2024 SCHEDULE
Sunday, JUNE 30th 3:00-4:30
Sunday, JULY 28th 3:00-4:30
Sunday, AUGUST 25th 3:00-4:30
Sunday, SEPTEMBER 29th 3:00-4:30
This summer Wilderbee is thrilled to host Poetry On The Salish Sea ~ monthly poetry readings in our meadery garden June-September by poets from around the Olympic Peninsula and beyond. Poetry On The Salish Sea celebrates the natural abundance and strong literary arts community in our region. See full schedule and poet bios below.
Seating is limited so feel free to bring your own lawn chair. This FREE poetry series is hosted by Wilderbee Farm, sponsored by The Production Alliance, Imprint Bookstore, Centrum, and curated by writer and poet Kathryn Hunt.
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JUNE 30
Season Unleashed is a new collection of poems from Empty Bowl Press by American Book Award-winning novelist Anna Odessa Linzer. A long-distance, cold-water swimmer, Anna glides through the seasons of her home waters, inviting us to join her in her powerful, deep immersion.
JUNE 30
Tanya Holtland is the author of Requisite (Platypus Press, 2020), a finalist for the Broken River Prize and nominated for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A graduate of San Francisco State University’s Creative Writing MA program, her essays and other work appear in Poetry Northwest, The Offing, EcoTheo Review, and elsewhere.
JUNE 30
Cedar Sigo was raised on the Suquamish Reservation in the Pacific Northwest and studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the author of eight books and pamphlets of poetry, including Language Arts (Wave Books, 2014), Stranger in Town (City Lights, 2010), Expensive Magic (House Press, 2008), two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003 and 2005) and most recently the Bagley Wright Lecture Series book Guard the Mysteries (Wave Books, 2021). He has taught workshops at St. Mary’s College.
JULY 28
Critic David Woo says that Rae Armantrout’s recent book Finalists (Wesleyan 2022) “emanates the radiant astonishment of living thought.” Her 2018 book, Wobble, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her book Versed won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. Armantrout is the current judge of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. A new book, Go Figure, will appear from Wesleyan in September 2024.
JULY 28
Born in California in 1945, Kay Ryan is acknowledged as one of the most original voices in the contemporary literary landscape. She is the author of several books of poetry, including Flamingo Watching (2006), The Niagara River (2005), and Say Uncle (2000). Her book The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Ryan’s tightly compressed, rhythmically dense poetry is often compared to that of Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore. She was appointed as U.S. Poet Laureate in 2008 and held the position for two terms, using the appointment to champion community colleges like the one in Marin County, California where she and her partner Carol Adair taught for over thirty years.
JULY 28
Heather McHugh is a beloved American poet and the author of Dangers, To the Quick, Muddy Matterhorn, and Upgraded to Serious, among other books. McHugh is the recipient of prestigious awards from both the MacArthur Foundation (“Genius Award”) and Griffin Poetry Prize. She began writing poetry at age five and became an expert eavesdropper by the age of twelve, an indispensable gift for a writer. At the age of 17, she entered Harvard University. She taught for 40 years at American colleges and universities, including the University of Washington in Seattle. McHugh wrote: If you’re a poet smitten with English, you love it for its drive and not its drone. The rhythms of a language must be irresistible—while the humdrums of it have to be resisted.
AUGUST 25
Ruby Hansen Murray is a columnist for the Osage News and lives along the Columbia River. An Indigenous Native Poets, Hedgebrook and MacDowell fellow, she’s winner of the Iowa Review and Montana Prizes for creative nonfiction. Find her work in Ecotone, Pleiades, The Hopkins Review, Peauxdunque Review, River Mouth Review, and Moss. She’s a citizen of the Osage and Cherokee Nations of Northeastern Oklahoma with West Indian roots. A student of Wah Zha Zhe ie, Osage language, her poems including or written in Osage were published by Broadsided Press, Yellow Medicine Review, and South Florida Poetry Journal.
AUGUST 25
Erin Malone’s new book Site of Disappearance (Ornithopter Press 2023) was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She has received grants and fellowships from Artist Trust, 4Culture, Jack Straw, and the Colorado Council of the Arts. Formerly the editor of Poetry Northwest (2016-2020), she works as a bookseller on Bainbridge Island.
AUGUST 25
Luther Hughes is the author of A Shiver in the Leaves (BOA Editions, 2022), listed as best books of 2022 in The New Yorker. They have been featured in The Seattle Times, Essence, Forbes, The Paris Review, and more. They live in Seattle.
![Rick Barot [photo by Rachel McCauley] 2.jpg](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/85d9f5_bafc0f2885ee421db0e300f1a01d1ae1~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_106,h_106,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/Rick%20Barot%20%5Bphoto%20by%20Rachel%20McCauley%5D%202.jpg)
SEPTEMBER 29
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.
SEPTEMBER 29
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.
SEPTEMBER 29
Jacqueline Allen Trimble lives in Montgomery, Alabama and is author of American Happiness, winner of the Balcones Poetry Prize, and How to Survive the Apocalypse. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow in poetry, a Cave Canem graduate fellow, and an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Louisville Review, The Offing, The Rumpus, Salvation South, and Poet Lore, and has been widely anthologized. Her nonfiction appears most recently in Old Enough, a collection of essays on aging and creativity by women artists. Trimble earned the B.A. from Huntingdon College and the M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Alabama. She is professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University.