About

About

Allisa Cherry is the author of An Exodus of Sparks (Michigan State University Press) and the winner of the 2024 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. She has been a finalist for Persea Books’ Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and The Sewanee Review’s poetry contest. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals, including Chicago Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, Penn Review, EcoTheo, and Salt Hill.

About

Dawn Pichón Barron is currently the academic director/faculty of the undergraduate interdisciplinary Native Pathways Program at the Evergreen State College. She writes across borders and genres, while dreaming of ripe lemon sunrays at the southern tip of the Salish Sea–on the lands of the Medicine Creek treaty tribes and bands—with her wingman and Chihuahuas. Her chapbook, ESCAPE GIRL BLUES, was published by Finishing Line Press, 2018. Other work can be found at A Socially Just Classroom: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Teaching Writing Across the Humanities (2022), Echoes: An Anthology of Native Women Writers (2022), Moss, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Washington 129 Poetry Anthology (2017), Of A Monstrous Child: A Creative Writing Anthology (2011), Yellow Medicine Review and elsewhere. Lately, she has been obsessed with adornments and fascinated by (reimagining of) motifs and mythical creatures used to demonstrate the continuity of shared time and space through culture.

About

E. A. Greenwell is a writer, conservationist, and community organizer. A former PEN/Northwest Wilderness Writing Resident, his work has appeared in Boston Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Terrain.org among other periodicals. 

About

Haines Whitacre is a poet, book artist, and near-shore sailor who lives in unceded Duwamish land a short walk from the Duwamish River. 

About

Jacqueline Allen Trimble is the Poet Laureate of Alabama, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow (Poetry), a Cave Canem Fellow, and a two-time Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow (2017, 2023). Published by NewSouth Books, American Happiness, her debut poetry collection, won the 2016 Balcones Poetry Prize. How to Survive the Apocalypse, her second poetry collection, was published by NewSouth Books, an imprint of UGA Press, in August 2022 and was listed as one of the top ten best poetry books of 2022 by New York Public Library.  She is Professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University.     

About

Janeen Armstrong has a BA from University of Washington. She studied with Lidia Yuknavitch and Gary Copeland Lilley, among others. She is the Reader Services Manager at Copper Canyon Press.

About

Jennifer Chang’s most recent book, An Authentic Life,  was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Her other honors include the William Carlos Williams Award, the Virginia Literary Award in Poetry, the Levinson Prize from Poetry, and fellowships from the Elizabeth Murray Artists Residency, MacDowell, and Yaddo. She is the poetry editor of New England Review and teaches at the University of Texas in Austin.  

About

Jenny George is the author of After Image (Copper Canyon Press, 2024; PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry finalist) and The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). She is also a winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize and a recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Lannan Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, Poetry, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Narrative, Granta, Iowa Review, Orion, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poem-A-Day at poets.org, and elsewhere. Jenny lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy. 

About

José Enrique Medina earned his BA in English from Cornell University. His poetry collection Haunt Me won the 2025 Rattle Chapbook Prize. His second book Man Without a Skirt, was selected by Ellen Bass as the runner-up in the 2025 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared in USA Today Hispanic Living Magazine, Redivider, Best Microfiction 2019, and many other publications. He is a VONA fellow and the founder of the Chickens & Poetry Residency for Writers. @MedinaWrites and MedinaWrites.com 

About

Kathryn Hunt is a poet and nonfiction writer and makes her home on the coast of the Salish Sea. She is author of two poetry collections, Long Way Through Ruin and Seed Wheel and two chapbooks, The Country I Come From and She Who Walks the Earth. Her poems have appeared in the Orion, Radar, Poetry Northwest, Missouri Review, and Narrative, among others, and she is the recipient of residencies and awards from Ucross, Hedgebrook, Artists Trust, and Joya AIR (Spain). She is the artistic curator of Centrum’s Poetry on the Salish Sea, a series that hosts poets from around the Pacific NW and beyond to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. She’s recently completed a memoir, Nocturne, a mother-daughter tale.

About

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Wildness Before Something Sublime (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) and Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, as well as four chapbooks. Her honors include multiple Pushcart Prizes, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing and Writing. Her poems appear in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, POETRY, and elsewhere. She teaches in Pacific University’s M.F.A. program and lives in Cincinnati. 

About

Lisbeth White is an enchantivist writer based in the Pacific Northwest. She is the author of American Sycamore; the elemental memoir, A Most Natural Thing; and co-editor of Poetry as Spellcasting.

About

Luther “Lue” Hughes is the author of A Shiver in the Leaves (BOA Editions, 2022), listed as best books of 2022 in The New Yorker, and the chapbook, Touched (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018), recommended by the American Library Association. They are the founder of Shade Literary Arts, an online platform for queer writers of color, cohosts The Poet Salon Podcast with Gabrielle Bates and Dujie Tahat, and serves as the Poetry Editor for CHUM News. Their honors include the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Rosenberg Fellowship, the 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize, Cascade PBS’s Black Arts Legacies honoree, and named Most Influential by Seattle Magazine. Their writing has been published in The Paris Review, Orion, American Poetry Review, Seattle Met, and others. They’ve been featured in The Seattle Times, Forbes, Essence, KUOW Public Radio, and more. Lue lives in Seattle, where they were born and raised.

About

Melissa Kwasny is the author of seven collections of poems, including The Cloud Path, Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today, Pictograph, and The Nine Senses. A portion of Pictograph received the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. Kwasny is also the author of Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision, and has edited multiple anthologies, including Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800–1950 and, with M.L. Smoker, I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Boston Review, and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral, among many other journals. She lives in Montana and is a former Montana Poet Laureate, a position she shared with M.L. Smoker. 

About

Melissa O’Neil is a mom and writer who believes the real magic happens when we connect with each other.  Melissa loves spending time with her kids, being outdoors, dance parties, and color-sorting bookshelves.  She has a BA in English and Creative Writing and an MS in Library and Information Sciences and just finished writing her first novel.

About

Michael Wiegers has been editing books for Copper Canyon Press since 1993, and currently serves as the Press’s Executive Editor/Editor in Chief. He has edited two anthologies covering the history of Copper Canyon Press poetry: A House Called Tomorrow: 50 Years of Poetry and Come Shining: More Poems and Stories from Fifty Years of Copper Canyon Press. He is also the poetry editor of Narrative magazine and edited What About This: The Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and The Essential W.S. Merwin. He is currently at work on a book about the poet W.S. Merwin and serves as a trustee for the Merwin Conservancy. 

About

Nanya Jhingran writes, teaches, and edits poetry, longform  criticism, and nonfiction on Coast Salish lands in Seattle, WA. She is the author of the chapbook Into Our Personal Weather. 

About

Rena Priest is a citizen of the Lhaq’temish [Lummi] Nation. In a historic appointment, Priest was named Washington State’s sixth Poet Laureate (2021-2023), becoming the first Indigenous person to hold the position. In this role, she championed poetry that celebrated the ecological gifts of her ancestral homelands, the bioregion. She is an Academy of American Poets Fellow, a Maxine Cushing Gray Distinguished Writer, and a winner of a Washington State Book Award for poetry. Her new essay collection, Positively Uncivilized, was published as the winner of the 2025 Keepers of the Fire Award from Raven Chronicles Press. She is also honored to be a Seattle City of Literature grantee, selected to participate in an international literary exchange co-sponsored by the Melbourne City of Literature and the UNESCO City of Literature Network. 

About

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. His fourth book of poems, The Galleons, was longlisted for the National Book Award. His collections include The Darker Fall, Want (a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and winner of the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize), and Chord, all from Sarabande Books. Rick’s work has appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University. He lives in Tacoma and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop. His newest book, Moving the Bones (Milkweed), will be published in 2024. 

About

Sati Mookherjee is the author of Eye (2022), Ways of Being (2023) and the forthcoming collection Deś. She is Vice President of the Board of CASCADIA International Women’s Film Festival.

About

Tamarah Rockwood: Harvard graduate, founder of Bainbridge Island Press, and PhD candidate at University of Birmingham, UK. Organizes western Washington poetry communities. Lives on Bainbridge Island with her family.

About

Ted McMahon, a retired pediatrician, now devotes his remaining time to music, poetry, and political activism. He lives in Seattle with his wife, artist and musician Rosanne Olson. 

About

Thena Westfall is a poet. She lives and works in Port Angeles WA.