2011 and Earlier

 

December 21, 2011. OPN's Traditional Season's Readings. Bring your favorite mid-winter poem as we celebrate short days, the chill, a range of religious and secular traditions, and the promise of eventual sun.

 

November 16, 2011. Lucia Perillo’s fifth book of poems, Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon 2009) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and also received the Washington State Book Award and the Bobbitt prize from the Library of Congress, given for the best book of poetry published during the last two years. A longtime closeted fiction writer, Lucia will publish her first book of stories n 2012, Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain. And her book of essays, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing, is out in paperback from Trinity University Press. Before earning a master’s degree in English from Syracuse University, she worked for the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

 

October 19, 2011. An Olympia native, Casey Fuller has lived in the Pacific Northwest for 33 years. He studied literature and cognitive science at The Evergreen State College then received his MFA from PLU in 2008. He’s worked as an auto detailer, burrito roller, fruit vendor, note taker, office worker, and forklift driver, most recently in a warehouse where he listened to audio books and wrote poems during his breaks. His poems have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Palabra, Switched-on Gutenberg, and A River and Sound Review. He’s received Olympia’s Here Today art grant, won the Jeanne Lohmann Poetry Prize, and most recently won the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award for his collection: A Fort Made of Doors. Today he lives in Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his amazingly talented wife, Katrina. He will be reading for Floating Bridge on October 5 at the Hugo House, and at Open Books on November 2.

 

September 21, 2011. Kelli Russell Agodon is author of Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room (White Pine Press, 2010), which recently won the Foreword Book of the Year Prize in Poetry. She is also the author of Small Knots (2004) and Geography, winner of the 2003 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. She is the editor of Seattle’s literary journal, Crab Creek Review and the co-founder of Two Sylvias Press. See her webpage here

 

August 17, 2011. Anita K. Boyle and James Bertolino visit us from Bellingham for a tandem reading. Originally an illustrator and graphic designer, Anita’s poetry marks a milestone with her chapbook What the Alder Told Me (MoonPath Press, 2011). James Bertolino’s tenth volume of poetry is Finding Water, Holding Stone (Cherry Grove Collections, 2009). Both poets are well-published with poems in numerous literary journals. Since 1968 Bertolino has published 25 chapbooks and volumes by 17 presses in nine states.

 

July 20, 2011. Open Mike. Full deal all-you-can-eat open mike. Those familiar with the OPN's open mike know that it offers surprising quality and quality surprises. So bring your best work. We will do our best to provide every reader with 3 minutes of crowd-focused attention. Depending on the number of participants, there may be time for more than one round of readings.

 

June 15, 2011. Todd Fredson’s poetry and non-fiction appears or is forthcoming in journals such as 42 Opus, American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Interim, Poetry International and West Branch. His collection of poems, The Crucifix-Blocks, won the 2011 Patricia Bibby First Book Award and will be available in the Spring of 2012. He lives with his partner, Sarah Vap, and their two sons in the Skokomish Valley, a small farming valley in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains. He is the Director of Programming for the McReavy House Museum of Hood Canal.

 

May 18, 2011. Tim McNulty is a poet, essayist, and nature writer. He is the author of two collections of poetry and ten chapbooks, including Some Ducks and Through High Still Air (both from Pleasure Boat Studio) and Cloud Studies (Empty Bowl). His books on nature include: The Art of Nature, Olympic National Park: A Natural History, Washington's Wild Rivers, and Washington's Mount Rainier National Park. Tim has received the Washington Governor's Writers Award and the National Outdoor Book Award. He lives with his family in the foothills of Washington’s Olympic Mountains.

 

April 20, 2011 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 should, again, prove interesting with appearances by poets as diverse as the "violet-haired, pure, honey-smiling Sappho", the reclusively brilliant Emily Dickinson, the Homeric Haida myth-teller known as Ghandl (Fresh Water), and a poet of “labyrinthine syntax” – Amy Clampitt. No doubt other inspirations will arise for the occasion. The audience will be 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 16, 2011 For years Bill Yake directed scientific investigations while writing poetry on the sly. Now his hidden life is revealed in widely published poems . His poetry has won the Alligator Juniper Award (2003) and the James M. Snydal Prize (2004). This reading will feature his second full-length collection, Unfurl, Kite, and Veer (Radiolarian Press, 2010) in which Bill’s travels spiral outward from the Olympic Peninsula to Papua New Guinea, from the late Paleolithic to last year, from philosophical to funny. Something, we hope, for everyone.

 

February 16, 2011. SPLAB founder Paul Nelson’s book on poetics is Organic Poetry (2008, VDM Verlag, Germany) and his serial poem, A Time Before Slaughter , was shortlisted for the 2010 Stranger Genius Award in Literature. In 26 years of radio he’s interviewed Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Anne Waldman, Sam Hamill, Robin Blaser, Eileen Myles, & others. Chosen to present at literary conferences in Belgium and China, he’s the Seattle editor of the Pacific Rim Review of Books.

 

January 19, 2011. Marjorie Power lives near Corvallis, Oregon. Widely published and anthologized, her poems have appeared in Artful Dodge, The Atlanta Review, Kalliope, The Seattle Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and many others. She is the author of several poetry chapbooks and a full-length collection.

 

December 15, 2010. OPN's Traditional Season's Readings. Bring your favorite mid-winter poem as we celebrate short days, the chill, a range of religious and secular traditions, and the promise of eventual sun.

 

November 17, 2010. Donna Waidtlow as a child was always awaiting the arrival of gypsies. They never came - so at eighteen she began a decade of roaming the arctic. She homesteaded in the wilds of Alaska, lived at Wild Lake, the Alatna River, the Kanuti Kilolitna River, and worked summers in Fairbanks. Grizzly bears were part of the fabric of her life. She received a MFA in creative writing from Goddard College. Her poetry has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Anima, Chaminade Literary Review, Chrysanthemum, Color Wheel, Nomad, Paper Boat, Perceptions, Psychopoetica, TAPJoE and others. She was co-editor of Switched-On Gutenberg. Her chapbook, A Woman Named Wife, won the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Contest in 1997.

 

October 20, 2010. Long-time Olympia resident Barbara Gibson writes poetry, prose and plays. Her work draws on a passion for people and place at the southern end of the Salish Sea, and a lifetime of working on issues of social justice and spirituality. She has taught at the University of Wisconsin and Thomas Jefferson College, published numerous poetry chapbooks and plays, and received a Doctor of Ministry in 2000.

 

-- Cancelled due to few registrations. -- September 18, 2010. The Olympia Poetry Network presents: The Paul Gillie Memorial “At the Mic” Workshop. 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at The Urban Onion, 116 Legion Way SE. Downtown Olympia. Energize your poetry reading! Strengthen your connection to the audience! Join us for a day of fun, safe, interactive exercises; group and individual activities; and one-on-one coaching. Focus on the voice as an instrument, body language, interpretation and delivery skills. Flyer and registration form here .

 

September 15, 2010. Open Mike & Fundraiser for Pakistani Flood Victims. In response to the serious flood damage and dislocations in Pakistan, and a request from Dick Meyer of Traditions, Traditions and OPN are teaming up to turn the reading on September 15 into a fundraiser for Pakistani flood victims. Some details are yet to be finalized but here’s what the event should look like:

 

• While folks are gathering (6:00 - 6:30 PM) there will be music – a Pakistani singer, we hear.

 

• At 6:30: a brief (5-10 min) talk by Naimat Gilal, a local resident originally from Pakistan, whose family has been seriously effected by the flood

 

• About 6:40: Pakistani poem followed by translation.

 

• About 6:45: Begin Open Mike. We hope to focus on concerns raised by the flood, interpreting this broadly as: floods, crisis, people displaced, attachment/detachment from peoples far away, the art/need of giving, something specific to a Pakistani family (i.e., wedding, birth, death, family gathering), perhaps other aspects of Pakistani culture.

 

We hope most readers will be able to accommodate the new themes and agenda, although we realize that this is a shift in plans. There is no requirement that readers adhere to the evening’s theme. Still, we hope the general focus of the evening will remain on the situation in Pakistan. As always, readers will be asked to limit themselves to 2 poems or 3 minutes, whichever is less. The overall length of the event remains to be determined. We hope to give all who wish to participate the chance to do so. Please come prepared to help the cause – both with poems and donations.

 

August 18, 2010. Tammy Robacker is the 2010 Poet Laureate of Tacoma. She will be reading poetry from her new book The Vicissitudes. Some new works too. Tammy's full biographical information can be found here .

 

July 21, 2010. Allen Braden is author of A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood and a fine letterpress accordion book Detail of the Four Chambers to the Horse’s Heart. He earned a BA from Central Washington University then MA and MFA degrees from McNeese State University. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and from Artist Trust as well as the Emerging Writers Prize from Witness magazine, the Grolier Poetry Prize, the Dana Award in Poetry and other honors. Braden’s recent work appears in Orion Magazine, Subtropics, Poetry International, Water-Stone Review and three textbooks.

 

June 16, 2010. Lohmann Poetry Prize Reading. Three winners have been announced for the 7th annual Jeanne Lohmann Poetry prize sponsored and judged by Jeanne’s poetry friends in California, and facilitated by OPN. The winners (with their hometowns and poems) are Brian Desmond (University Place, Bicycles), Trina Burke (Seattle, Confinement in a Strange Hour), and Casey Fuller (Olympia, Why Are You People So Nice?). Also, contest sponsor Valerie Berry, will be in town "to say a word or two about each winning poem..., what caught the eye/ear/imagination." Jeanne Lohmann is scheduled to read as well.

 

May 19, 2010. Greg Darms lives on an eighty-year-old float house in the Columbia River estuary. His poem Katagami: Web of Butterflies and Flowers recently appeared in Russian translation in the journal Apraksin Blues. Darms has two collections of poetry out from Radiolarian Press: Flammable, Inflammable: Selected Poems 1991–2006 (2007), and Para,Taxis (2010), and he has written the text accompanying fifteen art works by Astoria artists in archaeopteryx 1, A Sampler of Art (2009).

 

April 21, 2010. 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 should, again, prove interesting with appearances by poets as diverse as the witty and modern Dorothy Parker, the (very) early African-American poet Phillis Wheatley, and the acerbic humorist Samual Clemens (Mark Twain). Amy Lowell and Lucille Clifton are also expected, as are Marianne Moore and the outlaw western lyricist Townes Van Zandt. No doubt other inspirations will arise for the occassion. The audience will be 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 17, 2010. Bill Ransom, currently Dean of Curriculum at The Evergreen State College, has published six novels, six poetry collections, numerous short stories and articles. He was a firefighter, firefighting instructor, and CPR instructor for six years; and an Advanced Life Support EMT for ten years in Jefferson County, and volunteers with humanitarian groups in Central America. Bill founded and directed the popular Port Townsend Writers Conference for Centrum. One of his most recent publications, Learning the Ropes (Utah State University Press), a collection of poetry, short fiction and essays, was billed as "a creative autobiography." His poetry has been nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

 

February 17, 2010. Annette Spaulding-Convy's poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, Kalliope, and in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, among others. Her chapbook, In the Convent We Become Clouds, won the 2006 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Contest and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is currently co-editor of the literary journal, Crab Creek Review and lives in a small community on Puget Sound.

 

January 20, 2010. June O’Brien hails from southeastern Oklahoma where east Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma almost meet. Since this was the Oklahoma Territory a culture of inter-related, mixed blood families have lived in these hills and along the Red River. It is a culture where seeing spirits and having premonitions is not unusual, where the land itself is alive and carries its memories in layers of time. “It is a place where I am kin to everyone, and where every hill, pond and forest knows me.” Since leaving Oklahoma June (a member of the Nansemond Tribe) has found her home among Indian people, and in nature: the rim rock of the high desert, the mountains of the Olympic Peninsula and the shores of Puget Sound. She currently lives in Shelton, Washington, where she works for the Squaxin Island Tribe and is part of the Longhouse at the Skokomish Tribe.

 

December 16, 2009. OPN's Traditional Season's Readings. Bring your favorite mid-winter poem as we celebrate short days, the chill, a range of religious and secular traditions, and the promise of eventual sun.

 

November 18, 2009. Family Stories in Poetry & Song with Terri Cohlene and Ross Cowman. This mother and son combo will highlight a few of their family stories with the help of Ross’s band June Madrona. Terri is a poet, author of eight books for children, a freelance editor and on the board of Olympia Poetry Network. Ross is a songwriter, musician with five published albums, and co-owner of Bicycle Records, an Olympia recording label. June Madrona also includes Danielle Chiero, Sean Carson, and Molly McDermott. We hear that "the music of June Madrona tells tales of madness, family secrets, desert car rides, and too many lovers."

 

October 21, 2009. Open Mike. For the first time in recorded history OPN will feature an all-you-can-eat open mike. Those familiar with the OPN's open mike know that it offers surprising quality and quality surprises. So bring your best work. Although the details have not been finalized, we will do our best to provide every reader with 3 minutes of crowd-focused attention. Depending on the number of participants, there may be time for more than one round of readings.

 

September 16, 2009. Former newspaper reporter/photographer/editor Marjorie Rommel has driven a logging truck, cooked for a logging camp, worked as receptionist in a fly-by-night instant salvation by hypnosis studio (the kids were hungry), and raised a large family. She provided public/media relations services for the City of Auburn eight years and for the Tukwila School District 13 years, has taught creative writing in Puget Sound-area community colleges since 1985, and served as Visiting Lecturer at Pacific Lutheran University in 2002-2004. She was a Willard R. Espy Literary Foundation poetry resident in 2000, and in 2001 received a White Bridge Traveling Fellowship from the Adam Family Foundation to live and write in Teton Valley, Idaho. She was awarded the Bloom’s Day Prize for Short Fiction in 2002, and earned her MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at PLU in 2007.

 

August 19, 2009. Michael Daley was born in Boston and received an MFA from the University of Washington. He’s worked as a laborer, a taxi driver, waiter, tree-planter, editor, and Poet-in-the-schools; he became a high school English teacher in Mount Vernon where he still teaches. Gary Snyder called his first collection, The Straits (Empty Bowl Press, 1983, “Superb, elegant poetically and fresh with the Northwest world.” His most recent book, To Curve, was published by Word Press (2008) and another, Moonlight In The Redemptive Forest (Pleasure Boat Studios) is on its way.

 

July 15, 2009. Jeff Lair has published three books of poems. He will be reading from his brand new full volume of poetry: Bucking and Braying at the Dark Edge. His poems ring, he says, "with humorous authority on themes of disillusionment, epiphanies of bewilderment and death." Books available at the reading will be: Tall Grass and Bucking and Braying at the Dark Edge.

 

June 17, 2009. Lohmann Poetry Prize Reading. Three winners have been announced for the 6th annual Jeanne Lohmann Poetry prize sponsored and judged by Jeanne’s poetry friends in California, and facilitated by OPN. The winners (with their hometowns and poems) are Boyd Benson (Pullman, Leaves), Rachel Dilworth (Gig Harbor, Valence), and Dennis Held (Spokane, Matrimony ). Also, contest sponsor Valerie Berry, hopes to be in town "to say a word or two about each winning poem..., what caught the eye/ear/imagination." We hope Jeanne Lohmann will read as well.

 

May 20, 2009. Jenifer Browne Lawrence lives in Poulsbo, across the Puget Sound from Seattle. She is the recipient of a Washington State Artist Trust grant and the Potomac Review’s Annual Poetry Award. Lawrence is published in various journals, including Court Green, North American Review, and the Potomac Review. Blue Begonia Press published her first poetry collection, One Hundred Steps from Shore, in 2006.

 

April 15, 2009. Lucia Perillo’s fourth book of poems, Luck is Luck, was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and was awarded the Kingsley Tufts prize from Claremont University. A book of her essays, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing, was published by Trinity University Press in 2007. Her new poetry book, from Copper Canyon Press, is Inseminating the Elephant.

 

March 18, 2009. Jim Bill and multilingual friends read from Jim's new chapbook: Sins of Choice. Jim is a former writing and literature teacher, and current student of Chinese and Japanese, at South Puget Sound Community College. His poems have appeared in small magazines around the country and in Canada; translations of his poems have been published in China, as have his collaborative translations of Chinese poems into English. He is a slow traveler, a casual housekeeper, and a tutor of sorts. A trip around the world in this multilingual chapbook.

 

March 3, 2009. A rare double/special reading on the first Tuesday of March by poets Joseph Stroud and Tom Aslin.

 

Joseph Stroud received his BA in Literature and Philosophy and his MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. He is the author of In the Sleep of Rivers (Capra Press, 1974), Signatures (BOA Editions, Ltd., 1982), Below Cold Mountain (Copper Canyon Press, 1998), Country of Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2004), and Of This World: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). Stroud taught writing and literature at Cabrillo Community College for 35 years and co-hosted The Poetry Show on KUSP radio. His work earned a Pushcart Prize and a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. He divides his time between Santa Cruz and a cabin at Shay Creek in the Sierra Nevada.

 

Thomas Aslin, who was born in Spokane, has a B.A. from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Montana where he studied with the late Richard Hugo, Madeline DeFrees, and William Kittredge. He has published Sweet Smoke (Red Wing Press, 2006) and A Moon Over Wings (Clark City Press, 2008). Aslin presently lives and works in Seattle.

 

February 18, 2009. Bill Ransom (Academic Dean of Curriculum at The Evergreen State College) has led a remarkable life, from building and repairing jet engines and founding the popular Port Townsend Writers Conference for Centrum to appearing in two feature films: An Officer and a Gentleman and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (CBS) and co-authoring three novels with science fiction icon Frank Herbert: The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect and The Ascension Factor. Ransom has published six novels, six poetry collections, numerous short stories and articles. His latest is The Woman and the War Baby from Blue Begonia Press (Oct ’08). His poetry has been nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

 

January 21, 2009. Clemens Starck is a Princeton drop-out, an ex-merchant seaman, a retired union carpenter and construction foreman. His four books of poetry include Journeyman’s Wages, recipient of both the Oregon Book Award and the William Stafford Memorial Poetry Award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. He has given readings to diverse audiences up and down the West Coast, from San Diego to British Columbia. He lives with his wife in the foothills of the Coast Range in western Oregon.

 

--- Cancelled Due to Too Much Winter. We'll see you next month for Clem Starck's reading. --- December 17, 2008. OPN's Traditional Season's Readings. Bring your favorite mid-winter poem as we celebrate short days, the chill, a range of religious and secular traditions, and the promise of eventual sun.

 

November 19, 2008. Kevin Miller has worked in the public schools of Washington State for thirty-six years, teaching in Blaine, Gig Harbor, and, currently, at Washington Middle School in Olympia. His first collection of poems Light That Whispers Morning, from Blue Begonia Press (1994) received the Bumbershoot/Weyerhaeuser Publication award. His second collection Everywhere Was Far was supported by an Artist Trust Grant, while his newest collection Home & Away: The Old Town Poems received Tacoma Arts Initiative Grant from The Tacoma Arts Commission.

 

October 15, 2008. Tim Kelly was born in Cleveland, and educated in Ohio, Boston and Seattle. He’s been a resident of Olympia for over 25 years and works as an orthopedic physical therapist. Anatomy, the intimacy of PT practice, and the sensuality of the body are, unsurprisingly, major themes of his poems. He has won the Artsmith Poetry Prize (2008) the Floating Bridge Chapbook competition (2005) and the Field Poetry Prize (2000). He’s published four collections of poetry, the most recent being The Extremities published this Spring by Oberlin College Press. He teaches periodically at TESC.

 

September 17, 2008. Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. His first book, The Darker Fall (Sarabande Books, 2002) won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize. His newest book is Want (Sarabande, 2008). Rick’s work has been widely published (New England Review, The New Republic, Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review) and he was received several fellowships including a Stegner at Stanford. Barot lives in Tacoma and teaches at both Warren Wilson College and PLU.

 

August 20, 2008. The Poetrynight Poets of Bellingham hit town. This dynamic 5-Some brings their energetic tour from the borderlands of NW Washington, where they've hosting readings for over a decade, to Olympia. Olympia's version of the tour will feature: Anna Wolff, who writes, teaches and firmly believes that poets will someday regain their rightful status as rockstars; Ray Arani - a superhero-in-training and goat-farming enthusiast who spends most of her time in the woods playing with stinging nettles, studying Muay Thai, or researching the art of war; Eva Suter, who lives, drinks, writes and rides her bike in Bellingham – but, she says, "don't hold her to it"; Chris Gusta teaches high school, occasionally plays guitar and sings in a band called deerseekingheadlights; and Sarah Goodin, who first performing at 2, serenading her mother with Lionel Ritchie renditions; she's since washed dishes in a nursing home, hand-delivered groceries over the cobblestone streets of Boston, and represented the environmental research group WashPIRG. She released her first CD, Goodnight Noises Everywhere in July. The anticipation is palpable.

 

July 16, 2008. Michael Magee of Tacoma has been published in Poetry, Epoch, Poetry Northwest, Real Change and The Seattle Review. He has three chapbooks: Ireland’s Eye, A Trip to Jerusalem and Duo. His work has won the Seattle Eisteddfod Competition and the Wellberry Prize. One of plays was produced as a film which won the Best Actor Award at the Bare Bones Script-2-Screen Indie Film Festival.

 

June 18, 2008. Lohmann Poetry Prize Reading. Three winners have been announced for the 5th annual Jeanne Lohmann Poetry prize sponsored and judged by Jeanne’s poetry friends in California, and facilitated by OPN. The winners (with their hometowns and poems) are Shin Yu Pai (Seattle, Footprint), David Rizzi (Seattle, emergence), and Sean Brendan-Brown (Olympia, Otaka the Cat). Also, contest sponsor Valerie Berry, hopes to be in town "to say a word or two about each winning poem..., what caught the eye/ear/imagination." We hope Jeanne Lohmann will read as well.

 

May 21, 2008. Rebecca Loudon is the author of two collections of poetry, Tarantella and Radish King from Ravenna Press, and a chapbook, Navigate, Amelia Earhart’s Letters Home from No Tell Books. Her third collection of poetry, Cadaver Dogs, is forthcoming, also from No Tell Books. She is a violinist with Philharmonia Northwest Chamber Orchestra and teaches violin to children. Her work has appeared in Seattle Review, Portland Review, Texas Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Forklift Ohio, among other places. She is the librettist for composer Roupen Shakarian, and is currently writing the libretto for an opera, Red Queen, based on the relationship between Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell.

 

April 16, 2008. 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 should, again, prove interesting. Jane Kenyon is expected to show up as is Linda Hull. Other possible luminaries? The notorious Charles Bukowski, the light-footed e.e. cummings, inovative drinkers John Berryman and Richard Hugo, and a cross-over from the visual arts: Morris Graves . After these illustrious poets have performed, the audience will be invited to share their own favorite dead-poet poems in the Open Mike session. Rumor has it the Denise Levertov and several flood-water blues singers may be represented. Please join us for an entertaining evening among old, but not forgotten, friends.

 

March 19, 2008. Susan Rich is the author of Cures Include Travel and The Cartographer's Tongue, Poems of the World, which won the PEN USA Award and the Peace Corps Award. Her poems appear in Massachusetts Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review and Witness. She teaches at Highline Community College and lives in Seattle.

 

February 20, 2008. Lana Hechtman Ayers runs Night Rain Poetry, which offers poetry editing, a manuscript organization service, and writing and publishing workshops. Lana is the publisher of the Concrete Wolf Poetry Chapbook Series and Poetry Editor of Crab Creek Review. She is the author of two full-length books of poetry and a chapbook. An award-winning poet and Pushcart nominee, her work appears in numerous journals and anthologies. Lana curates a monthly poetry reading series at SoulFood Books in Redmond, WA.

 

January 16, 2008. Carolyn Maddux left her post as managing editor of the Shelton-Mason County Journal five years ago. She teaches a creative writing class at Olympic College Shelton where she is co-convener of Write in the Woods Writers Conference. Carolyn has also lead several OPN workshops. She and her husband have an antiques shop in Shelton. In 1998 she earned her master of arts from Antioch University’s McGregor School. Her poetry books are Remembering Water (1996, Bellowing Ark Press) and a letterpress chapbook, Voluntary on a Flight of Angels (2003, Hypatia Press), and has a book of poetry and one of essays in progress. Carolyn is a member of the board of Hypatia-in-the-Woods, whose Holly House recently opened its doors near Shelton providing residencies for women in the arts. She'll have information on that program at her reading.

 

December 19, 2007. OPN's Traditional Season's Readings. Bring your favorite mid-winter poem as we celebrate short days, the chill, a range of religious and secular traditions, and the promise of eventual sun.

 

November 21, 2007. Jennifer Borges Foster: Poet, bookmaker, Festival Programming Director of the 2007 Seattle Poetry Festival, founding editor of Filter, certified 2007 Stranger Genius and currently working away at a writer's residency in the Azores assured to "dominate and frustrate" her, Jennifer is a bridge between the archetypes of solitary and scene poet. The craft of her solitude recently appeared in ZYZZYVA, Rivet and Prarie Schooner, with four more to be released in the next Beloit Poetry Journal. The Stranger describes her scene as "(g)ood writers circle her like moons." Jennifer Borges Foster, mover and inker.

 

November 6, 2007. A reading by and for Craig Oare in celebration of his 60th year. Also featuring — poetry guests Bonnie Jones and Jean Turnbow, and music from Josh Amberson. Craig is the author of five chapbooks, including the newly-published Oh My God, I’m 60! His work has been anthologized in Earth First! Campfire Poems and The Last Adventure of Life: Sacred Resources for Transition. He has lived and worked in Olympia since 1981, including a ten-year stint at Orca Books. He plans to set up roadside stand with a big sign that says Fresh Poetry.

 

October 17, 2007. Jerry Martien is the author of Pieces in Place, poems drawn from a thirty-seven-year residence on California’s northern coast. His work is included in Poems for the Wild Earth, The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place, and the forthcoming Working the Woods, Working the Sea. He has also written a history of economic exchange, Shell Game: A True Account Of Beads And Money In North America. He has worked as a carpenter, book store clerk, poet-teacher in rural schools, editor of bioregional magazines, a writing teacher at Humboldt State University in Arcata, and has been an active participant in Humboldt County’s nature and culture wars.

 

September 19, 2007. Allen Braden has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, an Artist Trust fellowship, an Artist Trust grant, the Emerging Writers Prize from Witness magazine, the Grolier Poetry Prize and other honors. His work is anthologized in Best New Poets 2005, Spreading the Word: Editors on Poetry, and Family Matters: Poems of Our Families. A former poet-in-residence for the Poetry Center and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he now teaches at Tacoma Community College.

 

August 15, 2007. John Burgess Is a Seattle poet who grew up in upstate New York, worked on a survey crew in Montana and taught English in Japan. His influences include 1970’s punk music, Montana bars, haiku and his family; while his poet-heroes include Whitman, Dickinson, Kerouac and Bob Dylan. John’s poems have appeared in the King County Poetry on Buses project, Sidecar Anemone, Cranky, Pontoon, elimae and Chrysanthemum. John has further imbedded himself in the PNW poetry scene as a 2006 Jack Straw writer, a co-founder of the Washington Poets Association’s Burning Word Festival, and editor of Snow Monkey (an eclectic literary journal). His first book was Punk Poems (2005) from Ravenna Press, who will publish a second collection, A History of Guns in the Family, in 2008.

 

August 11, 2007. The Olympia Poetry Network presents the “Farm Reading” at a new time (Saturday at 7 PM) and new location: Batdorf and Bronson Coffeehouse, 516 S. Capitol Way, Olympia. Featured readers will be Allen Braden, Paul Hunter and Jeanne Lohmann. This special reading brings together three northwest poets and their connection to the land. Donations for Thurston County Food Bank Awareness month are encouraged.

 

July 18, 2007. Jane Alynn’s first collection of poems, Threads & Dust, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2005. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, such as StringTown, The Pacific Review, Quercus Review, Manorborn, Snowy Egret, and Switched-on Gutenberg, as well as in anthologies. In 2004 she was awarded a William Stafford Award from Washington Poets Association. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles and currently lives in Anacortes.

 

June 20, 2007. Lohmann Poetry Prize Reading. Three winners have been announced for the 4th annual Jeanne Lohmann Poetry prize sponsored and judged by Jeanne’s poetry friends in California and facilitated by OPN. The winners (with their hometowns and poems) are Sally Albiso (10 miles west of Port Angeles, Water Witching), Jim Bertolino (Bellingham, My Sister's Daughter), and Matthew Campbell Roberts (Bellingham, Some Waters, Some People, Some Time Ago). Also, contest sponsor Valerie Berry, hopes to be in town "to say a word or two about each winning poem..., what caught the eye/ear/imagination." We hope Jeanne Lohmann will read as well.

 

May 16, 2007. Peter Pereira is a family physician in Seattle, and was a founding editor of Floating Bridge Press. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Journal of the American Medical Association, and have been widely anthologized, including in the forthcoming 2007 issue of Best American Poetry. His books include The Lost Twin, Saying the World, and What’s Written on the Body, which was newly released by Copper Canyon Press in February, 2007.

 

April 18, 2007. 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 should prove to be interesting. Woody Guthrie is expected to show up as is James Wright. A lady poet (maybe one with multi-personalities or schizophrenia) who came to a tragic ending has put in a bid to appear. And a pyrotechnic display of quick-changing personalities might appear through the corporeal presence of Jim Bill. Marina Tsvetaeva, William Shakespeare, Pablo Neruda and Robert Frost are some of the names mentioned. After these illustrious poets have performed, the audience will be invited to share their own favorite dead poet poems in the Open Mike session. Please join us for an entertaining evening among old, but not forgotten, friends.

 

March 21, 2007. Kathleen Flenniken began as a civil engineer and hydrologist, then added the skills of a poetry and the teaching of creative writing. She was born in Richland and worked on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, but is now a poet, teacher andco-editor and president of Floating Bridge Press, which is dedicated to publishing Washington State poets. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Mid-American Review, Farm Pulp, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry Daily. Her first collection, Famous (2006, University of Nebraska Press) won the 2005 Prairie Schooner Prize.

 

February 21, 2007. Open Mike from 6:30 to 8:00. Bring your best.

 

February 7, 2007 - Note: This reading is on the 1st rather than the 3rd Wednesday of the month. Derek Sheffield won the James Hearst Poetry Award judged by Li-Young Lee, and David Wagoner chose nine of his poems for Poet Lore’s “Poets Introducing Poets”. His work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Ecotone, Crab Creek Review, Margie,Cranky, The Bellingham Review, several anthologies, and one chapbook (A Mouthpiece of Thumbs, Blue Begonia, 2000). In ddition, his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, featured on National Public Radio, and earned him grants from Artist Trust and the Seattle Music and Arts Commission. He lives in the foothills of the Cascades and teaches at Wenatchee Valley College where his courses include Creative Writing and Northwest Nature Writing, a learning community with ornithologist Dan Stephens.

 

January 17, 2007. Born in Spokane, Thomas Aslin (who lives in Seattle) has lived nearly all of his life in the Northwest. Aslin holds a B.A. from the University of Washington and an M.F.A. from the University of Montana where he studied with Madeline DeFrees and the late Richard Hugo. His poems have appeared in Natural Bridge, INTRO 12, and Artful Dodge, among others. Recently (2006) Red Wing Press published his chapbook Sweet Smoke, and in the fall of 2007 Clark City Press (Livingston, Montana) will bring out a full-length collection entitled A Moon over Wings & Other Poems.

 

December 20, 2006. OPN's Traditional Season's Readings. Bring your favorite mid-winter poem as we celebrate short days, the chill, a range of religious and secular traditions, and the promise of eventual sun.

 

November 15, 2006. Holly Hughes' poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and have appeared in the anthologies, American Zen: A Gathering of Poets and Family Matters: Poems Of Our Families as well as in the Alaska Quarterly Review and The Midwest Quarterly, among others. A graduate of the low-residency MFA program, Rainier Writing Workshop, she teaches writing at Edmonds Community College and co-directs the Convergence Writer's Series. She lives in a log cabin built in the 1930s in Indianola.

 

October 18, 2006. Thomas A. Thomas originally hails Midwest but for 24 years has adopted western Washington as home and lives now in Olympia. He worked as Detroit correspondent for a St. Louis based rock and jazz magazine, Concert News, covering many of the major acts of the mid-1970's. In 1981, he camped his way West, to Washington State, where he has lived happily ever since, doing infrequent readings at local colleges and universities, and working on poetry in the background while he pursued a civil service career, marriage, and family. His collection Getting Here was published by Trafford Publishing.

 

September 20, 2006. Three of Olympia's younger poets (Sam Lohmann, Gaia Thomas and Rob Ross) will be featured. Sam Lohmann recently published a chapbook (The Summer Rooms and the Base of the Mountain), and is currently wrapping up another (Listen and Run). Rumor is Sam likes swimming in lakes. Gaia Thomas has recently published a chapbook: Cut from the Body: How I Survived High School. Rob Ross is an owner of Last Word Books. Come see what the future holds.

 

August 16, 2006. Joseph Green’s poems have appearing in magazines since 1975 and have been collected in His Inadequate Vocabulary (1986), Deluxe Motel (1991), Greatest Hits: 1975--2000, and The End of Forgiveness, which won the Floating Bridge Press Poetry Chapbook Award for 2001. He was PEN Northwest’s Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writer for 2000, in residence at the Dutch Henry Homestead in Oregon’s Rogue River Canyon; and in 2002 he held a residency at Fundación Valparaiso, in Mojacar, Spain. He lives in Longview, Washington, where he has taught English at Lower Columbia College for the last twenty years.

 

July 12, 2006. [Note that this date is the 2nd Wednesday of the month.] Thomas Hubbard moved from his sloop to Seattle's Lower Queen Anne neighborhood last winter, and is still re-exploring city life, Which is basically just life you can walk to. Thomas is a retired freelance feature writer and writing instructor who became active in Seattle's Slam and other venues in 1993, winning the Grand Slam in 1995. He has been published in various poetry anthologies and his first chapbook, Nail and other hardworking poems, was published in 1995 by Year of the Dragon Press. He has since published Children Remember Their Fathers, an anthology of mostly performance poets from across the country. His book reviews have appeared in Square Lake and Raven Chronicles. He runs gazoobi tales publishing, a very small imprint currently offering work by John Kulm, M. Anne Sweet, Dave Caserio and Tiffany Midge. He currently serves on the board of Washington Poetry Association.

 

June 21, 2006. Lucia Perillo has published four books of poetry -- Dangerous Life, which won the Norma Farber Award from Northeastern University Press, The Body Mutinies (Purdue, 1996) which also won a number of awards, The Oldest Map With the Name America (Random House, 1999), and her new book, Luck is Luck, which been included in the New York Public Library’s list of “books to remember” from 2005and has just received the prestigious Kingsley Tufts prize. Her poetry, essays and short fiction have appeared in many magazines and have been reprinted in the Pushcart and Best American Poetry anthologies. In the year 2000 she received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. She has taught at Syracuse University, Saint Martin’s University, Southern Illinois University and now "decomposes" in Olympia, Washington.

 

May 18, 2006. Lohmann Poetry Prize Reading. Three winners have been announced for the 3rd annual Jeanne Lohmann Poetry prize sponsored and judged by Jeanne’s poetry friends in California and facilitated by OPN. The winners (and their hometowns and poems) are Claire McQuerry (Richland, Poem for the Paris Metro), Janet Norman Knox (Bainbridge Island, The Beauty of a Husband in Fall), and Kelli Russell Agodon (Kingston, I Stay Up All Night and Grieve for the Future). Sadly, the winners will not be attending to read their poems, they will be read by board member Phil Peters. Also Jeanne Lohmann, Olympia’s wonderful, prolific, and most special poet will read.

 

April 19, 2006. A Reading of Dead Poets. Once again, experience dead poets in OPN's annual celebration of April as Poetry Month. These poets (including Rumi, Allen Ginsburg, Hart Crane and Tu Fu) come alive when their work is read. See for yourself, when local poets from the Olympia Poets Network – some in costume - read aloud from the works of favorite dead poets. Resurrect the spirit. After a short program, the audience will be invited to follow suit at an open mic, so bring the work of your favorite dead poet, and feel the magic.

 

March 15, 2006. Last month's Weathered Pages reading - which was postponed due to the electrical fire at Traditions - has been rescheduled for March 15. Weathered Pages is an anthology containing the works of 132 diverse poets and published by Blue Begonia Press (Yakima). Its poems were selected from postings on The Poetry Pole in a central Washington garden. The editors of these weather-worn pages are Terry Martin (“The strength of the Poetry Pole is its resistance to formula.”), Dan Peters (“It is a way to testify.”), Rob Prout (who makes images), and Jim Bodeen (Keeper of the Pole , “The Pole arrived in a vision.”). The editors will testify; as will at least 4 Olympia-area contributors (Sky Crosby, Kevin Miller, Bill Ransom, and Bill Yake). Explore the mystery.

 

January 18, 2006. Laura Puryear Finnell lives in Tumwater, Washington. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University in Los Angeles in 2004 and has been published widely in print and on-line journals, including Olympia 4th Street, Maize, Arnazella, Banyan Review and Rock Salt Plum Poetry. She is on the Board of Directors for Gertrude Press in Portland and teaches poetry workshops through community education at South Puget Sound Community College and Inkberry.org. She works for St. Martin's University.

December 21, 2005. OPN's Traditional Season's Readings. Bring your favorite mid-winter poem as we celebrate short days, the chill, a range of religious and secular traditions, and the promise of eventual sun.

 

November 16, 2005. Zhang Er was born in Beijing, China and moved to US in 1986. The full length collections of her poetry, Seen, Unseen, was published by QingHai Publishing House of China in 1999 and Water Words was published by New World Poetry Press in 2002. Her poems have also appeared in many poetry journals. Her five chapbooks were published in recent years. Verses on Bird, Ms. Zhang’s selected poems, was published from Zephyr Press in the summer of 2004. She has read and lectured at international festivals, conferences, reading series around the world. She currently teaches at The Evergreen State College.

 

October 19, 2005. Tim Kelly was born and bred in the Midwest, but has been an Olympian since 1981. He has an MFA from Boston University, and has had three books published, most recently Toccata & Fugue, which won the 2005 Floating Bridge Chapbook competition. He has new poems forthcoming in Willow Springs, Field, and Healing Muse. He works in Olympia as a physical therapist, and teaches occasionally at the Evergreen State College.

 

September 21, 2005. Lyn Coffin is currently a Writer in the Schools for Seattle Arts and Lectures, an actor with EffectiveArts, and an experienced certified social worker. She is the author of seven books, three of original poetry, four of translation from Russian and Czech. One of her stories appeared lifetimes ago in Best American Short Stories, edited by Joyce Carol Oates.. She moved to Seattle a little over a year ago, and has read at Bumbershoot, Burning Word House of Open Mics, Elliott Bay Bookstore, and elsewhere, and launched Hugo House's series, "Writers and Work" last year.

 

August 17, 2005. Don Frease is an Olympia poet, writer, artist, and craftsman – specializing in woodwork and furniture design. He has published five chapbooks of poetry and his poems have appeared in journals including The Asheville Poetry Review, Rosebud and The Sulphur River Literary Review. He has served as poet-in-residence for men’s gatherings and has conducted numerous writing workshops. Don earned a BA in Art from The Evergreen State College and an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from Bennington College.

 

July 20, 2005. Anita K. Boyle is a co-director of the Whatcom Poetry Series: The Poet as Art, and the publisher/editor of Egress Studio Press. She won the 2004 Red Sky Poetry Theatre statewide competition and is included in the anthology Red Sky Morning. Her poems have appeared in StingTown, The Raven Chronicles, Spoon River Poetry Review, Indiana Review, Stories with Grace , Jeopardy, Margin, Arbutus.com and Crab Creek Review.

 

James Bertolino has taught creative writing at Cornell University, Washington State University, University of Cincinnati, Linfield College and Western Washington University. He will be the Hallie Brown Ford Professor of Creative Writing at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon for 2005-06. Bertolino is author of nine volumes and fourteen chapbooks of poetry and prose, including New & Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon) and First Credo and Sanil River (both from QRL).

 

Together their collaborations are forthcoming in the anthology Saints of Hysteria: a Half-Century of Poetry Collaboration in America (2005, Soft Skull Press).

 

June 15, 2005. The Boston Phoenix named Jack McCarthy “Best Standup Poet,” The Boston Globe said, “In the poetry world, he's a rock star.” Poet Stephen Dobyns calls him, "one of the wonders of contemporary poetry." He’s an engaging minor character in the film Slamnation and was a semifinalist for the Individual Slam Championship in 2000. His work appears in the anthologies The Spoken Word Revolution, Poetry Slam, and Complete Idiot's Guide to Slam Poetry. His most recent book, from EM Press, is called Say Goodnight, Grace Notes. Check out his website .

 

May 18, 2005. Lohmann Poetry Prize Reading. Three winners will soon be announced for the 2nd annual Jeanne Lohmann Poetry prize sponsored and judged by Jeanne’s poetry friends in California and facilitated by OPN. The winners (and their hometowns and poems) are Lyn Coffin (Seattle, Ned's Aria), Kevin Miller (Tacoma, When My Mother), and Ocean (Olympia, Octopus).The winners will each read several poems, including the winning poems. Jeanne Lohmann, Olympia’s wonderful, prolific, and most special poet will also read.

 

April 20, 2005. A Reading of Dead Poets. Once again, experience dead poets in OPN's annual celebration of April as Poetry Month. These poets (including Amy Clampitt, Robert Sund and William Stafford) come alive when their work is read. See for yourself, when local poets from the Olympia Poets Network – some in costume - read aloud from the works of favorite dead poets. Resurrect the spirit. After a short program, the audience will be invited to follow suit at an open mic, so bring the work of your favorite dead poet, and feel the magic.

 

March 16, 2005. Carolyn Maddux left her post as managing editor of the Shelton-Mason County Journal two and a half years ago and has since been teaching, editing, traveling a bit and selling antiques. She is co-convener of the Olympic College Shelton Writers Conference, Write in the Woods. In 1998 she earned her master of arts through the McGregor School of Antioch University in Ohio. Her first book of poetry, Remembering Water , was published by Bellowing Ark Press in 1996. A hand-printed, limited-edition letterpress chapbook, Voluntary on a Flight of Angels, was published in 2003 by Hypatia Press.

 

February 16, 2005. Libby Wagner was born in Madrid, Spain, and grew up with her military family traveling the United States. She received her Masters of Fine Arts from Eastern Washington University where she also began working in the Writers in the Prison program. In between her moves, she’s taught writing, waited tables, sold clothing at Lord & Taylor, and worked on backcountry re-vegetation crews. In 2004, she directed the Vagina Monologues production in Port Angeles, and currently, she lives in Olympia where she continues her work as an educator. Like This, Like That is her first collection of poems. Recent work has appeared in Willow Springs, Redactions and Writers Harvest.

 

January 19, 2005. Lucia Perillo has published three books of poetry --Dangerous Life, which won the Norma Farber Award from Northeastern University Press, The Body Mutinies (Purdue 1996) which also won a number of awards, and most recently The Oldest Map With the Name America (Random House 1999.) Her poetry, essays and short fiction have appeared in many magazines and have been reprinted in the Pushcart and Best American Poetry anthologies. In the year 2000 she received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. She lives in Olympia, Washington.

 

December 15, 2004. OPN's Traditional Season's Readings. Bring your favorite mid-winter poem as we celebrate short days, the chill, a range of religious traditions and the promise of eventual sun.

 

November 17, 2004. Peter Pereira divides his time between work as a family physician at High Point Community Clinic in West Seattle, and volunteering as an editor at Floating Bridge Press. Winner of the 1997 "Discovery"/The Nation Award, his books include The Lost Twin (Grey Spider Press 2000) and Saying the World (Copper Canyon 2003), which won the Hayden Carruth Award, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the Triangle Publishing Award, and the PEN USA Award in Poetry.

 

October 20, 2004. Bethany Reid teaches literature, poetry, and composition at Everett Community College and is a 2004 co-winner of the Lohmann Poetry Prize. She holds degrees in poetry and American Literature from the University of Washington. Her poetry has been published in Prairie Schooner, The Bellingham Review, The Duckabush Journal, Chrysanthemum, The Seattle Review, Santa Clara Review, Calyx and other literary magazines. Her chapbook, The Coyotes and My Mom, was published in 1990 by Bellowing Ark Press. She is currently at work on a book about life in Puritan America.

 

September 15, 2004. Judith Skillman is a teacher, widely published poet, and co-editor of Fine Madness – the Seattle-based literary magazine. She has received numerous grants and awards, including the Eric Mathieu King Fund from the Academy of American Poets, and her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Northwest Review, Poetry, Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, JAMA, and other journals. Her poetry collections include Red Town – a finalist for the Washington State Center for the Book award, as well as Worship of the Visible Spectrum, Beethoven and the Birds, and Storm. Her latest book is Latticework from David Robert Books; Tic Douloureux: New and Selected Poems 1985 – 2005 is forthcoming from Silverfish Review Press in late 2005.

 

August 18, 2004. Judith Roche is author of two collections of poetry Myrrh/My Life as a Screamer and Ghosts. She also co-edited First Fish, First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim, which won an American Book Award.She has worked in collaboration with visual artists and the Seattle Art Commission to install a suite of salmon poems at the Chittendon Locks (the "Salmon in the City" project), and is Literary Arts Director for the Bumbershoot Festival.

 

July 21, 2004. Olympia Poetry Network’s own Bill Yake will read from his new book This Old Riddle: Cormorants and Rain (Radiolarian Press). Bill’s poetry springs from place, wild nature and water and has been published widely in literary magazines (Willow Springs, Puerto del Sol, and The Seattle Review), in magazines serving the environmental community (Wilderness, Wild Earth, and The Bear Deluxe), and in anthologies (Under a Silver Sky – An Anthology of Pacific Northwest Poetry and March Hares – Best Poems from Fine Madness).

 

--- The Paul Gilley Memorial Reading ---

 

June 23, 2004. (Note that this is a change of date!) Christopher Howell is the author of eight collections of poems, including Memory and Heaven (1997) and Just Waking (2003). He has received the Washington State Governor's Award, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a fellowship from the Artist Trust, and the Vachel Lindsay and Helen Bullis prizes. His work has made three appearances in the annual Pushcart Prize publication, most recently in 2002, and may be found also in many journals and anthologies. Since 1975 he has been director and principal editor for Lynx House Press and is now also senior editor at Easter Washington University Press. He is on the Master of Fine Arts faculty of the Inland Northwest Center for Writers. Howell lives in Spokane with his wife, Barbara, and son, Evan. His most recent book is Light's Ladder.

 

May 19, 2004. Lohmann Poetry Prize Reading. Three winners have been announced for the 1st annual Jeanne Lohmann Poetry prize sponsored and judged by Jeanne’s poetry friends in California and facilitated by OPN. The winners (and their hometowns and poems) are Vita Laume (Olympia, Nest of Silence), Bethany Reid (Edmonds, Such Good Work) , and Ann Gerike (Coupeville, Earthquake, Cyprus, A.D. 365). Poets will read several poems, including the winning poems. Jeanne Lohmann, Olympia’s wonderful, prolific, and most special poet will also read.

 

April 21, 2004. A Reading of Dead Poets. Once again, experience dead poets in OPN's annual celebration of April as Poetry Month. These poets of the past come alive when their work is read. See for yourself, when local poets from the Olympia Poets Network – some in costume - read aloud from the works of favorite dead poets. Resurrect the spirit. After a short program, the audience will be invited to follow suit at an open mic, so bring the work of your favorite dead poet, and feel the magic.

 

March 17, 2004. For the past fourteen years, Sharon Hashimoto has been a literature and writing instructor at Highline Community College. Her poems have appeared in American Scholar, Poetry Northwest, POETRY, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner and others. She was awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her chapbook, Reparations, was published in 1992 by Brooding Heron Press. In 2003, her first full-length book of poetry, The Crane Wife was chosen co-winner of the Nicholas Roerich Prize and published by Story Line Press.

 

February 18, 2004. Jody Alieson started her FBI file in Birmingham, Alabama in the late 1960s and added to it as media representative with the Vietnam Moratorium Committee in Washington D.C. and Chicago. Deeply involved in the early second wave of feminism in the Pacific Northwest, she continues to work for justice and against war. Her most recent of ten books, Loving in Time of War, was published in 1999 by Blue Begonia Press. Her poems, stories, articles, essays, reviews and songs are found in national periodicals, anthologies and recordings and have earned grants and awards including a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Currently she serves as contributing editor for The Raven Chronicles and directs the PCC Farmland Fund, a non-profit land trust saving farmland from development.

 

January 21, 2004. Tacoma (Old Town) poet Kevin Miller is halfway through his thirty-second year in public education in Washington. Recent poems have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Crab Creek Review, Raven Chronicles, and Gingko Tree Review. Blue Begonia Press published his two poetry collections: Everywhere Was Far and Light That Whispers Morning.

 

December 17, 2003. OPN's Traditional Season's Readings. Bring your favorite mid-winter poem as we celebrate short days, the chill, a range of religious traditions and the promise of eventual sun.

 

This year we are inviting local poet-authors to bring their books for sale after this reading.

 

November 19, 2003. Alice Derry writes fine and unflinching poetry. Born in Oregon and raised in Washington and Montana, she holds degrees Goddard College and The American University in Washington, D.C. Her poems have appeared in periodicals including Southern Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Portland Review, The Seattle Review, Hubbub, Crab Creek Review and Raven Chronicles. Her first manuscript, Stages 0f Twilight, was chosen by Raymond Carver as the l986 King County Arts Publication Award winner. Her chapbooks include Getting Used to the Body (Sagittarius Press) and Not as You Once Imagined (Trask House); full collections include Clearwater (Blue Begonia Press), and most recently Strangers to Their Courage (Louisiana State University Press).

 

October 15, 2003. Craig Oare was completely unknown until 1947, when he was born. Since moving to Olympia in '81, he has produced three chapbooks, including the recent Mechanical Horse Poems. He has been a frequent contributor to the poetry page of the Earth First Journal, was included in the anthology Earth First Campfire Songs, and has also been known to appear in the 4th Street Poetry Bimonthly. His proudest literary distinction, however, is to be the brother of noted Olympia poet and artist Bonnie Jo Jones. He works eight days a week at Orca Books, and spends the rest of his time hiding in the Olympics.

 

September 17, 2003. Marj Hahne is a New-York-based poet who will be performing her poetry as part of her 4-month Plastic Igloo Poetry Tour. Her poems have appeared in several art exhibits, journals and anthologies. She's been heard on radio and TV, and has two chapbooks, Finding What Hides and Rememberance: for September 11, 2001, and a poetry CD, notspeak.

 

August 20, 2003. [Unfortunately Judith Skillman took ill and had to cancel. We hope she will be able to reschedule.] Judith Skillman is the winner of numerous awards, including the Eric Mathieu King Fund from the Academy of American Poets and the Stafford Award from the Washington Poets Association. Her poems have appeared in Iowa Review, Northwest Review, Poetry, Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Malahat Review, and other journals. Her previous volumes of poems are Worship of the Visible Spectrum, Beethoven and the Birds, Storm, and Red Town. Red Town is a finalist for the Washington State Center for the Book award. Her chapbook, Sweetbrier was published in 2001 as part of the Blue Begonia Working Signs Series. Her latest book , Circe’s Island was released this year by Silverfish Review. She holds a Masters in English Literature from the University of Maryland. Skillman teaches humanities courses at City University in Bellevue, Washington.

 

July 23, 2003. Patricia Kinney edits and publishes Olympia’s 4th Street, a hand-bound poetry bi-monthly, and has taught creative writing at TESC. She worked as a fulltime journalist and now writes occassionally as a freelance correspondent. Kinney wrote the syndicated humor column "Afterwords" for which she won a Washington Post Sunday humor award and has written for NBC's Frasier. She served as contributing editor in Kampala, Uganda for the newspaper Saba Saba. Her non-fiction and poetry have been published extensively in literary journals, newspapers and magazines including Hipmama, Poetry Magazine.com, The Tall Grass Writers Anthology, The Sun, Bellowing Ark, The Ovarian, Mamazine, Slightly West , The Seattle Weekly, The Olympian, The Washington Post and USA Today.

 

June 16, 2003. Jeanne Gordner has retired from teaching and parenting, with time now for poetry and life in woods and garden. Her formal education in poetry began In college. After mundane studies of Longfellow and Whittier in public school, she was stunned by the writing of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and other innovators, while earning a degree in political science. Later, earning advanced degrees, she studied Shakespeare and Donne, and contemporary writers. She is grateful for workshops that make continued study possible. The challenge of poetry, she believes, is to understand and convey ones own world in language worth the reading.

 

A Northwest writer, storyteller, and educator, Rebecca Chamberlain holds an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Washington. She teaches interdisciplinary courses at the Evergreen State College in literature, storytelling, and writing. She grew up on the beaches and in the forests of Whidby Island. Her poetry reflects an interest in natural history, dreaming , native cultural traditions, and the arts. She is the author of works: including, The Return Of The Rainwater Baskets, The Work Of The Winds, Sharing The Circle: Native Music Of Washington State, and “Native Songs and Food Gathering Traditions,” from Spirit of the First People.

 

May 23, 2003. OPN's second Major Poets Reading will feature Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar at Traditions - 8 PM. Tickets ($7 general; $5 students and seniors) are available from Traditions and OPN board members.

 

Dorianne Laux is the author of three collections of poetry. She teaches at the University of Oregon’s program in creative writing. Pattiann Rogers says, “The world of Dorianne Laux is rich and varied, with growth and decay, with grief and wit, with sex and prayer and fantasy... a finely structured music.” She has won the Pushcart and an NEA fellowship.

 

Joseph Millar now earns a living in academia, but before that he spent time working in blue-collar jobs. He’s worked as a telephone repairman and a commercial fisherman. His poems come out of the American landscape like freight cars, carrying the voices that poetry in English has mostly ignored: the poetry of work, dignity, pain, pathos and oppression.

 

April 16, 2003. A Reading of Dead Poets. Experience dead poets - they come alive when their work is read. See for yourself, when local poets from the Olympia Poets Network – some in costume - read aloud from the works of favorite dead poets. Resurrect the spirit. After a short program, the audience will be invited to follow suit at an open mic, so bring the work of your favorite dead poet, and feel the magic.

 

March 19, 2003. Katie Cameron was born in Berkeley California in l945, and currently lives in Olympia Washington. In recent years, Katie’s poems have appeared in PoetsWest, The Heron’s Nest, and Love is Ageless: Stories about Alzheimer’s Disease (Lompico Creek Press). She has recently self-published a chapbook of poetry called BARE, and a collection of poems and reflections on Alzheimer's Disease called What Kind Of Life Did I Have? Katie also writes non-fiction columns about social and health services for state and local publications.

 

February 19, 2003. David D. Horowitz earned bachelor's degrees in English and philosophy from the University of Washington and a master's in English from Vanderbilt University. He taught English at Vanderbilt and Seattle Central Community College, and presently works at a Seattle-based law firm as a conference room attendant. David's poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals,including The Lyric, Candelabrum, ArtWord Quarterly, and The Sporting News. In his spare time he manages Rose Alley Press, which primarily publishes books of formal poetry, including his own latest collections: Streetlamp, Treetop , Star (1999) and Resin from the Rain (2002).

 

January 15, 2003. Emily Warn is Acting Publisher of Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend). Her poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared in numerous journals and newspapers, including The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Parabola, The Seattle Times, The Bloomsbury Review, and Seattle Weekly. Her books include The Leaf Path, The Novice Insomniac, The Book of Esther and Highway Suite. Ms. Warn recently retired from Microsoft, where she was in charge of editorially programming the Microsoft.com web site, the fourth most popular site on the Internet. This winter she will be the Thornton Writer-in-Residence at Lynchburg College in Lynchburg, Virginia.

 

December 18, 2002: OPN's Traditional Season's Readings. Bring your favorite mid-winter poem as we celebrate short days, the chill, a range of religious traditions and the promise of eventual sun.

 

November 20, 2002. Tacoma (Old Town) poet Kevin Miller has recently become the assistant principal at Washington Middle School here in Olympia - a new career after thirty years of teaching high school English. He writes “I am a grandfather, I long for rain and relish the chance to return to read in Olympia. “ Kevin spent last year writing once-a-week Saturday poems. His two fine poetry collections: Everywhere Was Far and Light That Whispers Morning were published by Blue Begonia Press.

 

October 16, 2002. John Burgess. grew up in upstate New York, went to Montana State University, and now lives with his family in North Seattle. He has reported for weekly newspapers in Montana and Washington and taught English in Japan for three years. He currently works in corporate communications for an insurance company. His poems have appears in the 1999 King County Poetry and Art on Buses Project, Poets West Literary Journal, Portland’s Gumball Poetry Project and 4th Street from Inlet Press, Olympia.

 

September 18, 2002. Luke Warm Water. Born and raised in Rapid City, South Dakota, Kurt Schweigman (aka Luke Warm Water) is a half-breed, enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota Tribe. He has been a featured poet at venues across the United States, England and one blurry gig at the Cafe Pollux in Amsterdam. Luke currently lives in Portland, Oregon where he works as an epidemiologist in the Public Health field for the urban Indian Community. "Luke Warm Water writes of Marlboro lunches, and push cart vendors in strip bars of aging hookers, mourns the loss of radical Charles Bukowski and announces it’s 99-cent fish day at McDonalds" (From an article by Brenda Norrell in Indian Country Today).

 

August 21, 2002. Michael Shohan is a teacher and poet who thinks that listening is one of the great gifts given to us. To him, when you listen what you hear is singing. He fled the East Coast because it was too noisy to hear. It has been important to him to find the space and silence in which to be attentive to the songs around him.

 

July 10, 2002. Two hometown readers and OPN board members: Gayle Wilde and Barbara Gibson. Gayle grew up on the Olympic Peninsula where her father was a high school English teacher. It was from him that she learned her love of words and language. For Gayle, creating poetry is using words to create "fields of energy." She works for a living so she can feed her cat. Barbara grew up in Normal, Illinois, which is, she thinks, ironic. She taught writing and women's studies at several colleges before becoming a mental health councelor at Evergreen. Now she's retired, living with her partener, Carol, their many books, and two fat cats.

 

June 19, 2002. Jim Bill, having set out early in life to cross the vast deserts of fiction, was soon lured into the oasis of poetry. Not only the tangible boundaries of a poem, but its music and imagery brought him to his senses. Some of us would rather dance than ramble. And so he's been reading, gabbing about, and writing poetry for 30 years. Oh, and he went to school at Humboldt State University, the University of Washington, and the University of Iowa, and put in 20 years working for the state of Washington and teaching at SPSCC. His poems have appeared around the country, and he's played a part in bringing poetry from around the country to Olympia, through radio, television, teaching, and the OPN reading series which he helped keep going for a number of years. Figuring ten years work in support of poetry venues has been his fair dues, he's now retired from OPN to concentrate once more on reading, gabbing about, and writing poems.

 

May 15, 2002. Don Frease began writing poetry in the late eighties and earned an MFA in creative writing and literature from Bennington College in 1996. Don has published poems in literary magazines across the country, including Rosebud, The Asheville Poetry Review, and has work pending in an upcoming issue of Sulphur River. He has developed writing workshops that use writing and poetry to explore the self. Don is also a book designer and bookbinder, and has published three chapbooks of his own poems: Stones, Bones and Lovemaking (1990), In Creation (1996), and Natural History (1999).

 

April 17, 2002. A Reading of Dead Poets. Experience dead poets - they come alive when their work is read. See for yourself, when local poets from the Olympia Poets Network – some in costume - read aloud from the works of favorite dead poets. Resurrect the spirit. After a short program, the audience will be invited to follow suit at an open mic, so bring the work of your favorite dead poet, and feel the magic.

 

March 20, 2002. Carolyn Maddux edits the Shelton-Mason County Journal, leads a creative writing class at Olympic College, organizes the Olympic Poets and Writers reading series in Shelton, and is co-convener of the OCS Write-in-the-Woods writer’s conference. She has been writing poetry since 1989, when a Rainforest Writing session with Bob Pyle reminded her that there’s more than the who, what, when and where of news writing. In 1998 Carolyn completed a master’s degree in poetry and the environment from Antioch University. Recently, she wrote her first lyrics for a musical work commissioned by the North American Welsh Choir. Carolyn has one book in print, Remembering Water, and a chapbook on the way, entitled Voluntary on a Flight of Angels.

 

February 20, 2002. Originally from Indiana, Valerie Berry is a physician living in the San francisco Bay area, where she practices medicine and teaches at Stanford. Her first collection of poetry, difficult news is published by 16 Rivers Press, which was profiled in the September-October 2001 issue of Poets and Writers. Jeanne Lohmann says, "[Valerie's] poems refuse the temptation of medicine's easy drama and lead us instead to gratitude and respect for the rigorous possibilities in these humane arts. Whether responding to a question from Rumi, a line from Neruda, or learning from Rodin's fallen caryatids, Berry makes honest poems."

 

January 26, 2002: Dead of Winter Workshop. OPN's 6th annual legendary poetry workshop. Lead this year by Allen Braden (Puyallup poet and teacher) and Cynthia Pratt (Olympia poet). Call Chris Dahl (534-9357) for details.

 

January 23, 2002. Joseph Green, has taught English at Lower Columbia College, in Longview, for sixteen years, during which time his poems have appeared in The Bellingham Review, Crab Creek Review, 5 AM, Hubbub, Pontoon, Slipstream, The Threepenny Review, and ZYZZYVA. As PEN Northwest's Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writer for 2000, he spent seven months, mostly alone, at the Dutch Henry Homestead in the Rogue River canyon. That experience led to his collection The End of Forgiveness, which won the Floating Bridge Press Poetry Chapbook Award for 2001.

 

December 19, 2001: OPN's Traditional Season's Readings. Bring your favorite mid-winter poem as we celebrate short days, the chill, a range of religious traditions and the promise of eventual sun.

 

November 28, 2001. (Note, this the fourth Wednesday of November.) Melinda Mueller has published four collections of poetry: Apocrypha (Grey Spider Press, 1998); Private Gallery (Seal Press, 1976); Asleep in Another Country (Jawbone Press, 1979), which received a Washington State Governor¹s Award; and What the Ice Gets: Shackleton's Antarctic Expedition 1914-1916 (Van West & Company 2000), winner of the 2001 Washington State Book Award. Her poems have been included in the Pushcart Prize XX and Best American Poetry 1990 anthologies and many literary journals. Born in Helena, Montana, she now lives in Seattle, where she teaches high school biology at Seattle Academy.

 

October 17, 2001. Poets in Masks, In keeping with the spirit of the month, we plan to create an environment where poets are free to explore alternate personas. So - get in the spirit and wear a mask, and participate in the Open Mike. Poems about masks, costumes, trading places, changlings or transformations are appropriate.

 

September 19, 2001. Greg Darms, editor and publisher of the literary magazine convolvulus (now in its tenth year), has recently returned to live in the Northwest after six years teaching teaching in California. He currently finds himself on a houseboat (a hundred-year-old fishing shack) near Astoria, in the lower Columbia River estuary. Darms' poems and essays have appeared in various places, including Estero, Barnabe Mountain Review, Bellowing Ark, Limestone and Fish Dance.

 

August 18, 2001. Tomas Gayton was born and raised in Seattle, the grandson of black pioneers. He attended the University of Washington and besides being a civil rights attorney and poet, Tomas is a world traveler. As his "life in verse," his poetry is filled with colorful people and places. Tomas' work includes five books of poetry, including Poet's Grace, Two Races, and Winds of Change. His work has appeared in various newspapers and literary journals including The Seattle Times, The Seattle Review, and Sheila Na Gig.

 

July 25, 2001. Alissa Nielsen grew up in North Dakota, and moved to the West Coast four years ago. She has lived in Olympia for the past three years, studying writing at the Evergreen State College. Alissa has been writing "as long as I can remember," and gravitated to performance poetry in recent years. She has performed in Seattle on numerous occasions, winning poetry slams three times. Her passions are politics and women's issues, and her poetry explores these themes.

 

June 20, 2001. [Unfortunately Carolyn Maddux took ill and had to cancel. We hope she will be able to reschedule. To substitute we will be reading summer poems - please bring some.] Carolyn Maddux, by day the managing editor of the Shelton-Mason County Journal, writes poems and essays and teaches creative writing at Olympic College Shelton. She grew up on Hood Canal, and is rooted in the local area. Much of her work reflects her relationship with place: the Northwest landscape, and the its living creatures. She was recently commissioned to write lyrics for a new work with music by Winnipeg composer Victor Davies. "Lifting the Sky" premiered in April and will premiere in United Kingdom in 2002.

 

May 16, 2001: A Special - Two Poets:Susan Moon is a poet and elementary teacher from Prosser, WA. She lives and works with her husband and youngest of three sons on a third generation dry land farm in the Horse Heaven Hills. She has recent poems in the journals Calyx and Atlanta Review. Her first chapbook of poetry, The Telling Signs, was published by Blue Begonia Press in 2000. Terry Martin is an English professor at Central Washington University, where she is the recipient of this year's Distinguished Professor of Teaching Award. Her work has appeared in over fifty publications, including English Journal, Evergreen Chronicles, The Sun, 13th Moon, Earth's Daughters, Raven Chronicles and several anthologies. Wishboats, her new book of poems published this fall by Blue Begonia Press, won the Judge's Choice Award at Bumbershoot Book Fair, 2000.

 

April 18, 2001: On Wednesday April 18, six Evergreen students will read their poems. The readers will be Darsie R.B. Dela-Cruz, Patricia Kinney, Mark Lassow, Mac Lojowsky, Holly Shackelford and Kristy VanWindergren. Their work has been variously described by their teacher, Kate Crowe, as "hot and tasty," "saucy," "timeless and timely and mostly provocative," and "under the influence of Rumi." Check it out.

 

March 21, 2001: Susan Rich Susan Rich's book The Cartographer's Tongue/Poems of the World will be published this year by White Pine Press, New York and Snailpress, South Africa. Her work has been published in Harvard Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, and Poet Lore, and her poems are pending in DoubleTake and Ariel. Rich recently returned from South Africa where she was a Fulbright Fellow investigating the intersection of poetry and human rights. Currently, she is teaching private poetry classes, writing a literary arts column for the Eugene Weekly and is on the job market.

 

February 21, 2001: Michael Daley is the founder of Port Townsend’s legendary Empty Bowl of Port Press. Formerly a tree planter and freight hopper, he currently teaches English and philosophy at Mt. Vernon Highschool. Daley’s most recent volume of poetry is Original Sin . His earlier volumes include The Straits, Amigos, Angels, and Yes, Five Poems. Two recent chapbooks are afield: Horace: Eleven Poems and The Corn Maiden. He is also editor of the powerful collection, In Our Hearts and Minds: The Northwest and Central America. He'll be reading from a new manuscript entitled Rosehip Plum Cherry

 

January 17, 2001: Don Roberts. A member of Washington Poets Association, Don Roberts is a two-time King County Poetry & Art on Buses poet. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Spindrift, The Roc, and Voices in the Trees: The Washington Anthology. In 1999 his poem Wolf Spider was read on NPR's "Talk of the Nation." His writing is concerned with human relationships, both with one another and with the natural world.

 

December 20, 2000: OPN's Traditional Season's Readings. Bring your favorite mid-winter poem as we celebrate short days, the chill, a range of religious traditions and the promise of eventual sun.

 

November 29, 2000: Reception for Lucia Perillo - winner of the MacArthur Fellowship - at Traditions - 7:00 PM. Sponsored by the Olympia Poetry Network and the Olympia Arts Commission. Short reading to follow. Books will be available. Please RSVP here by email.

 

November 15, 2000: Chris Dahl. Since receiving her first publishing credit in second grade, Chris Dahl has advanced to magazines such as Poetry Northwest, Seattle Review and Fine Madness. In 1991 her chapbook, Mrs. Dahl in the Season of Cub Scouts, was published after winning the national Women in Words competition. A graduate of the creative writing program at the University of Washington, she returned to the northwest after living in England and Florida. She's married, has a grown son, and a malamute who still lives at home.

 

October 18, 2000: Judith Skillman is author of three books of poetry, including Beethoven and the Birds (1996) and Storm (1998), both from Blue Begonia Press. Storm received the Eric Mathieu King Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her collection Red Town will be published by Silverfish Review Press in 2001. A regular contributor to Northwest Review, Skillman's work has also appeared in Poetry, Southern Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Fine Madness, and other journals. Currently she lives in Bellevue teaches English Literature in the College of Arts and Humanities at City University.

 

September 20, 2000: Barbara Drake . Barbara and her husband live on a small farm in the foothills of the Oregon Coast Range, where they raise wine grapes and Romney sheep. She has published five books of poetry including What We Say to Strangers. She has recently published non-fiction book, Peace at Heart: An Oregon Country Life. She has also written a number of textbooks on poetry and literature, including Writing Poetry. She is a full professor in the English department. Her teaching specialties include creative writing, Irish literature, American women writers, and environmental literature.

 

August 16, 2000: A Handful of Olympia Poets: Jeanne Lohmann, Donald Arthur Freas, and mystery guests. Jeanne Lohmann is a graduate of the creative writing program at San Francisco State University. She is the author of six books, including, most recently, Granite Under Water (Fithian Press, 1996), Between Silence and Answer (Pendle Hill, 1994), and Gathering a Life (John Daniel & Co,. 1989). Don Freas has worked as a carpenter, furniture designer, sculptor, workshop leader, poet-in-residence, hands-on healer and ghost writer. He has a 1996 MFA in creative writing and literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars; and a 1999 Certificate in Transgradient Healing and Counseling. Don has two chapbooks in print, In Creation, a collection of poems, and Poetic Origins, an essay about creativity and learning.The mystery guests are great poets but slightly shy.

 

July 19, 2000: Tom Hunley teaches poetry writing to prisoners, children, and college students. He has a BA in English Literature from University of Washington (1993) and an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University (1996). This fall he will begin work on a PhD in English at Florida State University. Hunley has published poems in current or upcoming issues of Southern Poetry Review, Troubadour, The Temple, Chiron Review, Curious Rooms, Spindrift, and Heliotrope.

 

June 21, 2000: Tim Kelly's latest collection of poems, Stronger, won the 1999 Field Poetry Prize, and his first collection, Articulation, won the 1992 King County Arts Commission Publication Award. His poems have appeared this year in The Iowa Review, DoubleTake and on Nerve.com. In Stronger, Kelly writes about his work, his family, his memories growing up and Henderson Inlet, where he lives and hikes. He grew up in Cleveland and contemplated careers in medicine and rock music before settling on his double vocation as poet and physical therapist. He got his master's in physical therapy from the University of Washington.

 

May 17, 2000: [Unfortunately Micael Daley took ill (flu) and had to cancel. We hope he will be able to reschedule.] Michael Daley is the founder of Port Townsend’s legendary Empty Bowl of Port Press. Formerly a tree planter and freight hopper, he currently teaches English and philosophy at Mt. Vernon Highschool. Daley’s most recent volume of poetry is Original Sin. His earlier volumes include The Straits, Amigos, Angels, and Yes, Five Poems. Two new chapbooks are slated to be published this year: Horace: Eleven Poems and The Corn Maiden. He is also editor of the powerful collection, In Our Hearts and Minds: The Northwest and Central America.

 

April 19, 2000: Winners of the Olympia Poetry Network's annual Unpublished Poets Contest read their winning poems. What better celebration of April - Poetry Month?

March 15, 2000: James Scofield's collection 30 Poems was nominated for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize. Scofield has been a poet and essayist for thirty years. His work has been published throughout the United States in such prestigious literary journals as Ploughshares and the Iowa Review. His work has been published in England, Canada, France and India.

February 16, 2000: Don Foran is Director of Honors Education at Centralia College. He teaches Poetry, Philosophy, American Literature, Universal Themes in Literature, Writing, and, occasionally, Theology. In 1995 Dr. Foran was named Professor of the Year for Washington by the Carnegie Foundation. He will share poems about Ireland, the West Indies, and classical literary themes.

January 29, 2000: Dead of Winter Workshop. OPN's 5th annual legendary poetry workshop. Lead this year by Kevin Miller (Gig Harbor poet and teacher) and Carol Gordon (Olympia poet). Call Chris Dahl (534-9357) for details.

 

January 19, 2000: Cynthia Pratt has a teaching degree from Humboldt State College, a master’s degree in environmental studies from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, and resides in Lacey, Washington with her husband. She works as a Biologist with the State Department of Fish and Wildlife. Her poetry has been published in Crab Creek Review, Steelhead Special, Exhibition, Pontoon, and Raven Chronicles. Her poems have won the right to appear on Seattle Metro and Tacoma buses, Other awards include those from the Washington Poet’s Association, Washington Writer’s Association and from the Signpost Press.

 

December 15, 1999: OPN's Traditional Season's Readings. Bring your favorite mid-winter poem as we celebrate short days, the chill, a range of religious traditions and the promise of eventual sun.

November 17, 1999: Allen Braden was of the forth and last generation to work on his family's farm in the lower Yakima Valley. His poetry often strives to record the magical qualities of rural folklore, the hardships of earning a living off the land the experiences of growing up on the Yakima Indian reservation or the durable power of the family. Braden has received an Artist Trust grant, a Grolier Poetry Prize and Sam Ragan Prize. His work has appeared in His poetry has appeared in well-known journals including Shenandoah, Poetry Northwest, and ZYZZYVA. It was been published alongside Robert Frost's in Meridian. Currently he lives in Puyallup, Washington, and teaches at several colleges around Puget Sound.

 

October 20, 1999: Janice Gould is a poet, musician, and member of the Koyangk’auwi Maidu tribe of northern California. She has published two volumes of poetry, Beneath My Heartand Earthquake Weather, and is widely anthologized. She is currently completing her Ph.D. dissertation on Joy Harjo’s poetry, while she teaches and writes in Portland.

 

September 15, 1999: Diana Olegre Although Diana Olegre attended Berea College and The Evergreen State College, she is largely self-taught. She moved from Chicago to the woods of Kentucky as an older child and has lived in Olympia for the past six years. She won a College Prize from The Academy of American Poets. Her work has appeared in Appalachian Heritage and Wordsmiths. She has performed her work in five states and has been reading and writing poetry for nearly thirty years.

 

August 18, 1999: Sharon Carter received her medical degree from the Cambridge and imigrated to the United States in 1979. She recently won cash awards in all three categories of the Washington Poet's Association's annual contest. Her poems have appeared in Raven Chronicles, Pandora, Exhibition, and Synapse. Her work can also be viewed on-line at Switched-on Gutenberg, Melic Review and The Horsethief's Journal.

 

July 21, 1999: Derek Sheffield received his MFA in poetry from the Univ. of Wash. A native of the Puget Sound region, he currently lives and teaches in Seattle. His poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, Crab Creek Review, and the Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry. He is a co-author of Teaching with the Internet, Putting Teachers before Technology. Since August 1998, he has worked as Coordinating Editor for the Seattle Review.

 

June 16, 1999: SPCC Student Poets and Their Instuctors: Poets Jenn Curtis, Mary Margaret Fondriest, Kristi van Wingerden, Ariel Westberg and other poets with Instructors: Jim Bill and Lisa Lawrenson.

 

June 12, 1999: Be sure to join us as the Celebration of the Written Word on Super Saturday from 11 AM to 4 PM at the Evergreen College Library.

 

May 19, 1999: Lucia Perillo has published three collections: The Body Mutinies, for which she won the PEN/Revson Foundation Poetry Fellowship, and Dangerous Life, which received a Norma Farber Award and her lastest book, The Oldest Map with the Name America (Random House). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Kenyon Review as well as in the Pushcart and Best American Poetry anthologies. She teaches at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.

 

April 21, 1999: Marjorie Power is the author of two poetry chapbooks and one full length collection. Her poems appear in many journals and anthologies. Her most recent collection, Cave Poems, was published by Lone Willow Press in 1998. Her interests include ballroom dance, knitting, furniture painting,camping and hiking, and attending the theater, especially the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

 

March 17, 1999: Kevin Miller Kevin Miller lives in Gig Harbor, Washington. He has been a public school teacher for 27 years. Light That Whispers Morning (Blue Begonia Press) received the Bumbershoot/Weyerhaeuser Publication Award in 1994. Everywhere Was Far was published in October 1998.

 

February 17, 1999: Bonnie J. Nelson "Born on the Quillayute Prairie at the foot of the Olympics, who could help but write poetry?" asks Bonnie Nelson. The most esteemed mentor for this Forks resident has been UW's own Nelson Bentley. She has also studied with Maxine Kumin, Charles Wright, Steven Dunn, Carolyn Kizer, and David Wagoner. She has published in many small press magazines. Widely read, philosophical, and wickedly funny,Bonnie also sculpts in polymer clay, plays guitar and sings. She was for two consecutive years the Colonel-Sanders- Kentucky-Fried-Chicken-Country-Western-Songwriting-Competition winner.

 

January 23, 1999: Dead of Winter Workshop. OPN's 4th annual legendary poetry workshop. Lead this year by Carolyn Maddux (Shelton poet and teacher) and Bill Yake (Olympia poet). Call Jeanne Gordner (866-0603) for details.

 

January 20, 1999: Tim McNulty Tim McNulty is a poet, conservationist, and nature writer long active in Northwest literary and environmental communities. His poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S. and abroad. Tim's books of poetry include Pawtracks , Last Year's Poverty Reflected Light, Poems on Paintings by Morris Graves and others. His collection, In Blue Mountain Dusk, was recently published by Broken Moon Press. Tim has also published a number of natural-history-oriented books. Mark the date. 

December 16, 1998: OPN's Traditional Season's Readings. Bring your favorite mid-winter poem as we celebrate short days, the chill and the promise of eventual sun.

November 18, 1998: Bill Yake. OPN's own. Poems in Wilderness, Fine Madness, Puerto del Sol, Convolvulus, Many Mountains Moving. Three chapbooks: Confluence, Short Shrift, and The Faces of Birds. Recent 1st Prize Shoreline Art Festival. He's promising one new blues lyric.

 

October 21, 1998: Joanne (Riley) Clarkson . Author of three chapbooks of poetry, including Crossing Without Daughters. She has been published in over 80 magazines and journals. The most recent are Calyx, Karamu and The Evansville Review. She currently works as a librarian in Aberdeen. 

 

September 17, 1998: Unpublished Poets' Contest -- Readings from this year's winners: Laura Hurley, Richard Maywald, Michael Callaghan, and Julie Alessio. Join us is this celebration of new voices.

 

For more information contact Bill Yake.