Also, with Claudia Castro Luna, Saretta Morgan, Matthew Nienow, Dan Peters, Laura Da’, Maya Jewell Zeller, Christopher Howell, Cynthia Neely, Susan Blair, Thom Caraway, Ebo Barton, and Finn Menzies.

Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press. She is a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, and a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, as well as being awarded a US Artists Ford Fellowship. Diaz teaches at the Arizona State University Creative Writing MFA program.

Claudia Castro Luna is the Washington State Poet Laureate 2018-2020. She served as Seattle’s Civic Poet from 2015-2017 and is the author of the Pushcart-nominated Killing Marías (Two Sylvias Press, 2017), This City (Floating Bridge Press, 2016), and the creator of  the acclaimed Seattle Poetic Grid. She is also a Hedgebrook and VONA alumna, a 2014 Jack Straw fellow, the recipient of a King County 4Culture grant and an individual artist grant from Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture. Born in El Salvador, she came to the United States in 1981. She has an MA in Urban Planning, a teaching certificate and an MFA in poetry. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, La Bloga, Dialogo and Psychological Perspectives, among others. Her non-fiction work can be read in several anthologies, among them This Is The Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, 2017). Claudia is currently working on a memoir, Like Water to Drink, about her experience escaping the civil war in El Salvador. Living in English and Spanish, she writes and teaches in Seattle where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children. Since 2009, Claudia maintains Cipota bajo la Luna, a blog with reflections, writing and reviews.

Saretta Morgan is a writer and artist who uses text and objects to consider relationships between privacy and narrative forms. She is the author of the chapbooks, Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) and room for a counter interior (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2017) as well as a forthcoming full-length collection Plan Upon Arrival (Selva Oscura/Three Count Pour, tbd). She was a 2016-2017 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Resident and has created interactive text-based projects for art institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and Dia Beacon. Her work has received support from the Jerome Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, among others. Saretta received a B.A. in writing from Columbia University and an MFA from Pratt Institute. She teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

Matthew Nienow is the author of House of Water (Alice James Books, 2016). His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Crazyhorse, New England Review, Poetry, and in many other magazines and anthologies. A 2013 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellow, he has also received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Foundation, Artist Trust, and 4Culture. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington with his wife and sons where he makes a living designing and building high-end, wooden watercraft for his business Good Story Paddle & Surf.

Laura Da’ studied at the University of Washington and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is the author of Instruments of the True Measure, which is forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press in 2018, and Tributaries (University of Arizona Press, 2015), which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.  She is the recipient of fellowships from Hugo House and the Jack Straw Writers Program. Da’ who is Eastern Shawnee, lives near Seattle, Washington.

Maya Jewell Zeller grew up in rural Pacific Northwest communities. She is the author of the interdisciplinary collaboration (with visual artist Carrie DeBacker) Alchemy For Cells & Other Beasts (Entre Rios Books, 2017), the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press, 2015), and the poetry collection Rust Fish (Lost Horse Press, 2011). Maya’s prose appears widely, in such places as Booth Journal, Bellingham Review, and the anthology This is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, 2017). Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation as well as a Residency in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Maya teaches for Central Washington University and edits poetry for Scablands Books. Find her on Twitter @MayaJZeller.

Painter and poet, Cynthia Neely, is the author of three prize-winning chapbooks, Broken Water, Passing Through Blue Earth and Hopewell Bay. Her full-length book, Flight Path, was a finalist in the Aldrich Press book contest. Her poetry appears in many journals including Pontoon (co-winner of the 2017 Paula Jones Gardiner Memorial Award), Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Creek Review and Raven Chronicles. Her essay work appears in The Writers’ Chronicle and Cutthroat Journal (runner up for the Barry Lopez prize in Creative Non-fiction.) Her paintings, like her poetry, have a strong grounding in the natural world. She holds a BA in art from Goddard College and an MFA in poetry from Pacific University.

Susan Blair is a published poet and writer originally from the East Coast who has lived in Washington State since 1978.  Her poetry chapbook, What Remains of a Life, was published in the spring of 2018.  She is the founder of the Shrub-Steppe Poetry Café and the Shrub-Steppe Poetry Podium in Wenatchee, and is now writing a monthly column called “Profiles in Poetry” for The Wenatchee World.  A former aerobics instructor, Nia instructor and federal employee, she now volunteers in elementary schools and local libraries presenting poems to children costumed as “Perri the Poetry Fairy.”  Susan graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont with a B.A. in German and Russian (double major).

Thom Caraway is a poet, editor, publisher, and printer. His books include A Visitor’s Guide to North Dakota, No Secrets to Sell, and most recently, What the Sky Lacks. He teaches writing, editing, and publishing at Whitworth University, where he is the editor of Rock & Sling. He’s also the founder and publisher of Sage Hill Press, and the organizational director of Millwood Print Works, a community-based nonprofit letterpress and screen print shop. He is prepared to speak passionately about the type you’re using, stucco-removal strategies, dropped ceilings, J.R.R. Tolkien, and ink.

Christopher Howell has published 11 collections of poems, including Love’s Last Number (Milkweed Editions, 2017), a finalist for the UNT Rilke Prize, Dreamless and Possible: Poems New & Selected (University of Washington Press, 2010) and Light’s Ladder (University of Washington Press, 2004), which won the Washington State Book Award in 2005. He teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program at Eastern Washington University, in Spokane, and in the low-residency MFA program at Eastern Oregon University. His poems, translations, and essays have been widely published in anthologies and journals, including Harper’s, Gettysburg Review, Denver Quarterly, and Antioch Review. He has been the recipient of three Pushcart Prizes, two National Endowment Fellowships, two fellowships from the Artist Trust, the Stanley W. Lindberg Award for Editorial Excellence, among many others.

Finn Menzies is a teacher, poet, gender-variant soothsayer, and servant. Teaching is both his spiritual practice and his activism. Finn received his M.F.A. in Poetry from Mills College in California and is the creator of FIN Zine, a zine dedicated to the emotional cartography of his gender transition. Finn’s debut collection, Brilliant Odyssey Don’t Yearn, was published in 2017 by Fog Machine. His poems can also be seen in Gigantic Sequins, Quiet Lightning, SUSAN /the journal, Weekly Gramma, SPORK, The Shallow Ends, Big Lucks, and various other journals. Annually, Finn facilitates UNdoing Ego: a workshop on meditation and generative writing.

Dan Peters is a life-long resident of Selah, Washington. He and his wife Amy are co-owners of Blue Begonia Press. Peters has taught composition and creative writing at Yakima Valley Community College for 19 years. His books include, In the Easement of Absent Ties, The Reservoir, and Down the Road the Children Go. Peters holds a master’s degree in literature from the University of Montana, where his thesis centered on Raymond Carver’s sense of place. Like Carver, Peters’ likes the look of these hills and these rivers.

Ebo Barton is a Black and Filipino, Transgender and Non-Binary, poet and educator. Currently residing in Seattle, Washington by way of Los Angeles, California.  As a representative of Seattle, they’ve been on 4 National Slam Teams and participated at 3 Individual World Poetry Slams.  Their most notable poetry slam accolade is placing 5th in the world in 2016.  Ebo curated and directed, How to Love THIS Queer Body of Color: An Unapology and wrote and directed the award-winning play, Rising Up.  They are a cast member of Anastacia Renee’s Queer. Mama. Crossroads.  You may have seen Ebo’s work in Adrienne: A Poetry Journal by Sibling Rivalry Press, SlamFind, Write About Now, Button Poetry and All Def Poetry.  They and their work have been featured in Seattle Weekly, Seattle Gay News, Seattle Review of Books, and Crosscut. Their work touches on political issues from a personal point of view and often is birthed from the struggles of living in the identities that they are. Ebo believes in the power of language and art as a tool for revolution.