Priscilla Long (June 2, 2026)
Priscilla Long’s eighth book and third book of poems is Cartographies of Home (MoonPath Press, 2026). Forthcoming in 2026 is On Spaces and Colors and the third edition of The Writer’s Portable Mentor (University of New Mexico Press, 2026). Her awards include a National Magazine Award and ten of her essays have been honored as "notable" in various years of Best American Essays. She has an MFA from the University of Washington and grew up on a dairy farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. (Photo from Anne Herman)
Chris Jarmick (May 5, 2026)
Christopher J. Jarmick was raised on the East Coast, became a Los Angeles based producer/screenwriter in the late 70s, moved to Seattle in 1994, worked as a radio producer, financial advisor and then technical writer. In 2016 he became the owner of the independent bookstore, Booktree in Kirkland. He is a writer, poet whose first poem was published when he was 12 years old. He has been organizing and hosting readings throughout the pacific northwest since the late 1990s. His essays, stories, reviews and poetry have been published in a variety of print and online magazines and in several anthologies. His previous poetry collections include: Not Aloud (MoonPath Press), Ignition, Poems for the Working Class and later this year; Stir (Moonpath Press 2026). He is one of the organizers/founders of WesternWashingtonPoetsNetwork.org which list readings open mics, workshops and more throughout the Western Washington region.
Christianne Balk (April 7, 2026)
Christianne Balk’s latest book is The Holding Hours (University of Washington Press Northwest Poetry Series). She loves broken music, the rhythms of everyday street talk, and open water swimming. Honors include The Walt Whitman Award for Bindweed, and fellowships/grants from Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, and Jackstraw Studios. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Cirque Literary Journal, The Naugatuck River Review, Nimrod, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Poemoftheweek.org, Terrain, and other magazines.
Brenda Cooper (March 3, 2026)
Brenda Cooper is a futurist, a writer, and an editor. She writes speculative fiction and poetry of all types. She holds an MFA from Stonecoast and is an Imaginary College Fellow at the Center for Science and the Imagination, CSI, at Arizona State University. Her fiction has won two Endeavour awards and been shortlisted for the Phillip K. Dick Award. She also writes the Creative Courage substack which highlights creators of all kind pushing back on power. Brenda’s most recent work includes a collection of stories and poems about strong women and the environment, When Mothers Dream, from Fairwood Press. Brenda lives in Washington State where she can be found riding bikes and walking dogs.
Charlie Glick (Feb. 3, 2026)
I’m Charlie. I’m a poet and musician living in the foothills above Duvall. A multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, I spent my 20s writing, recording, and touring North America with my band Sure Sure. In the wake of the pandemic, I transitioned away from an all-out music career and into a phase of wandering: working on farms, writing poetry, nearly attending an MFA program before backing out to start a new band (Outside Air) and making another album. The Eaton Fire ate up my home and most of my belongings in Los Angeles in January of 2025, which spurred me to wander once again and enroll in the Immersion program at Wilderness Awareness School in Duvall to deepen my connection with the more-than-human world and train as a naturalist.
For me, writing poetry is a bit like making spells and divining the future. It springs from a mode of paying attention to the world that drops us into deep imagination, giving access to the currents behind the wind and rain and seasons. Poetry found me when I first lived in Washington out on the Olympic Peninsula in 2021—there’s something about this corner of the country that draws poems out of me. I took workshop under Gary Copeland Lilley for a couple years, and his feel for line and music has continued to influence my writing. I’ve had work published here and there in lit mags like the Southern Review, Reed Magazine, Voicemail Poems, Thimble Lit, and others.
For me, writing poetry is a bit like making spells and divining the future. It springs from a mode of paying attention to the world that drops us into deep imagination, giving access to the currents behind the wind and rain and seasons. Poetry found me when I first lived in Washington out on the Olympic Peninsula in 2021—there’s something about this corner of the country that draws poems out of me. I took workshop under Gary Copeland Lilley for a couple years, and his feel for line and music has continued to influence my writing. I’ve had work published here and there in lit mags like the Southern Review, Reed Magazine, Voicemail Poems, Thimble Lit, and others.
Bethany Reid (Jan. 6, 2026)
Bethany Reid’s fourth full-length poetry book, The Pear Tree: Elegy for a Farm, won MoonPath Press’s 2023 Sally Albiso Award. Her poetry has won numerous awards, including the Gell Poetry Prize, Calyx’s Lois Cranston Memorial Prize, and OPN’s Jeanne Lohmann Prize. Her poems, short stories, essays, and poetry reviews have recently been published in Catamaran, After-Images, Tendon, Escape Into Life, Raven Chronicles and Calyx. She earned her MFA and PhD from the University of Washington and taught English, creative writing, and literature to college students for 30 years. She now teaches for the Creative Retirement Institute (CRI) and blogs about writing and life at http://www.bethanyareid.com
C.A. Coffing (Dec. 2, 2025)
C.A. Coffing holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University. A self-published novelist, playwright and poet, work is published in Flash Fiction Magazine, Does It Have Pockets, Ginosko Literary Journal, SPREAD, Half and One, and elsewhere. A 2013 Santa Fe Writers Project Finalist, 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee, and 2023 Best Micro-Fiction nominee, written work has appeared in live theatre showings throughout the Pacific Northwest, including Bumbershoot, Cold Reader’s Theater, and Northwest New Works. She currently writes, teaches dance and waits tables in a small river town. She is a self-professed eavesdropper because after all, observation is key. We are the observers of the world.
Emily Young (Nov. 4, 2025)
Emily Young was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She is a full-time health care provider and a board member of the Redmond Association of Spokenword (RASP). Her work explores themes of motherhood, gender roles, the COVID-19 pandemic, grief, and love. She is currently working on her first poetry collection, and is happiest when writing with her pup Rowan on her lap.
Emily has graciously agreed to share the spotlight with a few other readers from the second Western Washington Poets Network anthology, Surviving Interesting Times. This anthology features 43 poets, from Bellingham to Vancouver, Washington. Printed by East Point West Press on a 114 year-old letterpress, this chapbook resembles publications of a by-gone age.
Emily has graciously agreed to share the spotlight with a few other readers from the second Western Washington Poets Network anthology, Surviving Interesting Times. This anthology features 43 poets, from Bellingham to Vancouver, Washington. Printed by East Point West Press on a 114 year-old letterpress, this chapbook resembles publications of a by-gone age.
Peter Ludwin (Oct. 7, 2025)
Peter Ludwin is especially drawn to physical and spiritual aspects of the natural world, different cultures, history and the quality of being alive in the moment. 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. His poems have appeared in many journals, among which are Nimrod, North American Review and Prairie Schooner.
His new book, An Altar of Tides, inhabits various parts of his beloved Pacific Northwest. Winner of the 2024 Trail to Table Editors’ Award in Poetry, it was published by Trail to Table Books, an environmental imprint of Wandering Aengus Press. The author of three previous books of poetry and the 2016 winner of the Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award for his poem 'Wolf Concerto,' Ludwin attributes the lion’s share of his success to the fourteen years he was a participant in the weeklong San Miguel Poetry Week in fabled San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where he workshopped under top poets such as Mark Doty, Joseph Stroud and Robert Wrigley, Tony Hoagland, Patricia Goedecke and many others, including Scots poet Alastair Reid, whose dictum, “Listen to how it sounds on the ear!” paralleled his own reality.
A resident of Kent, Washington, his website is www.peterludwin.com.
His new book, An Altar of Tides, inhabits various parts of his beloved Pacific Northwest. Winner of the 2024 Trail to Table Editors’ Award in Poetry, it was published by Trail to Table Books, an environmental imprint of Wandering Aengus Press. The author of three previous books of poetry and the 2016 winner of the Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award for his poem 'Wolf Concerto,' Ludwin attributes the lion’s share of his success to the fourteen years he was a participant in the weeklong San Miguel Poetry Week in fabled San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where he workshopped under top poets such as Mark Doty, Joseph Stroud and Robert Wrigley, Tony Hoagland, Patricia Goedecke and many others, including Scots poet Alastair Reid, whose dictum, “Listen to how it sounds on the ear!” paralleled his own reality.
A resident of Kent, Washington, his website is www.peterludwin.com.
Griffith H. Williams (Sept. 2, 2025)
Griffith H. Williams, of East Point West Press, known to the Welsh community by his bardic name of Gruffydd Hirwallt, operates an antique letterpress in Kenmore, Washington. Over a lifetime of printing, he has published 35 chapbooks of his own verse. Williams has also published over fifty regional poets in chapbooks, anthologies, broadsides and Tag-Lines.
Tito Titus (Aug. 5, 2025)
Tito Titus, author of I can still smile like Errol Flynn (2015), Bones in the Shallows (2024), and When the Mekong Ran Red (2024), appeared on Garrison Keillor’s "The Writer’s Almanac" in 2020. Washington State Poet Laureate Rena Priest included his poem “Salmon of a Man” in her 2023 anthology I Sing the Salmon Home. Puget Soundings, Argus, and Seattle Post-Intelligencer published his satire. Various journals and anthologies have published his poetry. In 2003 he received the Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award from King County, Washington, for his service to elderly homeless people.
Tito worked on farms and ranches, fought range fires, barked in a carnival, went to war overseas, earned a master's in urban planning, ran for public office, joined a theater troupe, created art, worked as an environmental public hearings officer, and served two terms on the Seattle Design Commission. Originally from Snake River’s Hells Canyon, North America’s deepest gorge, he now lives in Seattle’s Capitol Hill community with his wife Kate. They’re in their eighties and have been married forty years.
Tito worked on farms and ranches, fought range fires, barked in a carnival, went to war overseas, earned a master's in urban planning, ran for public office, joined a theater troupe, created art, worked as an environmental public hearings officer, and served two terms on the Seattle Design Commission. Originally from Snake River’s Hells Canyon, North America’s deepest gorge, he now lives in Seattle’s Capitol Hill community with his wife Kate. They’re in their eighties and have been married forty years.
Christian Wright (July 1, 2025)
Christian Wright is an Australian poet and musician who has published seven books of poetry, fiction, a graphic novel and photography as part of his founded collective of artists named Sea&itsHorses. Christian's written poetry and storytelling often originates from dynamic interactions with audiences and is intended in spirit, to be read aloud. While performing in and with several rock bands across the East Coast of Australia, Christian previously held a Sydney residency as a spoken word artist, and performed and exhibited his works across Sydney and Melbourne Pubs and Clubs. Christian is also a qualified Emergency and Disaster Nurse and Midwife. He has worked across a range of urban and rural contexts of care including in culturally sacred birthing spaces in remote Australian Indigenous Lands and more recently in natural disaster affected remote villages of Papua New Guinea. With the experience of helping hundreds of strong birthing women bring their babies into the world, in November 2024 he finally got to deliver his own son, River, with his powerful wife, Caroline.
Alison Peacock (June 3, 2024)
Alison Peacock, a Seattle-based visual and literary artist, has been chasing the poetry of the every day since she was old enough to hold a pen. Peacock honed her observation skills in the magazine industry for 17 years before returning to her true loves, poetry and prose. Her poetry has been featured in Poetry on Buses and seven anthologies, including Examined Life (a Western Washington Poets Network publication), Bards West, and Ghosts, Echoes & Shadows.
J.I. (Judy) Kleinberg (May 6, 2025)
J.I. (Judy) Kleinberg has lived in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Berkeley, Seattle, Santa Fe, Bellingham, and on Instagram @jikleinberg. Along the way she has been an artist, marketing executive, freelance copy writer, scuba instructor, poetry blogger, disaster responder, and a few other things. Her poetry (including more than 800 of her found poems) has been widely published and featured in art exhibits in Seattle, Asheville (NC), La Conner, and Bellingham. Her chapbooks The Word for Standing Alone in a Field (Bottlecap Press), How to pronounce the wind (Paper View Books), and Desire’s Authority (Ravenna Press Triple Series No. 23) were published in 2023; She needs the river (Poem Atlas) was published in 2024 and Sleeping Lessons is now available from Milk & Cake Press. Find out more at https://chocolateisaverb.wordpress.com/.
David Fewster (April 1, 2025)
David Fewster is a poet, musician and humorist from Tacoma WA. His work has appeared in the Seattle Times (he was a regular contributor to Pacific Magazine's "Sunday Punch" column 1989-1994), LA Weekly, Writer's Digest, Free Venice Beachhead, Cirque, SPREAD, Exquisite Corpse, etc. Anthologies include "Seattle Poems by Seattle Poets" (Poetry Around Press, 1992), "Revival: Spoken Word from Lollapalooza 94" (Manic D Press, 1994), "Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader Vol. 2" (Black Sparrow Press, 2000), Chrysanthemum 2020 (Goldfish Press) & "Dissent: an anthology to end war and capitalism" (Vagabond Press, 2024.) His full-length book of poetry, "Diary of a Homeless Alcoholic Suicidal Maniac & Other Picture Postcards" was funded by a 2003-2004 Tacoma Artists Initiative Project grant. His most recent book is "A la recherche du temps perdu, or GET OFF MY LAWN" (Couth Buzzard Press, 2021.)
Suzanne Edison (March 4, 2025)
Suzanne Edison’s book, Since the House Is Burning, by MoonPath Press, was published in 2022. Her chapbook, The Body Lives Its Undoing, was published in 2018. Poetry can be found in: The Missouri Review; SWWIM EveryDay; Solstice Literary Magazine; MER; RockPaperPoems; Whale Road Review; Lily Poetry Review; JAMA, and elsewhere. She has work included in the anthologies: The Healing Art of Writing, Vol. 1 and Women Writers on Faith, Mysticism, and Awakening. She is the Mental Health Coordinator at the Cure JM Foundation and teaches expressive writing to caregivers through UCSF Wellness Center for Youth with Chronic Conditions. She lives in Seattle, is an avid gardener, and cloud-watcher.
Ivey (Feb. 4, 2025)
Ivey grew up in San Francisco and Seattle. She's been a Duvall resident for 16 years. Her profession as a hairstylist feeds her lifelong interest in people and their stories. As a performer in The Duvall Improv Social Club, Ivey compares improv to creative writing prompts. She does sketch journaling and strives to write a haiku daily. Ivey is currently working on her first book of poetry and her first novel.
Mary Crane (Jan. 7, 2025)
Mary Eliza Crane is a long time Duvall resident and one of the co-curators of Duvall poetry. She has been a regular participant at Duvall Poetry since its inception in 2004, and it continues to inspire and sustain her. Mary is celebrating the release of her new collection of poetry, Last Call of the Dark, just published by Cirque Press. She has two previous collections What I Can Hold in My Hands and At First Light, both published by Gazoobi Tales, has been published in several journals and anthologies, and has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Julia McConnell (Dec. 3, 2024)
Julia McConnell is a poet and a librarian. Her manuscript Landlocked was selected by Thomas Lynch as the winner of the 2022 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize (Emerging) and was published by Michigan State University Press in 2023. Her chapbook, Against the Blue, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016. Julia’s publications include Whale Road Review, Shark Reef, Right Hand Pointing, Plainsongs, Lavender Review, and other journals. Originally from Oklahoma, Julia lives in Seattle with her partner, her poodle, and her Jack Russell Terrier. Learn more about Julia at www.juliamcconnell.net.
Susan Blair (Nov. 6, 2024)
Susan Blair is a poet, writer, arts event organizer and award-winning speaker. Her full-length poetry collection, A Howling, was published in the fall of 2023 by Press 53 in Winston-Salem, N.C. Her poetry chapbook, What Remains of a Life, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2018; her work has also appeared in numerous print and online publications. Susan founded and is the editor of The Shrub-Steppe Poetry Journal, an annual anthology representing the poets of Central Washington. She hosts the monthly “Third Thursday Poets” open mic event. She has also written five poetry-activity books for children and presents them in costume as “Perri the Poetry Fairy” to elementary school kids. Susan graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont with a B.A. in German and Russian and lives in Wenatchee, WA.
Tony Beeman (Oct. 2, 2024)
Tony Beeman is a Seattle-based writer and performer who has been published in the Sycamore Review, the Oak Leaf, and even a few non-tree based publications. He is Assistant Artistic Director at Unexpected Productions in Pike Place Market, where he has directed, produced and performed several poetry-based shows including Thirteen Ways and This Is For You (co-directed with Audrey Kohler). He minored in poetry at Purdue University, studying under Marianne Boruch and the late Tom Andrews, who once accused Tony of enthusiastically presenting and then abandoning his poems like paper airplanes thrown out a third story window. Tony has not yet broken the habit, and is excited to throw a few more airplanes this Fall.
Julene Tripp Weaver (Sept 4, 2024)
Julene Tripp Weaver is the author of four poetry collections, the newest released in May: Slow Now With Clear Skies. Prior books include: truth be bold: Serenading Life & Death in the Age of AIDS (a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards, winner of the Bisexual Book Award and four Human Relations Indie Book Awards), No Father Can Save Her, and a chapbook, Case Walking: An AIDS Case Manager Wails Her Blues. Widely published and anthologized, she was a Jack Straw Writing Fellow (2022-2023) working on her memoir-in-process about living through the AIDS epidemic. She lives in Seattle, forages wild foods and lives according to the Wise Woman Tradition. Read more of her writing at www.julenetrippweaver.com.
Joanna Thomas (August 7, 2024)
JOANNA THOMAS was born in April, which is the cruelest month, in Chicago, where the fog comes on little cat feet. She currently lives in a tin-sided house, on the wrong side of the railroad tracks, in a small, rural, university town. She encountered her first simile when she was eleven years old, while reading National Velvet, a novel in which author Enid Bagnold describes Velvet Brown's sisters as sleek golden greyhounds, their fine faces like antelopes. Thomas is a bibliophile. She is also a visual artist, working with paper scraps, scissors, and paste, and a poet, working with language fragments. She has no fear of breaking an egg to make an ocelot. When composing poems, she likes to read first drafts aloud to the dog, and when the dog says no, no, no, you gotta sigh like a goose, honk like a duck, quack like a bunny, she revises.
Maurice Robkin (July 3, 2024)
Maurice Robkin grew up in Hollywood, California at the time that the electric streetcars still ran on Hollywood Boulevard. He graduated from Hollywood High School, within a few miles of major movie studios. He took his undergraduate degree from Caltech and his doctorate from MIT. He has worked as an engineer in industry and retired from the faculty of the University of Washington.
After he retired, he began to write fiction. He took some classes at UW Extension and practiced by writing two mysteries. He has written seven volumes of a series about Margaret Fleming Hawley, a female pirate. The eighth and last of the series is finished and is in the final editing phase. He writes fiction under the pseudonym of Martin March. As is the case for many authors of this new era, his books are available on Amazon.
Many years ago, he tried his hand at poetry. He took a class but had little encouragement from the instructor. In the last few years, he tried again. Perhaps the added experiences of living made the attempts more productive. He now has a collection of poems on various themes, many of which he has inflicted on poetry open mics around his home in Puget Sound country.
After he retired, he began to write fiction. He took some classes at UW Extension and practiced by writing two mysteries. He has written seven volumes of a series about Margaret Fleming Hawley, a female pirate. The eighth and last of the series is finished and is in the final editing phase. He writes fiction under the pseudonym of Martin March. As is the case for many authors of this new era, his books are available on Amazon.
Many years ago, he tried his hand at poetry. He took a class but had little encouragement from the instructor. In the last few years, he tried again. Perhaps the added experiences of living made the attempts more productive. He now has a collection of poems on various themes, many of which he has inflicted on poetry open mics around his home in Puget Sound country.
John Burgess (June 5, 2024)
John Burgess grew up in upstate New York, worked on a survey crew in Montana, taught English in Japan, and now retired, writes and draws in Seattle. His influences include 70s punk, Montana bars, and Japanese haiku. He has six books of poetry from Ravenna Press, each with an increasing number of maps, graphs, and comics interwoven. His latest book is Punk Poems Complete (2023) which collects all 100 of his 10-line poems. He's a co-instigator with the Band of Poets, a poetry and music collaborative. More at punkpoet.net.
