The 4th Cascadia Poetry Festival is set for November 3-6, 2016, at the Spring Street Center in Seattle, at the corner of 15th & Spring. Among the featured performers are Daphne Marlatt (Vancouver, BC), Brenda Hillman (Moraga, CA), Sam Hamill (Anacortes, WA), Peter Munro (Kenmore, WA via Sitka, AK), JM Miller (Vashon Island), Marilyn Stablein (Portland, OR) and Judith Roche (Seattle). 
The fest will be dedicated to the memory of Denise Levertov who lived in Seattle the last few years of her life and wrote eloquently about Mt. Rainier. A main stage reading and panel will honor Levertov and a Sunday morning ritual walk from Spring Street Center to Levertov’s grave in Lake View Cemetery will be part of the fest. The fest will feature the Living Room open reading each day, Thursday through Saturday from 3-5pm, Main Stage readings at 7:30pm, panels and late night readings, as well as other events now in the planing stage. Marilyn Stablein will facilitate an Introduction to Handmade Artist Books workshop Sunday morning.
CPF 2016 Author Bios
Jordan Abel is a Nisga’a writer from Vancouver. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD at Simon Fraser University where his research concentrates on the intersection between Digital Humanities and Indigenous Literary Studies. Abel’s creative work has recently been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry (Tightrope), The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation (Arbiter Ring), and The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (Hayword). Abel is the author of Injun, Un/inhabited, and The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award).
Erin Fristad is of the Northwest: she is the spawn of loggers, miners, and commercial fisherman ⎯she grew up running wild through the wooded foothills of the Cascades on her horse. Erin survived fifteen years as deckhand on commercial fishing and research vessels and eventually returned to graduate school to earn her MFA. She works as a writer, educator and facilitator. Her poems appear in numerous journals and anthologies including Rosebud, americas review, The Blue Collar Review, Hanging Loose, The Seattle Review, Floating Bridge Review, National Fisherman, Working the Woods, Working the Sea: An Anthology of Northwest Writing, Poets of the American West, and Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Occupy The Workspace. Erin was a subject in the documentary film FISHER POETS. Her first collection of poems, The Glass Jar, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2016. You can learn more on her website at erinfristad.com.
Brenda Hillman has published chapbooks with Penumbra Press, a+bend press, and EmPress; she is the author of nine full-length collections from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are Practical Water (2009), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), which received the International Griffin Poetry Prize for 2014. With Patricia Dienstfrey, she edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (Wesleyan, 2003), and has co-translated Poems from Above the Hill by Ashur Etwebi and Instances by Jeongrye Choi. Hillman teaches at St. Mary’s College where she is the Olivia C. Filippi Professor of Poetry; she is an activist for social and environmental justice. http://brendahillman.net/
Daphne Marlatt, known as a poet (Steveston, Liquidities), has also published works of fiction, poetics and oral history. In 2006 she was made a member of the Order of Canada, and in 2009 her long poem The Given was awarded the Dorothy Livesay Prize for Poetry. In 2012 she received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. Her work includes The Gull, the first contemporary Canadian Noh play, produced by Pangaea Arts in 2006 in the tradition of classical Japanese Noh theatre. Rivering, her selected poetry edited by Susan Knutson, was published by Wilfred Laurier University Press (2014). Reading Sveva, a series of poems responding to the life and work of the Italian-Canadian painter Sveva Caetani, arrives from Talonbooks this fall.
JM Miller is a trans-identified poet, essayist, instructor and healer living on someone else’s amazing farm on Vashon Island, WA. Their debut collection, Wilderness Lessons, is out from FutureCycle Press and they have one chapbook, Primitive Elegy (alicebluebooks). They won the Grand Prize for the Eco Arts Awards in 2014 & was a finalist for terrain.org’s 2013 poetry contest. JM is a professor of creative writing at the University of Washington in Tacoma & teaches at Richard Hugo House. Their work explores eco-justice poetry from a queer perspective, hybrid forms, extinction and the environmental imagination.
Judith Roche is the author of four poetry collections, most recently, All Fire All Water, Black Heron Press, 2015. Her book Wisdom of the Body, was an American Book Award winner, and Judith has published widely in various journals and magazines, & has had poems installed on several Seattle area public art projects. As Literary Arts Director for One Reel she produced the Bumbershoot Bookfair and Literary Program for over twenty years. She was Distinguished Northwest Writer-in-Residence at Seattle University in 2007 and has also taught at the Richard Hugo House and at Cornish College of the Arts.
MICHAEL “SKEETER” PILARSKI is a life-long student of plants and earth repair. Michael founded Friends of the Trees Society in 1978. He has been involved in the bioregional movement since 1984. Since 1988 he has taught 36 permaculture design courses in the US and abroad. His specialties include earth repair, agriculture, seed collecting, nursery sales, tree planting, fruit picking, permaculture, agroforestry, forestry, ethnobotany, medicinal herb growing, hoeing and wildcrafting. Michael has been professionally wildcrafting medicinal plants for the past 20 years and has a vast amount of knowledge about the traditional and modern uses of Cascadia’s native plants (as well as the non-native weeds). He is a prolific gathering organizer and likes group singing. Permaculture – Medicinal Herbs & Seeds – Farming | Friends of the Trees Society | Michael Pilarski
Marilyn Stablein, poet and artist, exhibits her artist books in museums, libraries, and galleries in the US and abroad. Her work is included in Lark’s 1000 Artist Books, Lark’s 500 Artists Books and in magazines (Raven Chronicles, Rattle Magazine, Gargoyle, & Kyoto Review.) A monograph Bind, Alter, Fold: Artist Books recently published by Book Arts Editions, was featured in the Vancouver Canada Sun, Guild of Bookworkers news and Bound and Lettered Magazine. Her books include Sleeping in Caves: A Himalayan Memoir; a collection of environmental essays set in the Northwest, Climate of Extremes: Landscape and Imagination and Splitting Hard Ground which won the New Mexico Book Award and the National Federation of Press Women Book Award. Visit: marilynstablein.com