Our Authors
Tele Aadsen
Tele Aadsen is a commercial fisherman, writer, and lapsed social worker. Born in Alaska, she finds home in seasonal migrations: ocean summers on the outer coast of Lingít Aaní, Southeast Alaska, aboard the F/V Nerka with her sweetheart, Joel, followed by land winters in the Coast Salish territory of Washington’s Skagit Valley. Read more…
John Brandi
John Brandi’s haiku practice spans four decades, a steadfast companion to his life as a writer, visual artist, and author of numerous books of poetry, travel essays, and haibun. A California native, his early forays into a landscape of desert, mountain, and seacoast opened a broader road for his travels around the Pacific Rim, India, Southeast Asia, and explorations of America’s desert southwest. Read more…
Michael Daley
Michael Daley’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Hudson Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Rhino, North American Review, Writers Almanac, Raven Chronicles, Seattle Review, Jeopardy, Prairie Schooner, Cirque, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cascadia Review, and elsewhere. Founding editor of Empty Bowl, publisher of the Dalmo’ma anthologies, former Poet-in-Residence for the Washington State Arts Commission, Skagit River Poetry Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, he retired from teaching at Mount Vernon High School in 2012. Read more…
Tom Crawford
Tom Crawford was the author of nine books of poetry, including Lauds, The Temple on Monday, and The Names of Birds. He was the recipient of the Pushcart Prize, the Foreword Book of the Year Award, and the Oregon Book Award for Poetry, among others, and fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts. Read more…
Freeman House
Freeman House was a writer, social activist, and commercial fisherman turned watershed restorationist, who cofounded the Mattole Salmon Group and Mattole Restoration Council on the Mattole and Sinkyone ancestral lands of Northern California. He passed away in 2018 at the age of eighty, leaving a tremendous legacy of bioregional awareness and community-based environmental organizing through his decade’s worth of writings and the organizations he developed, which uphold his visions to this day. Read more…
Holly J. Hughes
Holly J. Hughes is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Hold Fast, coauthor of The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World, and editor of several anthologies, including Keep a Green Bough: Voices from the Heart of Cascadia, and Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease. Her fine art chapbook Passings received an American Book Award in 2017 and her poems and essays have been nominated for Pushcart prizes, set to music and performed in New York city and Sitka, Alaska. Read more…
Tom Jay
Tom Jay was born in Manhattan, Kansas, in 1943. An active member of the Northwest art community since 1966, he built the first bronze-casting facility for Seattle University and supervised construction of casting facilities at the University of Washington. Receiving an MFA from the University of Washington in 1969, he established Riverdog Fine Arts Foundry, which cast his own work and that of sculptors throughout the
Northwest. Read more…
Anna Odessa Linzer
Anna Odessa Linzer has always lived along the Salish Sea. Her deep connection with the Pacific Northwest is reflected in both her poems and her fiction. Her novel Ghost Dancing (Picador/ St. Martin’s Press) received an American Book Award in 1999. Her novels Blind Virgil, Dancing on Water, and A River Story were produced as the handbound, limited-edition Home Waters by fine-arts publisher Marquand Books. A River Story was adapted and performed as a two-person play, and her poems have been featured in gallery and museum installations as well as on wine bottles. Read more…
Tim McNulty
Tim McNulty is a poet, essayist, and nature writer based on Washington's Olympic Peninsula. He is the author of ten poetry books and eleven books of natural history. Tim has received the Washington State Book Award and the National Outdoor Book Award among other honors. Tim's newest book of poems, Ascendance, is published by Pleasure Boat Studio. His natural history books include Olympic National Park: A Natural History, and Washington's Mount Rainier National Park. Read more…
Shin Yu Pai
Shin Yu Pai was Civic Poet of the City of Seattle (2023–2024). From 2015 to 2017, she served as the fourth poet laureate of the City of Redmond. Shin Yu is a poet, essayist, and visual artist and is the author of several books, including Less Desolate (Blue Cactus Press, 2023), Virga (Empty Bowl, 2021), ENSŌ (Entre Ríos Books, 2020), Sightings: Selected Works [2000-2005] (1913 Press, 2007), Aux Arcs (La Alameda, 2013), Adamantine (White Pine, 2010), and Equivalence (La Alameda, 2003). Read more…
Kate Reavey
Kate Reavey completed an MA in poetry with Gary Snyder as her mentor. She worked as a fire dispatch and interpretive ranger before deciding on a path of teaching, which she has followed for more than thirty years. Her chapbooks Through the East-Window (Sagittarius Press) and Trading Posts (Tangram) are limited-edition, letter-pressed works, and Too Small to Hold You was published by Pleasure Boat Studio. She coordinates Studium Generale at Peninsula College, and for many years was codirector of the Foothills Writers Series. Read more…
Andrew Schelling
Andrew Schelling was born 14 January 1953 and raised in Thoreau territory, west of Boston. He spent the 1970s and 1980s in Northern California. In college, he studied ecology of mind with Gregory Bateson and poetry with Norman O. Brown. Schelling took up the study of the Sanskrit language, wrote poetry among urban poets of the Bay Area, and developed wilderness skills in the Sierra Nevada and Coast Range mountains. In 1990 he moved to Colorado to teach poetry and Sanskrit at The Naropa Institute (now University). Read more…
Clemens Starck
Clemens Starck was born in Rochester, New York, in 1937. After dropping out of Princeton, he continued his education on the road, riding freight trains and working at a variety of jobs around the country. He has been a ranch hand in eastern Oregon, a newspaper reporter on Wall Street, a door-to-door salesman, and a merchant seaman. For over twenty years he worked construction up and down the West Coast, as a union carpenter and carpenter foreman on projects from bridge work in San Francisco and Oregon to custom homes in British Columbia. Read more…
Finn Wilcox
Finn Wilcox, born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, worked in the woods of the Olympic and Cascade Mountains with the forest workers co-op, Olympic Reforestation, for twenty-five years, planting over a million trees. He spent a great deal of time riding the rails, and learning about the life, journeys, and history of the once-respected American Hobo. His book, Here Among the Sacrificed, which includes the poignant photography of Steve R. Johnson, portrays the people he met on freight trains and in railroad yards through memorable poems and stories—all of which, along with a selection of Steve Johnson’s photos, are included in Too Late to Turn Back Now. Read more…
Kurt Hoelting
Kurt Hoelting grew up by the shores of Puget Sound, working summers as a commercial fisherman and wilderness guide in Alaska for fifty years. A graduate of the University of Washington and Harvard Divinity School, he is an ordained minister and Zen student, who has blended his love of wilderness exploration with an equal passion for exploring the “wild within.” A mindfulness teacher in a variety of contexts, he served for many years as head guide with Inside Passages, leading mindfulness-based seakayaking expeditions in the Tongass region of Southeast Alaska. Read more…
Sibyl James
Sibyl James is the author of fourteen books, including In China with Harpo and Karl (Calyx Books), The Adventures of Stout Mama (Papier-Mache Press), China Beats (Egress Studio Press), The Last Woro Woro to Treichville: A West African Memoir (StringTown Press), The Grand Piano Range (Black Heron Press), and, most recently, The Mother of Invention, a children’s book from Calyx. She has taught at colleges in the United States, China, and Mexico and, as Fulbright professor, in Tunisia and Cote d’Ivoire. Read more…
Jerry Martien
Jerry Martien is the author of several collections of poetry and Shell Game and The Price of a Life, histories of money and exchange in North America and northwest California. He is also the editor of A Watershed Runs Through, a collection of essays by Freeman House, published by Empty Bowl in 2023. He and his wife Jenny live near Elk River, a principal tributary of Humboldt Bay, where for a dozen years he walked with their dog Maggie observing sea level rise at the confluence of river and bay. Read more…
Bill Porter/Red Pine
Bill Porter, who translated under the name Red Pine, was born in Van Nuys, California on October 3, 1943 and grew up in Northern Idaho, where his parents moved in 1954. Since his father was often away on business, he attended boarding schools in LA and the Bay Area, where he graduated from high school in 1961. After a tour of duty in the US Army 1964-67, he attended UC Santa Barbara and majored in Anthropology. In 1970, he entered graduate school at Columbia University and studied anthropology with a faculty that included Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. Read more…
Ann Spiers
Ann Spiers lives on Vashon Island, Puget Sound, where she was the island’s inaugural poet laureate. Her diverse life provides the seeds for Rain Violent’s quatrains. She raised sons down trail in a beach cabin, leads writing workshops, assists with fieldwork in the Cascade volcanoes and for citizen science projects, and hiked the Washington coast from the Columbia River to Cape Flattery. Her poems appear widely in journals, anthologies, and online. In addition to Rain Violent, her other recent books include Back Cut (Black Heron) and Harpoon (Triplet Series, Ravenna). Read more…
Kang Xuepei
Kang Xuepei completed her graduate study in the United States with a master’s degree in English literature. She has published two books in English: In the Countryside and China’s Sent-Down Youth. Kang was also the chief editor of the book Zhiqing: Stories from China’s Special Generation. Her translation of Kang Youwei’s Overseas Poems is forthcoming. Her writings have appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies. Read more…
Edward Harkness
Ed Harkness was born in 1947 and grew up in Seattle. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana, where he studied with two great poets, Madeline Defrees and Richard Hugo. Harkness taught English and creative writing at Shoreline Community College for thirty-four years. He lives with his lifemate, Linda, in Shoreline, Washington. Read more…