been published in Belonging to Life, by Mary OMalley; Awaken Press, 2002.
Jim is currently writing a book about his experiences in the Army during the Vietnam era. The book, tentatively titled, Hey You! … or How I Learned to Love the War is a series of humorous, ironic and tragic vignettes about his experiences as a highly resistant infantryman in the United States Army.

Lana Hechtman Ayers
Lana grew up in Queens, NY, lived in New England over a decade before relocating to Kirkland, WA where she is a manuscript consultant, workshop facilitator and publishes the Concrete Wolf Poetry Chapbook Series http://ConcreteWolf.com. She holds degrees in Mathematics and Psychology and earned an MFA in Poetry from New England College. A Pushcart nominee, her poems appear in such journals as Poetica, Cider Press Review, The Bitter Oleander, Rhino, and Feminist Studies Quarterly. She has authored several collections of poems: Dance From Inside My Bones, which won the Violet Reed Haas Award, Chicken Farmer, I Still Love You, which won D-N Press National Book Award, and Love is a Weed, a chapbook published by Finishing Line Press. To view some of Lana’s work, visit her website, http://LanaAyers.com.

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Mary Barnard (1910-2001)
The distinguished poet, essayist and translator of Sappho died August 25, 2001. She was born in Vancouver, WA, grew up in Buxton, Oregon but spent her last years back in Vancouver. She was an alumna of Reed College where she studied Greek. She spent the thirties and forties in New York City, where she got to know several major twentieth century poets: Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and aspiring writers Delmore Schwartz and Muriel Rukeyser. She also worked for years with historian Carl Van Doren. In the 1930s at Ezra Pound's instigation, she began to translate Sappho. She did a stint at the Yaddo artist colony and was curator of the University of Buffalo's Poetry Center. Her translation of Sappho has been in print for more than forty years and is reputed to have sold more than 100,000 copies.

Her publications include:
Nantucket Genesis: The Tale of My Tribe, Breitenbush, 1988 (genealogy)
Time and the White Tigress, Breitenbush, 1986 (poetry) - Western States Book Award
Assault on Mount Helicon, Univ. of California Press, 1984 (memoir)
Three Fables, Breitenbush, 1984
Collected Poems, Breitenbush Books, 1979
The Mythmakers, Ohio University Press, 1966 (essays)
Sappho: A New Translation, Univ. of California, 1958 (reissued 1999)
"Cool Country" (poems) included in Five Young American Poets, New Directions, 1940.

Pat Bartolo
Pat is a poet and essayist who was born in Iowa and raised in both Michigan and in Chicago. She considers herself a Midwesterner who has moved to the coast — both of them. She has a B.A. in English from Fontbonne College in St. Louis and an M.A. in Humanities from SUNY, Stony Brook. She taught English in Chicago, Long Island, and Germany. Before moving to Arizona, she worked in the software industry in Seattle for ten years: both in sales and in technical recruiting.

Her poems have been published in PoetsWest, Fan, a Magazine of Baseball Literature, Voices International, Pudding House Press Publications, The Woodinville Weekly and The Mudville Diaries, an anthology of baseball literature. She has two chapbooks of poetry: Because You Said I Shouldn't and Apples and Other Temptations. She has read her poems at the PoetsWest Reading series at the Frye Museum in Seattle, at the Wit's End café, at Barnes & Noble and at many other public forums. Her essays have been seen in local papers and The Bridal Connection a trade paper. She served as the President of the Seattle Branch of the National League of American Pen Women from 1996-1999 and was their newsletter editor from 1994-1996. She is a former board member of the Washington Poets Association. Her work reflects her Irish Catholic background (maiden name, Ryan), modern family life and marriage. It is full of humor and shows her interest in and love of people of all cultures.

Alexandra Oliver Basekic
Was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1970. Since emerging onto the Vancouver poetry scene in 1992 and being named the following year as one of the Top Ten Young Artists of the year by The Vancouver Sun, she has gone on to perform her work at places as diverse as Lollapalooza, The 1996 National Poetry Slam and the 2004 CBC National Poetry Face-Off. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and publications worldwide, including Orbis Rhyme International, Nexus, In Hells Belly and The Vancouver Sun, as well as About.Com's Poems After The Attack anthology, a collection discussing and reflecting upon the aftermath of 9/11. She has taught poetry and led workshops in high schools, colleges and prisons and was one of the Directors of the Edgewise Electrolit Centre, an organization created to promote poetry and new poets through the use of new media. She lives in Seattle with her husband and son.

Bart E. Baxter
Bart Baxter, award-winning poet and master of poetic form, and recent Seattle Poet Populist, was born in Sherman, Texas. After graduating (B.A. with honors) from the University of Texas, he did postgraduate studies at Boise State University and the University of Washington.

Bart's many writing awards include:
1999 King County Arts Commission Grant
1999 First Place, Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Competition
1998 First Place, Seattle Poetry Grand Slam
1997 William Stafford Award
1996 Carlin Aden Award for Poetry
1995 Charles Proctor Award
1994 Hart Crane Award for Poetry, Kent State University
1994 First Place, MTV Poetry Grand Slam
1994 Seattle Arts Commission Grant

Bart Baxter's recent work has appeared in the Formalist, The Ohio Poetry Review, and Poetry. His most recent author appearances have included the Washington State House of Representatives; Washington State Senate; Distinguished Poets Series; Northwest Bookfest Panel on Neo-Formalism; Nuyorican Poets Café, New York; Greenmill Tavern, Chicago; 1998 National Poetry Slam; and the Whidbey Island Writers Conference. He was selected as poet populist at Seattle's 2001 Poe

Bart Baxter's poetry collections include:
The Man with St. Vitus' Dance, Floating Bridge Press, Seattle, 2000 (includes CD with QuickTime video of Bart performing title poem)
Sonnets from the Mare Imbrium, Floating Bridge Press, Seattle, 1999
Peace for the Arsonist, Bacchae Press, Bristolville, Ohio, 1995
Driving Wrong, Poetry Around Press, Seattle, 1992.

Bruce Beasley
Bruce Beasley was born in Georgia in 1958 and moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1992. He holds a B.A. in English from Oberlin College, an M.F.A. from Columbia University and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He is currently a professor of English at Western Washington University in Bellingham. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Artist Trust of Washington, and three Pushcart Prizes. His work appears in The Pushcart Book of Poetry: The Best Poems from the First 30 Years of the Pushcart Prizes. His poetry has also been published in Poetry, Antioch Review, New England Review, and Yale Review.

His poetry collections include:
The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems, University of Washington Press, 2007
Lord Brain, winner of the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series competition, 2005
Signs & Abominations, Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2000
Summer Mystagogia, winner of the 1996 Colorado Prize (selected by Charles Wright)
The Creation, winner of the 1993 Ohio State University Press / The Journal Award in poetry
Spirituals, Wesleyan University Press, 1988

Marvin Bell (1937- )
Born in New York City, Marvin Bell grew up on rural Long Island. Well known in the Pacific Northwest for an astonishing body of work (also taught at the University of Washington and lives part of the time in Port Townsend), he has been teaching at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop for many years. In the spring of 2000 he was named Iowa's first Poet Laureate. A past winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1977), Bell has twice been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship (1983, 1986) and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1978, 1984). His many awards also include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature (1994), the Bess Hokin Award (1969), and the Academy of American Poets Lamont Award (1969).

His collected works include:
Nightworks: Poems 1962-2000, Copper Canyon Press, 2000
Wednesday: Selected Poems 1966-1997, Salmon Publishing, County Clare, Ireland, 1998
Poetry for a Midsummer's Night, Seventy Fourth Street Productions, Seattle, 1998
Ardor, The Book of the Dead Man, Vol. 2, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend WA, 1997
The Book of the Dead Man, Vol.1, Copper Canyon Press, 1994
A Marvin Bell Reader: Selected Prose and Poetry, Middlebury College Press, 1994
Iris of Creation, Copper Canyon Press, 1990
New and Selected Poems, Atheneum, 1987
Drawn by Stones, by Earth, by Things That Have Been in the Fire, Atheneum, 1984
Old Snow Just Melting: Essays and Interviews, University of Michigan Press, 1983
Segues: A Correspondence in Poetry (co-authored with William Stafford), David R.Godine, Publisher, 1983
These Green-Going-to-Yellow (poems), Atheneum, 1981
Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See, Atheneum, 1977 (National Book Award Finalist)
Residue of Song, Atheneum, 1974
The Escape into You, Atheneum, 1971
A Probable Volume of Dreams, Atheneum, 1969
Things We Dreamt We Died For, Stone Wall Press, 1966.

Beth Bentley
Beth Bentley was educated at the University of Minnesota (B.A.) and received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and English from the University of Michigan. She has been living in Seattle since 1952 and has taught in the Northwest and elsewhere for over thirty years. She taught "Writing Contemporary Poetry" at the University of Washington from 1980 to 1992; she also founded and directed the Northwest Poets' Reading Series at the Seattle Public Library, where it ran from 1960 to 1974. The Reading Series became the Castalia series at the U of Washington. (Also see Nelson Bentley.) Her poetry has been widely published in journals and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, Saturday Review, and The Sewanee Review.

Beth Bentley's poetry collections include:
Little Fires, Cune Press, 1998
The Purely Visible, SeaPen Press, 1980
Philosophical Investigations, SeaPen Press, 1977
Country of Resemblances, Ohio University Press, 1976
Field of Snow, Gemini Press, Seattle, 1973
Phone Calls From the Dead, Ohio University Press, 1972

Her awards and honors include:
Montalvo Award, 1987
Washington State Governor's Award for each of her previous books: Phone Calls From the Dead and Country of Resemblances
Northwest Bookseller's Award for Phone Calls From the Dead
National Endowment of the Arts fellowship, 1976/77.

Beth Bentley selected and edited The Selected Poems of Hazel Hall, published by Ahsahta Press. She has translated a number of contemporary French poets, which were published both in the U.S. and in Canada. She was a fellow of the NEA in 1978; that same year she and Nelson Bentley were invited to read at the Library of Congress.

Nelson Bentley (1918-1990)
Born in Elm, Michigan and educated (B.A. and M.A.) at the University of Michigan, Nelson Bentley was a much-loved poet and professor of English at the University of Washington. His presence on the literary scene is legendary and spanned a period of more than forty years, during which he conducted workshops, hosted readings at literary venues around the city and on radio and public television, juried poetry contests, edited poetry for journals and newspapers, and was a co-founder of Poetry Northwest and The Seattle Review. The Castalia Reading Series for graduate students, which started at the U of Washington in the mid-seventies, continues today.

Nelson Bentley's poetry collections include:
The Flying Oyster: The Collected Comic Apocalypses, Bellowing Ark Press, 1997
Collected Shorter Poems, Bellowing Ark Press, 1988
Iron Man of the Hoh, Copper Canyon Press, 1978
Grayland Apocalypse, Bonefire Press, Seattle, 1972
Sea Lion Caves and Other Poems, from "New Poetry Series," Alan Swallow, Denver, 1960.

Sean Bentley (1954- )
Sean, the son of Nelson and Beth Bentley, was born in Seattle. He was graduated from the University of Washington in 1980 with a B.A. cum laude in Cinema/English. He has been coeditor of Fine Madness magazine (www.finemadness.org/) since 1984, and is president 1998-2000 of Friends of Nelson Bentley (www.friendsofnelson.org). Visit the web site for a list of Sean Bentley's publications, sample poetry and fiction, etc. He lives in Seattle and works as a technical writer for Microsoft.

"My parents read, wrote, and taught poetry. The house I grew up in brimmed with poetry books. My first words reportedly were, "Of Man's first disobedience..." I loved to identify the photos of the authors on the Oscar Williams anthologies, and knew Yeats and Auden by sight as some kids know sports stars. By 15, I was spending five nights a week at the University of Washington attending my father's workshops or student readings. For ten years, this was my social life, education, career, and, essentially, family. By 18, my self-consciousness and sense of nepotism kicked in and I assumed a series of anagrammatic pen-names, finally settling on Lenny E. Beast. In the 1980s, I turned my writing almost exclusively to lyrics and music for a terminally unknown power-pop band, Walk Don't Walk, which finally disbanded after nine years, at which time I turned back to nonmusical forms.

I find the work of Albert Goldbarth particularly inspirational for colorful language, in addition to Dylan Thomas's, for rhythm. A friend once told me he couldn't write a poem that didn't concern the "big things." (I visualized something on the order of an abominable snowman.) I was taught to avoid writing "political poems," since polemic tends to overcome the poetry. But politics, a four-letter word these days, is difficult to transcend, and much of my work deals with it. However, I try to leaven tirade with particulars, the desolation with grace."

Sean Bentley's poetry collections include:
Grace & Desolation: New Poems, Cune Press, Seattle, 1996
Instances: Poems, Confluence Press, Lewis & Clark College, Lewiston, Idaho, 1979
Into the Bright Oasis, Jawbone Press, Seattle, 1976.

James Bertolino
Bertolino was born in Wisconsin and received his B.S. in English from the University of Wisconsin (1970) and his M.F.A. in poetry from Cornell University (1973). Teaching is how he's made his living, which has taken him to Washington State University, Cornell, University of Cincinnati, Washington Community Colleges, Chapman University, Western Washington University, the Centrum Foundation, Washington State Department of Ecology, and the North Cascades Institute. From 1983 to 1998 he lived on Guemes Island, Washington, and for the 1998-99 school year he was a visiting professor teaching literature and creative writing at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. In 2005 he was the Lead Poet for the Washington Poets Association "Poetry Roadshow," and for 2005-2006 was Writer-in-Residence at Willamette University. He is now retired and living in Bellingham. His email address: jimbertolino@yahoo.com

Jim has two complete out-of-print volumes of his poetry available free online at Connecticut College's Contemporary American Poetry Archive! Links also listed below in list of publications.http://capa.conncoll.edu/bertolino.making.html and
http://capa.conncoll.edu/bertolino.pkgss.html.

Bertolino won the international Quarterly Review of Literature Book Award for his eighth full-length collection of poems, Snail River (1995). His other awards include:
Book-of-the-Month Club Poetry Fellowship
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
Ohio Arts Council grant
The Discovery Award.

Jim Bertolino's collections of poetry include:
Pocket Animals: 60 Poems, Egress Studio Press, 2002
James Bertolino: Greatest Hits, 1965-2000 (chapbook), published as part of "Greatest Hits" series by Pudding House Publications, Johnstown, Ohio, 2000
26 Poems from Snail River, Egress Studio Press, 2000
Snail River, QRL Contemporary Poetry Series, Princeton University, 1995
First Credo, QRL Award Series, 1986
Precinct Kali & the Gertrude Spicer Story, New Rivers Press, 1982. (Available free online at http://capa.conncoll.edu/bertolino.pkgss.html.)
New & Selected Poems, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1978
Making Space for Our Living, Copper Canyon Press, 1975 (Available free online at http://capa.conncoll.edu/bertolino.making.html.)

Bertolino has been widely published for almost forty years, and his work has appeared in numerous periodicals, including Ploughshares, Poetry, Paris Review, Epoch, Partisan Review, Northwest Review, Seattle Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kansas Quarterly and many others. Recent anthologies include Poets Against the War (The Nation Books), and Under A Silver Sky: Pacific Northwest Poetry (Evergreen State College). He has also served as poetry editor for Abraxas, Quixote Press, Stone Marrow Press, Ithaca House, Epoch, Rapport, Eureka Review, Cincinnati Poetry Review, the Cincinnati Area Poetry Project, Cornfield Review, and In Context. His many book reviews and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies. Yale University's Harold Bloom has twice reprinted Bertolino's essay on Maya Angelou.

"Sigmund Freud once said, 'Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.'
When I was fifteen or sixteen I read an article about self-hypnosis, and decided to try it. After a relaxation procedure, I began to repeat the phrase I'd been given, and felt myself sink deeper and deeper into my body. Within several minutes I noticed I was sinking more rapidly--it felt like wind or water rushing by me--and suddenly it was as though I'd fallen out the bottom. I had passed through some barrier and was floating in an immense, dark space, like outer space, with flickering points of light. I was frightened not only in being completely without bearings, but by a roaring which surrounded and seemed to penetrate me. Then I understood: that vast sound was many millions of voices, speaking in hundreds of languages. My body began to shiver with excitement, and the physical motion quickly brought me back to my bedroom on a sunny, Summer afternoon.

That experience was a central one for me, because it demonstrated that the true nature of existence was quite different from how it had been conventionally described. For over forty years I've believed there is a transcendence possible by going into the body, just as by reaching into what is vast and grand we come onto what is particular and personal and precious. I see the poem as a descent into the transcendental body of language, a process that is actual, not metaphoric--the poem as a kind of technology for both enacting and extending the ecstatic world. Gregory Bateson saw that the structures and syntax of human language are of the same family as the structure and syntax of the universe. David Abrams has argued elegantly that through language we become co-creators of what exists. As a poet I've tried to enact in my language everything I've experienced, all that my imagination and intuition have described, and have tried to exclude nothing. I believe if we give ourselves fully, poetry can bring us into a magical, alchemical, intercourse with the world. The ancient alchemist Hermes Trismegistus has best described the scale and inclusiveness I have always wanted for my poetry: "Find your home in the haunts of every living creature. Make yourself higher than all heights and lower than all depths. Bring together in yourself all opposites of quality: heat and cold, dryness and fluidity. Think that you are everywhere at once, on land, at sea, in heaven. Think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave. Grasp in your thought all this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together."

"It has always been the work of poetry to give humanity new images of the world, and new descriptions of what it means to exist. I take that responsibility seriously. "

—from the Introduction to Greatest Hits, 1965-2000, chapbook published as part of its "Greatest Hits" series by Pudding House Publications, Johnstown, Ohio, 2000.

Linda Bierds (1945- )
This award-winning (Pen West Poetry Prize) poet and MacArthur Foundation fellow was born in Delaware and educated at the University of Washington (B.A. and M.A.). She is the director of the writing program and member of the faculty in the English Department at the University of Washington in Seattle. A frequent contributor to anthologies and journals, Linda Bierds's poetry collections include:
The Seconds, Putnam, 2001
The Ghost Trio, Henry Holt, 1994
Companions for the Slow Rowing, Henry Holt, New York, 1991
Heart and Perimeter, Henry Holt, 1991
The Stillness, the Dancing, Henry Holt, 1988
Flights of the Harvest-Mare, Ahsahta Press, 1985
Snaring the Flightless Birds, Allegany Mountain Press, 1982.

David Biespiel (1964- )
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Educated at Boston University (B.A.), University of Maryland (M.F.A.), and Stanford University as a Stegner Fellow. He is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Biespiel has taught at the University of Maryland, Portland State University, and Stanford University. He now teaches at Oregon State University and is writer-in-residence at "the Attic." His work has been published in: American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Hungry Mind Review, Ohio Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Sewanee Review, New York Times Book Review, Zyzzyva. Publishers' Weekly described his first collection of poems, Shattering Air (BOA Editions), as a "search for transcendent, intuitive truths." The Journal described it as "Keatsian." He lives in Portland, Oregon.
His books include:
Editor: Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets (Oregon State University Press, 2006)
Wild Civility (University of Washington Press, 2003)
Shattering Air (BOA Editions, New Poets of America Series, 1996).

Gloria Bird (1951- )
A member of the Spokane tribe, Gloria Bird lives in Spokane. After attending Portland Community College, she received her B.A. in English (1990) from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and her M.A. in English (1992) from the University of Arizona. She has been a teacher of literature and creative writing, has conducted workshops, and is associate editor for the Wicazo Sa Review (Minneapolis). She has been published in many anthologies, including First Fish, First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific, University of Washington Press, and Dancing on the Rim of the World: An Anthology of Contemporary Northwest Native American Writing, Sun Tracks, Vol. 19, University of Arizona Press, 1991. Her awards include the Witter-Bynner Foundation grant (1993), Diane Decorah Award (1992), and Oregon Writer's Grant (1988). She and Harjo were awarded the Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America for Reinventing the Enemy's Language. Long active in the arts, Gloria is a board member of the Wakiknabe Inter-Tribal Theater in Albuquerque, New Mexico and she has been associated with the Institute of American Indian Arts. In 2001 Gloria Bird was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Washington Commission for the Humanities.

A partial list of her publications includes:
The River of History (poetry), Trask House Books, 1997
Reinventing the Enemy's Language (edited with Joy Harjo), Trask House Books, 1997
Full Moon on the Reservation (poetry), Greenfield Review Press, 1994.

Earle Birney (1904-1995)
The long writing career of this award-winning Canadian poet spanned the decades from the 1940s to 1991. He was born in Calgary and educated at the University of British Columbia (1922-1926). He received his master's from the University of Toronto (1927) and studied for a short time at Berkeley before leaving for the University of London (1934-1936). He returned to the University of Toronto for his Ph.D. A political activist and Marxist in the 1930s, he served in the Canadian Army in World War II. After the war he taught at the University of British Columbia until moving to the University of Toronto in 1965. A world traveler and legendary teacher, he wrote novels, plays, travel pieces, as well as his numerous collections of poetry.

The following titles are only a partial list of his published works:
Last Makings, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1991
Copernican Fix, ECW Press, Toronto, 1985
Ghost in the Wheels: Selected Poems, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1977
The Rugging and the Moving Times: Poems New and Uncollected, Black Moss, Coatsworth, Ontario, 1976
Alphabeings & Other Seayours, Pikadilly Press, 1976
The Collected Poems of Earle Birney, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1975
The Bear on the Dehli Road, Chatto & Windus, London, 1973
What's So Big About Green, McClelland & Stewart, 1973
Rag and Bone Shop, McClelland & Stewart, 1971
The Poems of Earle Birney, McClelland & Stewart, 1969
Memory No Servant, New Books, Trumansburg, NY, 1968
Selected Poems 1940-1966, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1966
Ice, Cod, Bell, or Stone, McClelland & Stewart, 1962
Trial of a City, Ryerson, 1952
The Strait of Anian, Selected Poems, Ryerson Press, Toronto, 1948
Now Is Time, Ryerson Press, 1945
David and Other Poems, Ryerson Press, Toronto, 1942 (Received the Governor General's Award). 

bill bissett(1939- )
Performance poet who recites and chants his own work. His poetry is political and his style anti-conventional. He is also an editor, painter and musician, and a leading figure in Canadian culture. bissett conducts writers' workshops at the University of Toronto; in the mid-eighties was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario, and a participant in the Writer-in-Libraries program at Woodstock Public Library.

He was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. After moving to Vancouver in 1958, he started blewointment press publishing work by bpNichol, Steve McCaffery, Andrew Suknaski, Lionel Kearns and d.a. levy. bissett's work ranges across various media, including drawings, use of page space and even hypertext with in th whirlwind. His awards include the milton acorn peopuls poets award (1990) and dorothy livesay bc book award poetree (1993). bissett is based in Toronto.

His publications, too numerous to list here, but they include:
skars on th seehors (Talonbooks, 1999) (Also recorded)
loving without being vulnerabul (Talonbooks, 1997)
th influenza uv logik (Talonbooks, 1995)
h last photo uv th human soul (Talonbooks, 1993)
inkorrect thots (Talonbooks, 1992)
what we have, hard 2 beleev (Talonbooks, 1990)
And his work is included in these anthologies: Canadian Poetry, Volume Two (General Publishing/ECW Press, 1982), The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English (Oxford University Press, 1982) and Descant 98 LOVE (Descant, 1998).

bissett has done several recordings:
skars on th seehors (van trout sound, 1999)
sonic horses (with dermot foley and lenore coutts) london life. (london works, 1992)
dreemin uv th nite (luddites, 1992)
luddites (with Peter Denny, Gerry Collins and Murray Favro), 1987.

Robin Blaser (1925- )
Born in Denver, Colorado, he grew up in Idaho. He received his B.A.(1952) and his M.A.(1954) and M.L.S.(1955) from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a major figure (with Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer, and Robert Duncan) in the San Francisco Renaissance in the 1950s and early 1960s. Robin Blaser moved to British Columbia in 1966 to join the English Department of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby. He became a Canadian citizen in the early 1970s. He retired in 1995.

A partial list of his publications includes:
The Fire (essays), U of CA Press, 2006 The Holy Forest: Collected Poems (Revised and Expanded), U of CA Press, 2006
Pell Mell, Coach House, 1988
The Faerie Queen & the Park, Fissure Books, Vancouver, 1987
Syntax, Talonbooks, Vancouver, 1983
Image Nation 15: The Lacquerhouse, W. Hoffer, 1981
Harp Trees, Sun Stone House & Cobblestone, Vancouver, 1977
Image Nations 13 & 14, Cobblestone, Vancouver, B.C., 1975
Image Nations 1-12, Ferry Press, London, 1974
Cups, Four Seasons Foundation, San Francisco, 1968
Les Chimeres, Open Space, San Francisco, 1965
The Moth Poem, Open Space, San Francisco, 1964
Apparitors, Auerhahn, San Francisco, 1963.

Laurie Blauner
Was born and raised in New York City. Received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, Field, Crab Creek Review and other magazines. She has received an NEA and several Seattle Commission grants. She lives in Seattle and her web site is www.laurieblauner.com.

Her poetry collections include:
Wrong, Cherry Grove Editions, 2008
All This Could Be Yours, Cherry Grove Editions, 2006
Somebody, Black Heron Press, 2003
Facing the Facts, Orchises Press, 2002
Children of Gravity, Owl Creek Press, 1992. Winner of 1995 King County Publication Award
Self Portrait with an Unwilling Landscape, Owl Creek Press, 1989
Other Lives, Owl Creek Press, 1984.

She has also authored a work of fiction:
Infinite Kindness, Black Heron Press, 2007.

Jim Bodeen
This poet, photographer, and publisher of poetry lives in Yakima, Washington, where he and his wife, Karen, run award-winning Blue Begonia Press. After publishing letterpress broadsides for ten years, they began publishing their trade edition books in 1991. Jim also teaches Latino Literature at Davis High School in Yakima. His poems have been published in Paterson Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, Seattle Review, Poet Lore, PoetsWest, Borderlands, and Gulf Coast. His poetry collection, Whole Houses Shaking, has been translated into Spanish as Casas Enteras Temblando by the Instituto Cultural de Chihuahua, Chihuahua, Mexico. His latest collection, This House, was just published by Tsunami. With My Hands Full//Con Mis Manos Llenas, an anthology of young Latino writers, edited by Jim, can be ordered from Blue Begonia Press. All of Jim's books can be ordered from Blue Begonia Press in Yakima, Elliott Bay Bookstore and University Bookstore in Seattle, or from Sunshine and Wisteria in Yakima, Washington. Blue Begonia's address is 225 S 15^th Ave., Yakima, WA 98902-9748.

Jim Bodeen's poetry collections include:
This House, Tsunami Press Inc., 2000
Impulse to Love, Blue Begonia Press, 1998
Whole Houses Shaking, Empty Bowl Press, 1993
With My Hands Full/Con Mis Manos Llenas, edited by Jim Bodeen.

Karen Bonaudi (1946 - )
Karen Bonaudi grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., went to Rutgers, lived in LA, Australia and Georgia and has resided in Washington since 1979. She currently lives and works in Moses Lake. She is a former long-time Washington Poets Association board member and winner of its Faith Beamer Cooke Award. She has worked with Russian journalists developing curriculum for conflict resolution training, published articles in education and other publications, performed with the All Bets Are Off ensemble and conducted many workshops and readings. Her poetry has been published in Bellingham Review, Nascent, Salal Review, Milepost 177, Mute Note Earthward, Pontoon, Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry, and others. She can be reached at kbonaudi@earthlink.net.

George Bowering(1935- )
This "post-modern" "experimental" poet, novelist, essayist, historian, and hard-core baseball fan is one of Canada's most prolific writers and its current Poet Laureate. George Bowering describes himself as "the chronicler" who, like William Carlos Williams, records or gives witness to the ordinary and in language that is natural. Bowering was born December 1, 1935 in Penticton, British Columbia where the semi-desert Okanagan valley, "so full of rattlesnakes, cactus, and sagebrush, is just like the landscape in Western movies."

Beginning in 1954 George Bowering served three years as an aerial photographer in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He then earned a B.A. in history (1960) and M.A. in English (1963) from the University of British Columbia. Important influences in his writing were the poets from the previous generation: Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley (with whom he studied in Vancouver), Robert Duncan, and, of course, W. C. Williams. As a young man, Bowering yearned to be a baseball writer, and he did write for the local papers, getting paid by the inch. For a time he was a "closet" sportswriter under the name Erich Blackhead.

Around 1961 he and fellow poets, Frank Davey, David Dawson, and Fred Wah, founded the Tish Movement, in which Vancouver, its geography and history formed the core of their writing. They published the poetry in Tish, their literary magazine. After graduate school, Bowering moved to Calgary where he started Imago (1964-1974), a magazine devoted to long poems. Bowering taught at universities in Calgary and Montreal before returning to Vancouver in 1971 and a teaching post at Simon Fraser University.

Bowering has written numerous books of poetry as well as novels, plays, essays, and irreverent books on Canadian history. History figures in much of what he writes, as in his recent Bowering's B.C.: A Swashbuckling History (1996). His sardonic look at the world of politics was evident back in the sixties when, in The Man in Yellow Boots (1964), he took note of several events that year. The Cardinals clobbered the Yankees for the World Series, and the Chinese dropped their first A-bomb. Considering that the U.S. did not recognize China, Bowering wondered how the Americans explained the loud noise coming from Asia. In 1967 he wrote George, Vancouver: A Discovery Poem, based on three Georges (George Vancouver, King George III, and Bowering). He parodied Canadian politicians in fictionalized works like A Short Sad Book (1977) and Burning Water (1980). In Seventy-one Poems for People (1985), the political topics of the sixties and seventies received his barbs: the Vietnam War, violence, and "the other America."

He explores the act of creating in his first "real" book of poetry, Points on the Grid (1964), and continues the self-explorations in Baseball: A Poem in the Magic Number 9 (1967), in which baseball is a metaphor for life, and in Genève (1971), based on a deck of Tarot cards. The shifting viewpoint of Genève is continued in Kerrisdale Elegies (1984), loosely based on Rilke's Duino Elegies. In its ten sections Bowering meditates on mortality and poetry, and on the poet in the process of writing.

Bowering twice received the Governor General's Award—for poetry in 1969 for Rocky Mountain Foot and for the novel Burning Water in 1980. In 2002 he was named Canada's Poet Laureate. Bowering lives in Vancouver and teaches Canadian and American Literature at Simon Fraser University.

The following list of his poetry collections includes the titles discussed above:
Blonds on Bikes, Talonbooks, Vancouver, 1997
George Bowering Selected Poems 1961-1992, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1993
Urban Snow, Talonbooks, Vancouver, 1992
Sticks & Stones, Talonbooks, Vancouver, 1989. (First published in 1963.)
Imaginary Hand, NeWest Publishers Ltd., Edmonton, Alberta, 1988
Seventy-One Poems for People, RDC Press, Red Deer, Alberta, 1985
Kerrisdale Elegies, Coach House, Toronto, 1976
Smoking Mirror, Longspoon, Edmondton, 1982
West Window: Selected Poetry of George Bowering, General, Toronto, 1982. This collection includes booklength poems published in the 70s: Curious (1973), At War with the U.S. (1974), Allophanes (1976), Uncle Louis (1980), and Between the Sheets (1982).
Particular Accidents: Selected Poems, Talonbooks, Vancouver, 1981 (Poems from the 60s and 70s.)
At War with the U.S., Talonbooks, Vancouver, 1974
George, Vancouver: A Discovery Poem, Weed/Flower Press, Toronto, 1970
The Gangs of Kosmos, Anansi Press, Toronto, 1969 (Awarded the Governor General's Literary Award)
Rocky Mountain Foot, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1969
Baseball, Coach House Press, Toronto, 1967
Points on the Grid, Contact Press, Toronto, 1964.

A sampling of his other publications includes:
Bowering's B.C., Viking, Toronto, 1996
Craft Slices, Oberon, Ottawa, 1985 (Ruminations on writers, places, and literature)
The Mask in Place, Turnstone Press, Winnipeg, Manitoba, 1982 (Essays on fiction)
Burning Water, General, Toronto, 1980 ("Fictional biography")
A Short Sad Book, Talonbooks, Vancouver, 1977 (Fiction)

Marilyn Bowering
Was born in Winnipeg and grew up in Victoria, BC. She has lived in the US, Greece, Scotland, Spain, and Canada, and now makes her home in Sooke, British Columbia. An award-winning novelist, poet and playwright whose first novel, To All Appearances A Lady, was a New York Times Notable Book of 1990. Her second novel, Visible Worlds (1997), was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, nominated for the Dublin IMPAC Prize, and awarded the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her third novel, Cat's Pilgrimage, is a psychological map in the form of an album of human and animal stories. What it Takes to Be Human (Penguin, 2006; UK edition, 2007) of survival in a world where human qualities are increasingly under threat. Her new book of poems, Green, was published by Exile Editions. Winner of the 2007 M award for "Favourite Prose Writer." In 2008 Marilyn Bowering will be the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Creative Writing at New York University. Her website address: www.marilynbowering.com.

Anita K. Boyle
Graduated in 1998 from Western Washington University with a B.A. in Art (graphic design, illustration) and English (creative writing). She is a director of the Whatcom Poetry Series: The Poet As Art, and the publisher/editor of Egress Studio Press. She was a winner of the 2004 Red Sky Poetry Theatre statewide competition, and is included in the anthology Red Sky Morning. Boyle received a Willard R. Espy Literary Foundation residency in Oysterville, WA during October 2003.

Her poems have appeared in Crab Creek Review, StringTown, The Raven Chronicles, Jeopardy, Spoon River Poetry Review, Indiana Review, Stories with Grace, Jeopardy, Margin, Crab Creek Review, and Arbutus.com. Her chapbook, Bamboo Equals Loon, was published in 2001. Anita K. Boyle was a winner of the 2004 Red Sky Poetry Theatre statewide competition, and is included in the anthology Red Sky Morning.

She also writes collaborative poetry with James Bertolino. Their poems have been published in these literary magazines: Indiana Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, StringTown and Margin, as well as the collaborative poetry anthology, Saints of Hysteria (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and in two chapbooks, Pub Proceedings and Bar Exams.

Allen Braden
Allen Braden earned a B.A. at Central Washington University and M.A. and M.F.A. degrees from McNeese State University in Louisiana. The son of a farmer and grandson of a professional pugilist, he has worked on a cattle ranch, in a bar, at the front desk of a hotel and for Motorola as well as for various public schools, community colleges and universities. He lives in Puyallup, Washington, and has published in PoetsWest, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review,Poetry Northwest and the second edition of Spreading the Word: Editors on Poetry. He has received grants from the Washington State Arts Commission and the Artist Trust, a Grolier Poetry Prize and a Sam Ragan Prize. Believing the term "inspiration" is an elitist expression, he simply discovers ideas for lyrical narrative poetry in the natural world, art, folklore, family, memory or gender identity. He currently teaches at Tacoma Community College and is an editor for www.literarysalt.com.

Kate Braid
The publications of this Canadian poet and writer include:
Red Bait! Struggles of a Mine Mill Local, Kingbird Press, 1998
Inward to the Bone, Polestar, 1998
To This Cider Fountain, Polestar, 1995
Small Songs, Hawthorne Society, 1994
Covering Rough Ground, Polestar, 1991
Her poetry has also appeared in numerous literary magazines, journals and anthologies.

Karen Braucher
Originally from New England, she received her M.F.A. in creative writing from Vermont College. She was an Oregon Book Award Finalist for her first full-length book of poetry, Sending Messages Over Inconceivable Distances, selected by Maxine Kumin. One of her poems is in the 2003 POETRY IN MOTION program in which poems are posted on Portland's buses and trains. She has won the Bacchae Press Chapbook Prize, the Grolier Poetry Prize, two Oregon Literary Fellowships as a writer and one as a publisher, and the Worcester Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Fireweed, Manzanita Quarterly, Nimrod, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Oregon Review, The Oregonian, Pool, Puerto del Sol, The Worcester Review and other journals and anthologies. She is also the founding editor and publisher of The Portlandia Group, a small poetry press.

Tom Bremer
Has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Colorado State University. He was a co-founder of the Portland Poetry Festival and is a board member of the Oregon Writers Workshop. His books A Bird That Changes Trees (1987) and Just Once(2001) were both finalists for the Oregon Book Award. He lives in Portland, Oregon and teaches in high school.

Robert Bringhurst (1946- )
Known for his classic text on typography, The Elements of Typographic Style (second edition, published in 1992), Bringhurst, however, is primarily a lyric poet whose scholarly interests have led to an impressive writing and teaching career in linguistics, art history, classical studies, and particularly Native American studies, especially of the British Columbia coast. Born in Los Angeles, he lived in various western states, both in the U.S. and Canada. He did undergraduate studies at MIT and the University of Utah before receiving his B.A. from Indiana University (1973). He then received his M.F.A. in 1975 from the University of British Columbia. Bringhurst is well known for his collaboration with West Coast artist, Bill Reid, in Native American studies (The Black Canoe: Bill Reid and the Spirit of Haida Gwaii, second edition, Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver, 1992; University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1991 and The Raven Steals the Light, Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver, 1984; University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1984 & 1996). His work in translation includes Navajo and Haida, as well as Greek, French, Italian, and Arabic.
His poetry collections include Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music, Copper Canyon Press, 1987 (first published in 1986 by McClelland & Stewart, Toronto), and The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1972-1982, Copper Canyon Press, 1985 (first published in 1982 by McClelland & Stewart, Toronto).

His awards include:
Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, 1987-88
Canadian Council Senior Arts Award, 1984-85
CBC Poetry Prize, 1985
Macmillan Prize for Poetry, 1975.

Randall Brock (1943- )
This Northwest poet and writer was born in Colfax, Washington, raised in Pullman, and now lives in Spokane. He received his B.A. from Eastern Washington University (1970) and his M.F.A in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon (1973). He did graduate work in history at Eastern Washington University (1982-1983). His poems have been published widely in journals and anthologies.

He participated in the Potter Discussion Group at Washington State University, the Artists Lecture Series at Washington State University (1974), and was a Centrum scholar in 1977. He has participated in numerous readings, has had hundreds of poems published, and has recorded four cassette tapes of his poetry.

"my method of writing is automatic--automatic writing--a device used by the surrealists---my poetry is experimental & surreal---I'll combine fragments of poetic energy--and form poems--making a collage of words which is coherent in a surreal framework--short bursts of energy---that is what I'm doing---I'm trying to add shape to the past---my poems are about sex--family--my mother & so on---my poems are an art form in words---images take on a surreal hue---I'm trying to recreate the past--some sense to the events in my life---

small case i --- influenced by Larry Eigner
yr for your --- influenced by Gary Snyder
various poets have had an influence--Bob Dylan--also my two teachers--Ralph Salisbury at the University of Oregon--& Howard McCord at Washington State University."

His poetry collections include:
Fog of Paranoia, Snark Publishing, 2003
Pieces from the Valley, Grandview Press, 1998
Concrete Poetry, Grandview Press, 1996
Love and Other Secrets of the Sea, Grandview Press, 1995
Images in Stone, Grandview Press, 1995
A Message from the Other Side, Grandview Press, 1995
Variations, USA, 1994
Weave, Found Street Press, 1994
Inside I Am, Iguana Press, 1991
Seven Zen Meditations, Peaceful Valley Press, 1990
Lost Voices, Hub Editions, Bedfordshire, England, 1988
Inside and Out, Curvd HZ, 1988
Cold Fire Poems, Proper Tales Press, Toronto, 1988
Stranger to the Stars, Calliopes Corner, 1986
Solid Blue, Gesture Press, Toronto, 1985
The Goat Poems, Coma Goats Press, 1984
Shadows of Seclusion, Proper Tales Press, Toronto, 1982
I Am Poems, Curvd HZ, 1982
Poems and Photographs, Vortex, 1979
Mouse Poems, Contributor Press, 1971.

Anselm Brocki
Has had over 1,440 poems accepted by over 790 publications. A former senior editor for Houghton Mifflin and editorial coordinator for the Los Angeles City Schools, he is currently running his own editing business.

Eric Browning-Larsen
Originally from Minnesota, Browning-Larsen moved to Seattle more than fifteen years ago to pursue his corporate career as a senior executive in several companies. He has a BA in English, an MA in Industrial Relations and a JD in Law. He dropped out of the corporate world over seven years ago, he started a management consulting practice focused on S.E. Asia, started up and sold several beauty salon franchises, and traveled extensively throughout Asia and Europe. His other interests include writing and international travel. His first book, Lucky at Love, is a collection of short stories and essays based on experiences in Asia. He is currently working on My Mother's Son, a collection of poems about growing up in a small town.

Gloria J. Burgess (1953- )
Gloria Burgess, an award-winning poet, actor, and director, was born in Oxford, Mississippi. She was educated at the University of Michigan and the University of Southern California. At the University of Michigan, Gloria worked with poet Robert Hayden, who helped her give voice to her experience as an African American woman in a way that is, at once, personal, authentic, and universal. Her poetry has been featured on NPR's All Things Considered and in numerous workshops. She is a Poetry Fellow with Cave Canem, a group of African American poets sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Edmonds, Washington and is currently an Affiliate Assistant Professor at the University of Washington. She also teaches workshops in poetry and creative writing, and is a consultant to Fortune 500, medium and small organizations on leadership, cross-cultural diversity and creativity. For more information, check her web site www.jazz-inc.com/.

"Having been born in the rural South, I've been blessed to live on the margins and in the mainstream. I know firsthand about prejudice, social injustice, and inhumanity; I also know about love, forgiveness, and grace." Gloria's poetry reflects the spectrum of her experience, including her passion for family and service to others. She believes that poetry has the greatest potential to profoundly affect our spirit and to bring about change in our world, for it uses the potency of language and music and voice. In 2001, she released Pass It On, a book for children of all ages about the importance of helping others, based on her father's relationship with the writer, William Faulkner.

Gloria's poetry appears in numerous anthologies, including The Ring Ear and Gathering Ground. Her latest book is Dare to Wear Your Soul on the Outside, which builds on the themes in some of her previous work, including her best-seller Legacy Living. Both books weave a tapestry of inspirational stories, poetry, and images to inspire readers to transform their lives and be of service to others.

Her collections of poetry include:
The Open Door, Red Oak Press, 2001
Journey of the Rose, collected and new (1973- 1998)
A Yellow Wood.

John Burgess (1958- )
Burgess grew up in upstate New York, went to Montana State University, worked on a survey crew in Montana; has lived in Seattle since 1985. Has Journalism degree from the SUNY and BA in English Lit from Montana State University (1982). He has worked as a reporter and copy editor for weekly newspapers in Montana and Washington and taught English at a private school in Matsuyama, Japan for three years in the late '80s. He currently lives and works in Seattle. His poems have appeared in the 1999 King County Poetry and Art on Buses project, PoetsWest, Portland's Gumball Poetry Project, Pontoon, Snow Monkey, 4th Street from Inlet Press, Olympia, and Raven Chronicles. He is a board member of the Washington Poets Association. His influences include punk music, haiku, and Montana bars. His two books of poetry are Punk Poems (Ravenna Press, 2005) and A History of Guns in the Family (Ravenna Press, 2008). He has also produced a CD Ballads under New Regime with music by Jed Myers. Read more at www.punkpoet.net.

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Gladys Cardiff
Her poetry collections include To Frighten a Storm: Poems.

Raymond Carver (1938-1988)
Carver was born May 25, 1938 in Clatskanie, Oregon, a logging town of 700 residents on the Columbia River. Married at nineteen and father of two before he turned twenty-one, he experienced during his "first life" many of the vicissitudes he depicts in his writings; spirit-breaking ennui and underemployment, domestic "dis-ease" culminating in divorce and life-threatening alcoholism. A comparatively tranquil and productive "second life" commenced in 1977, when Carver stopped drinking, began his decade-long association with the poet and writer, Tess Gallagher, and steadily gained international recognition as the foremost short-story writer of his generation. Carver and Gallagher married shortly before his death, at age fifty, from lung cancer on August 2, 1988. Carver is the author of five books of stories and six books of poems: Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (McGraw-Hill, 1976, nominated for the National Book Award); Furious Seasons and Other Stories (Capra Press, 1977); What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Knopf, 1981); Cathedral (Knopf, 1983, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize); and Where I'm Calling From (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988). He is also the author of Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories (Vintage Press, 1986), and numerous chapbooks and limited editions.

His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. (Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral, Where I'm Calling From, Where Water Comes Together With Other Water, Ultramarine and Fires are currently available from Vintage Books.) Call If You Need Me, which will include five newly discovered short stories, was published by Knopf in January of 2001.

In 1983 the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters awarded Carver one of its first Mildred and Harold Strauss "Living Awards," a fellowship bringing him five years of income and release from teaching duties; in May 1988 he was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. This was to be the most prestigious award he would receive. Other important awards included two NEA grants, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize, a Creative Arts Award Citation from Brandeis University, and an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Hartford. His story "Call If You Need Me" was selected for an O'Henry Award. "Kindling" appeared in Best American Short Stories of 2000.

Despite Raymond Carver's foreshortened career, his contributions to American literature are substantial. Carver reinvested realism for postmoderns, set in motion the short-story renaissance of the 1980s, and gave voice to a formerly submerged population. By precept and example he served as mentor to an emerging generation of "post-modern" realists whose fiction is, like his, at once representational and self-interrogating. Following his literary hero, Anton Chekhov, Carver set himself a modest but enduring goal: "a bringing of the news from one world to another." Learn more at www.whitman.edu/english/carver/ray1.html.

Raymond Carver's collections of poetry include:
All of Us, Vintage paperback, March 2000, and Knopf, September, 1998
A New Path to the Waterfall, published posthumously by Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989
Ultramarine, Random House, 1986
Where Water Comes Together With Other Water, Random House, 1985.

(Updated January 2001, courtesy of Tess Gallagher)

Brandon Cesmat (1960- )
Brandon Cesmat is an award-winning poet, short story writer, musician, and screenwriter. He attended College of the Siskiyous and Humboldt State and earned his M.F.A. at San Diego State in 1991. Brandon's aesthetic sensibility shows in his love of his home in rural Southern California, its people, his family, and music. His poetry has those philosophical and historical underpinnings so vital to the craft. In particular, he has the history of The Americas down pat but doesn't fall for the myths. The music in Brandon's work is quite literally that with a CD of him performing as part of arts ensemble Drought Buoy. His book Driven into the Shade (Poetic Matrix Press, 2003) won the San Diego Book Award. His other collections include: Ice Drum (Caernarvon Press, 2001) and Nightsinging published by Terry Hertzler (Caernarvon Press, 1994).

Yearn Hong Choi
Yearn Hong Choi, the founding president of the Korean Poets and Writers Group in the Washington DC area, has published one poetry book, Autumn Vocabularies (Writers' Workshop, 1990), and four poetry books in the Korean language. His poems have appeared in the PoetryUSA, PEN International, PoetsWest, dIS*orient, Mildred, Wyoming, Washington Post, World & I among others, and were translated into Portuguese and published in Brazil. He edited Mother and Dove, Korean-American Poetry Anthology (Institute for Korean-American Culture, 1997), Surfacing Sadness: A Centennial of Korean-American Literature (Homa & Sekey Books, 2003) with Haengja Kim, Fragrance of Poetry: Korean-American Literature (Homa & Sekey, 2005), and An Empty House (Homa & Sekey, 2008). He read his poems in the US Library of Congress in 1994 and 2003 as an invited poet. He published his poems in the Hyundae Munhak, the most prestigious literary magazine in Korea during his college days at Yonsei University. He reviews Korean literature for World Literature Today.

T. Clear

Lyn Coffin
Widely published and award-winning poet, fiction writer, playwright, nonfiction writer, editor, and translator. Author of seven books: two of poetry, one of poetry/fiction/drama, and four of translation. Moved to Seattle area from Michigan in January 2004. Launched Hugo House's Writers and Work series spring 2004. Revising a novel, and producing a commissioned play based on the fiction of Billy Lombardo, a hot young Chicago writer. Had a story published in Best American Short Stories 1979 and was a finalist in the Louisville Short Play competition. Recipient of an NEH grant and an International Poetry Review prize, second place winner for Porad Haiku Award, Baxter finalist, and one of three winners of the 2004 Jeanne Lohmann Poetry Award. Long time editor of The Michigan Quarterly Review. New WITS writer with SAL.

Lyn Coffin's publications include:
Crystals of the Unforeseen (Plain View Press, 1999) Poetry, fiction and drama
Human Trappings (Abattoir Editions) Poetry
The Poetry of Wickedness (Ithaca House) Poetry
Elegies by Jiri Orten (translation from Czech)
The Plague Column by Jaroslav Seifert (translation from Czech) Used by Nobel Committee in granting Seifert his prize.
More than One Life by Miloslava Holubova (translation from Czech)
Selected Poems of Akhmatova (translation from Russian).

Her awards include:
Grants from Michigan Council of the Arts
National Endowment for the Humanities
First prize in Translation from Academy of American Poets (for the Orten Elegies.

Sage Cohen
An award-winning poet and essayist. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University and an MA in creative writing from New York University where she was awarded a New York Times Foundation fellowship. Moved to Portland, Oregon in 2003. She is author of the poetry collection Like the Heart, the World, published in 2007. Sage's poetry, essays, fiction and articles have appeared in more than thirty journals and anthologies including Poetry Flash, Oregon Literary Review, Cup of Comfort for Writers, Greater Good, Black Lamb, blueoregon.com and VoiceCatchers. She has taught creative writing at universities, hospitals, writing conferences, and online. Sage hosts a monthly reading series at the Lloyd Center Barnes & Noble in Portland, Oregon. Her book, Writing the Life Poetic, is forthcoming from Writer's Digest Books. She also is principal of Sage Communications, a marketing communications firm serving clients such as Kaiser Permanente, Dell, Wells Fargo, and Intuit. Visit her website at http://www.sagesaidso.com/.

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn(1930- )
Cook-Lynn, Professor Emerita from Eastern Washington University (1971-1991) and member of the Crow Creek Sioux tribe, is a poet, story-teller, literary scholar, essayist, and editor well known for her writings on the cultural history of Native Americans. After retiring from teaching, she returned to South Dakota to focus on her writing.

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's book titles include:
I Remember the Fallen Trees: New and Selected Poems, Eastern Washington Press, 1998
Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays, University of Wisconsin Press, 1996
From the River's Edge (novel), Arcade, 1991
The Power of Horses and Other Stories (short stories), Arcade, 1990
Seek the House of Relatives (chapbook), Blue Cloud Quarterly, 1983.

Kevin Craft
He hails from the mid-Atlantic zones of the USA. Born in Delaware and raised in southern New Jersey, he holds a Bachelor of Arts in both English and French from the University of Maryland, a Master of Fine Arts in English from the University of Washington. He has also studied drama at the University of Sheffield in Great Britain and romance languages at the Université de Perpignan in France. His poems have appeared in many reviews and journals, including Poetry, Gulf Coast, AGNI, Verse, Antioch Review, Cream City Review, Willow Springs, Pontoon, Crab Creek Review, Puerto del Sol, and Poetry Northwest. He was a book editor and contributing writer for the late great Northwest writer's periodical, Wordscape, as well as an associate poetry editor at Seattle Review. Craft was twice featured in the Mississippi Review Prize Poems of the Year (2000, 2001), was a Bread Loaf Scholar in 1996, and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, The Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), The Camargo Foundation (France), and the Washington State Arts Commission/Artist Trust. He currently resides in Seattle and teaches English and Creative Writing at Everett Community College and at the University of Washington's Rome Center in Italy. Kevin Craft's first book of poems, Solar Prominence, won the 2004 Gorsline Prize from Cloudbank Books as judged by Northwest poet Vern Rutsala. Check out his web site at http://www.geocities.com/solarpr.

Jeffrey Crandall (1964-)
A Washington native, Jeff received a B.A. in Creative Writing with an emphasis on poetry from the University of Washington. In 1994 he co-founded Floating Bridge Press, a non-profit organization created to support Washington State poets. His first book of poems The Grief Pool (Firestorm Press, Seattle) won a 1999 King County Arts Commission Special Projects Award. He makes his living in Seattle as an artist combining poetic text with glass and serves as an editor for Floating Bridge and its annual anthology Pontoon.

Clark Crouch (1928 - )

Clark Crouch, western and cowboy poet of Bothell, Washington, delivers the reality of the west through his original poetry. Born in rural Nebraska in 1928, he worked as a cowboy from the age of twelve until he was nearly eighteen. His poetry is drawn from that personal experience, capturing the humor and the pathos of the west of yesterday and today. Inspired by a 1940's acquaintance with Badger Clark, the classic western poet who was then Poet Laureate of South Dakota, he wrote his first cowboy poem in 1941. Sixty years later his interest was revived by meeting Sherman Alexie, the Native American author. As a result, he has been professionally writing poetry since 2002 and performing in a variety of Northwestern venues since 2004.

Current poems not yet published in book format appear on his web site at http://poetry.crouchnet.com/western.html. Some of his poems are also published on cowboypoetry.com, the premier western poetry site on the internet, and selected verses are syndicated to some fifty regional editions of The Country Register, a monthly tabloid which features country living, crafts, and antiques. He is a member of PoetsWest, Washington Poets Association, Western Music Association, Northshore Poets Group, and Columbia River Cowboy Heritage Society.

Formal publications include a CD and five books:
Western Images (Western Poetry Publications, 2007)
Where Horses Reign (CD by Ediger Media, 2005)
Sun, Sand & Soapweed (print and ebook editions by Western Poetry Publications, 2005)
Where Horses Reign (print and ebook editions by Western Poetry Publications, 2004)
Reflections: a second poetic journal of life, attitude, and remembrance (iUniverse, 2003)
Voices of the Wind: a poetic journal of life, attitude, and remembrance (Writer's Club Press, 2002).
Although he favors traditional ballad format with strong rhythm and rhyme, Reflections and Voices of the Wind contain only freeform verse.

Lorna Crozier (1948- )
Born in Saskatchewan, Lorna Crozier lives on Vancouver Island and teaches writing at the University of Victoria where she is Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Writing. In 2004, she received an Honourary Doctorate from the University of Regina for her contribution to Canadian literature. In 2007, she received one from the University of Saskatchewan. Her poems have been translated into several languages and she has read her work in Canada South Africa, Australia, Malaysia, Europe, and Chile.

Her publications include:
The Blue Hour of the Day (2007) poems (selected by London's Times Literary Supplement as a notable book of 2007)
Whetstone (2005) poetry
Bones in Their Wings: Ghazals (2003) poems
Apocrypha of Light (2002) poems
Addicted: Notes for the Belly of the Beast (2001) essays co-edited with Patrick Lane.
Desire in Seven Voices (Douglas & McIntyre, 1999) essays editor.
Her tenth book of poetry, What the Living Won't Let Go (McClelland & Stewart, 1999) received the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award for the best book of poetry in B.C. that year.
Everything Arrives at the Light, received the Pat Lowther Award for 1995, and a selection of poems from that collection was awarded the National Magazine Gold Medal.
Inventing the Hawk (1992) received all three of Canada's national poetry awards: the Governor General's Award, the Pat Lowther Award for the Best Book of Poetry by a Canadian Woman, and the Canadian Authors' Association Award for poetry.

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Nancy Dahlberg
Grew up in Chicago and has a BFA in studio art from the University of Chicago and an MA in creative writing from the University of Houston. Her poems have been published in Shenandoah, Northwest Review, CALYX, PoetsWest, Fireweed, Stringtown, and Poets Table Anthology, A Collection of Poetry by Northwest Poets. She has served on the editorial board of Northwest Review and is a board member of the Washington Poets Association and PoetsWest. She also is a member of the Poets Table group. Nancy lives in Ballard and is a political activist with Radical Women.

Michael Daley (1947- )
Born in Boston, Massachusetts on March 25, 1947, Michael Daley received a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts in 1972 and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Washington in 1990, when he began teaching Poetry and Philosophy classes at Mount Vernon High School. While living in Port Townsend, he founded Empty Bowl Press and edited several of its publications, among them Dalmo'ma, The Dalmo'ma Anthology and In Our Hearts and Minds: Dalmo'ma 7.

Michael Daley's publications include:
The Cornmaiden, Tangram, 2000
Horace: Eleven Odes, translation, Brooding Heron Press, 2000
Original Sin, Pleasure Boat Studio, 2000
Yes, Five Poems, Sagittarius, 1985
Angels, Blue Begonia Press, 1985
Amigos, Empty Bowl Press, 1985
The Straits, Empty Bowl Press, 1983.

Michael's poetry and prose have appeared in American Poetry Review, Cumberland Review, Graham House Review, Tampa Review, Crab Creek Review, The Hudson Review, Manoa, Ploughshares, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, Margin, Jeopardy, Kansas Quarterly, The Nebraska Review, Alaska Quarterly, Raven Chronicles, Litrag, The Temple, The Seattle Review, and other regional and national publications. One of his poems was selected for the Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry for 1995/1996. Pleasure Boat Studio has featured some of Michael's poems and essays and links to articles at www.pleasureboatstudio.com.

Christine Deavel
Christine Deavel has B.A. in English from Indiana University and M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Iowa. She was the co-editor of Fine Madness magazine from 1988 to 1998, and, since 1989, has been the working co-owner (with John Marshall) of Open Books: A Poem Emporium from 1989 to present. She has published poetry in American Poetry Review, Poetry East, Poetry Northwest, Fence, and other literary magazines around the country. She has given readings locally at Red Sky Poetry Theater, It's About Time Reading Series, Seattle Poetry Slam, Blue Moon Tavern, and other local venues. She is 2001 co-recipient of the Faith Beamer Cooke Award from the Washington Poets Association.

Madeline DeFrees (1919- )
Born in Ontario, Oregon, she was educated at Marylhurst College (B.A.) and the University of Oregon (M.A.). A former Roman Catholic nun, her poetry was first published under the name of Sister Mary Gilbert. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry. She was a good friend and colleague of Richard Hugo and also taught English and Journalism at the University of Montana in Missoula from 1967 until 1979. She then was professor of English and director of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Massachusetts until she retired and returned to the Northwest. In 1988 she was Poet-in-Residence at Bucknell University. In 2002 her collection, Blue Dusk: New and Selected Poems, published in 2001 by Copper Canyon Press received both a Washington State Book Award and the prestigious Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She also received the 2002 PoetsWest Lifetime Achievement Award.

Madeline DeFrees' other poetry collections include:
Spectral Waves: New & Uncollected Poems, Copper Canyon Press, 2006
Double Dutch, chapbook, Red Wing Press, 1999
Possible Sibyls, Lynx House Press, 1991
Imaginary Ancestors, Broken Moon Press, 1990
Magpie on the Gallows, Copper Canyon Press, 1982
When Sky Lets Go, George Braziller, 1978
From the Darkroom (published under the name of Sister Mary Gilbert), Bobbs-Merrill, 1964.

Oliver de la Paz
Born in Manila, Philippines, he received his MFA in creative writing from Arizona State University. He is co-founder and board member of Kundiman, a not-for-profit organization committed to the discovery and cultivation of emerging Asian-American poets. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, his work has appeared in journals such as Quarterly West, Cream City Review, Third Coast, North American Review, and elsewhere. Names Above Houses, a book of his prose and verse, was a winner of the 2000 Crab Orchard Award Series and was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2001. His second book, Furious Lullaby, was also published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2007. For more information, check www.oliverdelapaz.com.

Alice Derry
A Northwest native, Alice Derry has an M.F.A. from Goddard College in Vermont, and an M.A. in English from American University in Washington, D.C. She has been published in several periodicals and anthologies. She teaches at Peninsula College in Port Angeles, Washington and co-directs the Foothills Writers Series.

Alice Derry's publications include:
Strangers to Their Courage, Louisiana University Press, 2001
Clearwater, Blue Begonia Press, 1997
Not as You Once Imagined (chapbook), Trask House Books, Portland OR, 1993
Getting Used to the Body (chapbook), Sagittarius Press, Port Townsend WA, 1989
Stages of Twilight, Breitenbush Books, Portland, 1986, (King County Arts Publication winner).

Olivia Diamond
An Illinois native, Olivia Diamond is a poet, novelist, essayist, and short story writer living in Whitefish, Montana. She received a B.A. from Northern Illinois University (1969) and M.A. in English from the University of Missouri-Columbia (1972). She taught English as a second language in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for two years. She has written two books of narrative poetry: Women at the Well (American Studies Press, 1989) and Land of the Four Quarters: A Poetic History of the Incas (Northwoods Press, 1994). She has written a series of personal poems centered on Edith Sitwell's life. Geography of My Bones (Helm Publishing, 2004) is an extensive collection of her poetry. Active for years in poetry readings, she also was editor of The Rockford Review from 1988-90. Her short stories and poems have been widely published in small magazines and journals throughout the country, including Amelia, Raccoon, Haight Ashbury Review, Tamaqua, Bellowing Ark, and in Concert at Chopin's House (New Rivers Press, 1987). She is a featured writer in the Rockford Literary Anthology 2000, Confluence. Her most recent collection, Geography of My Bones, was published in 2004 by Helm Publishing of Rockford, IL. Three of her other books, Women at the Well, The Pluperfect Phantom and Blue Angel are available at www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/ or through her website at www.mountainofdreams.com.

Danika Dinsmore
Danika is a writer, performer, educator, and literary activist. She holds a B.A. and teaching credential in English from California Lutheran University and an M.F.A. in Writing and Poetics from The Naropa University in Boulder, CO. She has performed and conducted poetry workshops at multiple venues throughout the Pacific Northwest. In 2000, she assisted in organizing an international poetry festival in Prague, CZ. She is the co-founder and former executive director of the Northwest SPokenword LAB (SPLAB) in Auburn, Washington and the former director of the 2001 and 2002 annual Seattle Poetry Festivals while serving as Executive Director of Eleventh Hour Productions. She lives in Vancouver, Canada where she facilitates creative writing workshops.

Her publications include:
Her Red Book, En Theos Press, Seattle, 2004
Every Day Angels and Other Near Death Experiences, En Theos Press, Seattle, 2002
The 3:15 Experiment, The Owl Press, Woodacre, CA 2001
all over the road, spokenword CD, En Theos Productions, Seattle, 2000
SPLAB Poetry Curriculum Guide for Teachers, It Plays in Peoria Press, Auburn, WA, 1998
traffic, It Plays in Peoria Press, Auburn, WA, 1997.

Her awards include:
Jack Straw Writers Program, 2001
Bart Baxter Award for Performance Poetry, Washington Poets Association, 1999
King County Arts Commission Grant, 1997-1998.

Pamela Moore Dionne
Pamela is a poet/writer/visual artist, whose poetry and fiction have won awards and published nationally. Pamela was the creator and MC of the Second Sunday Poetry Series in Bremerton, Washington. Her poetry has appeared locally in PoetsWest, Synapse, Raven Chronicles.

Ed Dorn (1929-1999)
Ed Dorn was born in rural Illinois, educated at the University of Illinois, and studied under Charles Olson at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He moved around a lot and his connections with the Pacific Northwest included a stint in the early 1950s living in Washington and working for Boeing before moving to Pocatello, Idaho where he taught at the University of Idaho. From 1965 to 1970 he was a lecturer at the University of Essex. While in England, he met his second wife, film-maker Jennifer Dunbar. In 1967 he began a twelve-year collaboration with Gordon Brotherston in translating the works of Native American poets in both Latin America and North America. Dorn moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1977 to teach Creative Writing at the University of Colorado. The translations then continued on both sides of the Atlantic. The collection, including original text, was published in 1999 as The Sun Unwound. Dorn and his wife, Jennifer Dunbar, also started Rolling Stock, a literary newspaper. Dorn produced some thirty books of poetry and prose, including the works on Native Americans. His long poem, Gunslinger, came out in four books between 1968 and 1971 and is considered one of the most important "Western" epic poems. (In 1975 it was published in a single volume as Slinger.) One of his later works, Abhorrences (1990), is an irreverent, and even savage, look at the decade of the eighties.

Barbara Drake (1939- )
Writes poetry and prose. Among other works she is the author of Peace at Heart: an Oregon Country Life, a memoir published by Oregon State University Press, and Writing Poetry, a widely used college textbook published by Thomson/Heinle Publishers (formerly by Harcourt Brace), which has been in print since 1983. Drake has also had several collections of poetry published by literary presses, including What We Say to Strangers, Love at the Egyptian Theatre, Life in a Gothic Novel, and Small Favors. Her newest poetry collection, Driving 100, will be published by Fairweather Books, an imprint of Bedbug Press.

Drake's writing has appeared in anthologies such as Poets on Place (U. of Utah Press), The Plain Truth of Things (Harper Collins), The Sumac Reader (Michigan State University Press), The New Geography of Poets (U. of Arkansas Press), American Sports Poems (Orchard Books), Third Coast Fiction Anthology (Wayne State Press), The Prescott Street Reader, Varieties of Hope (prose) and From Here We Speak (poetry), (Oregon State University Press), and others. Her poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many literary magazines. She has been the recipient of a Northwest Arts Foundation grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Edith Green Distinguished Professor Award. Peace at Heart was an Oregon Book Award finalist in 1999.

After completing her B.A. and M.F.A. at the University of Oregon, she lived in Michigan for sixteen years, and taught at Michigan State University before returning to Oregon in 1983. Teaching at Linfield College from 1983 to 2007, she is now a Linfield Emeritus Professor of English. She has also taught as a visiting writer at Whitman College, Lewis and Clark College, Willamette University, and Pacific University. Besides creative writing she has taught Irish literature, environmental literature, and a travel course, American Expatriate Writers in Europe.

Barbara Drake and her husband live on a small farm in the foothills of the Oregon Coast Range where they raise wine grapes and Romney sheep and enjoy introducing their grandchildren to the country life. Besides writing and teaching college, her interests include photography, travel, art, and long walks with their border collies. She also enjoys giving readings of her work. Contact: bdrake@linfield.edu or bdrake1@verizon.net.

William Dunlop (1936-2005)
Poet and English scholar born Southampton, England 5 July 1936. He received his education at Eastbourne College, with the Gordon Highlanders, and at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he edited the magazine Granta. In 1962 he came to Seattle to work with Theodore Roethke. For many years he was soccer correspondent and opera critic for the Seattle Weekly. Instructor in English, University of Washington 1962-66, Assistant Professor 1966-73, Associate Professor 1973-2001. In 1997 Rose Alley Press published his first book, Caruso for the Children, & Other Poems. Died Seattle 20 October 2005.

Margaret Slavin Dyment (1939- )
The publications of this Canadian poet and fiction writer include Drawing the Spaces (fiction from Orca Press, 1994), Tracing a Line (poetry from Ekstasis, 1994), and I Didn't Get Used to It (poetry from Ouroboros, 1983). Dyment was born in Indian Head, SK. and grew up in Belleville, ON. Her undergraduate degree is from Queen's University in Kingston, ON, and she holds master's degrees in French Literature from Queen's, and in English Literature from the University of Waterloo, ON. Her poetry has been published in literary magazines and anthologies, and in Quaker publications. She teaches creative writing with her company, Write Away! Courses & Manuscripts Website: http://www.nexicom.net/~writeaway.

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