July 19, 2017.  Tacoma poet Rick Barot has published three books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall, Want, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize, and Chord.  Chord received the UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award.   His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer. He  directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University.  He is also the poetry editor for New England Review.  In 2016 he received a poetry fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation.

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May 17, 2017.  Cynthia Pratt is a founding member of the Olympia Poetry Network’s board.  Her poems have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Raven Chronicles, Bellingham Review, Quill and Parchment, as well as other publications, and anthologies, including Dirt?  Scientists, Book Artists, and Poets Reflect on Soil and Our Environment, Pacific Lutheran University (2015). One of her poems was accepted for display at the Seattle Salmon Strategy Summit 2005, and a couple of poems have had the honor of riding around in Tacoma and Metro buses.  Her book, Celestial Drift, was published in January, 2017 (Precession Press). Her husband and she have a son and daughter, now grown, and three grandchildren.  She is the Deputy Mayor of the City of Lacey.

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April 19, 2017.  Dead Poets Reading. In honor of National Poetry Month, board members of the Olympia Poetry Network, will channel the works of favorite dead poets, proving that those who came before us still come alive when their works are read. This year, again, the shades drawn to our séance will be varied, brilliant, and occasionally disconcerting:

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Thomas Lux (with his "live-wire ear for oddball lingo and kooky hearsay"), Australian poet Judith Wright who championed Aboriginal peoples and the Great Barrier Reef,  Gwendolyn Brooks (the first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize),  Jesuit priest, poet and activist Daniel Berrigan and Marianne Moore (“Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads”).  

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No doubt other inspirations will arise for the occasion. The audience is invited to share their own favorite dead-poet poems during the Open Mike session. Please join us for an entertaining evening among old, but not forgotten, friends.

 

March 28, 2017. Members of the Olympia Poetry Network will share their works at a Poetry Reading from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 28, at the O’Grady Library Reading Room on the Saint Martin’s University campus. The reading is sponsored by the dean’s office of the University’s College of Arts and Sciences, English Department and Writing Center. The reading has been organized by Associate Prof. of English Nathalie Kuroiwa-Lewis, Ph.D., director of Saint Martin’s Writing Center and an OPN board member. “Each poet on the board will be reading their work and introducing Saint Martin’s to the unique eclecticism of imagery and sound in poetry emerging from the Pacific Northwest.”

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Besides Kuroiwa-Lewis, board members Bill Yake, Joanne Clarkson, Cynthia Pratt and Terri Cohlene will read their poetry. The public is invited to attend the reading, which is free of charge. Light appetizers and beverages will be served, and the Network will showcase its poetry books available for purchase.

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March 15, 2017. Kent resident Peter Ludwin is an award-winning poet and avid traveler. His collections include A Guest in All Your Houses (2009, Word Walker Press), Rumors of Fallible Gods (2012, Presa Press), which was twice a finalist for the Gival Press Poetry Award, and most recently Gone to Gold Mountain (MoonPath Press.) Peter has received the W.D. Snodgrass Award for Endeavor and Excellence in Poetry and first prize winner of the Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award judged by Marge Piercy for The Comstock Review. He also plays acoustic blues guitar and autoharp.

 

February 15, 2017. Megan Snyder-Camp is the author of three collections of poetry: The Forest of Sure Things (Tupelo Press, 2010, winner of the Crazyhorse First Book Award), Wintering (Tupelo Press, 2016) and The Gunnywolf (Bear Star Press, 2016, winner of the Dorothy Brunsman Book Award). She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Djerassi, Willapa Bay AiR, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, and the 4Culture Foundation. Megan lives in Seattle.

 

January 18, 2017. Clemens Starck is a Princeton drop-out, a former merchant seaman, a retired union carpenter and construction foreman, and the author of six books of poems. He is a recipient of the Oregon Book Award as well as the William Stafford Memorial Poetry Award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. His books are: Journeyman’s Wages (1995), Studying Russian on Company Time (1999), China Basin (2002), Traveling Incognito (2004), Rembrandt, Chainsaw (2011) and Old Dogs, New Tricks (2016). He lives in the foothills of the Coast Range in western Oregon.

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