D.A. Navoti, Troy Osaki and Guests

This Spring The Seattle Public Library's Guest Curated Series celebrates Poetry in Public, a project that honors and fosters local voices.

Poet Planner Laura Da’ and the 4Culture team worked with Community Liaisons from Poetry in Public’s 2023-2024 Communities of Focus. Together they developed and implemented community workshops and customized outreach in their communities. Through a submission process open to all King County residents, poems inspired by the theme Places of Landing were shared with the public on transit.

This program highlights the work of D.A. Navoti and Troy Osaki and members of the community.

About D.A. Navoti, Indigenous Community Liaison

D.A. Navoti is a multidisciplinary storyteller, composer, and writer of the Gila River Indian Community. The author of essays and stories, his artistic work spans three “landscapes” — written, musical, and visual — a hybrid form that explores what it means to be Indigenous in the 21st century. Recipient of the 2022 Artist Trust Fellowship, D.A. also served as the 2022-23 Native-Artist-in-Residence at Seattle Rep. Learn more at www.danavoti.com

About Troy Osaki, Filipino Community Liaison
Troy Osaki is a Filipino Japanese poet, organizer, and attorney. A three-time grand slam poetry champion, he has received fellowships from Kundiman, Hugo House, the Jack Straw Cultural Center, and the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. His work has been featured in “Poetry,” “The Missouri Review,” “The Offing,” and other publications, and is anthologized in “The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration.”
In 2023-2024, Troy served as the Filipino Community Liaison for 4Culture’s Poetry in Public Program, promoting community-based poetry across King County transit. A member of the National Lawyers Guild, Troy earned his Juris Doctor from Seattle University School of Law, where he interned at Creative Justice, an arts-based alternative to incarceration for youth in King County. Troy lives in Seattle, WA, where his great-grandfather served as the Buddhist minister at the Seattle Buddhist Temple during World War II.

More about Poetry in Public:

Poetry in Public—formerly known as Poetry on Buses—celebrates local voices in one of our most vital shared spaces: transit. The most recent theme “Places of Landing” embraces the poetry of our daily lives. It honors the movements, places, and feelings that tell the stories of our days.

Every day, thousands of people use transit—to commute to work, visit family, go to school, and return home. It’s a unique public space, rich with stories. For a short while, all of us are moving in the same direction. Poetry in Public fills that space with poems written by the person across the aisle, that kid in the back, and the professional poet alike. Everyone can be a poet!

More on the theme “Places of Landing”

Many of our transportation hubs, roads, docks, and recreational spaces exist directly over Indigenous places of landing. As our community grows and changes, new paths will arise. The concept of landings extends from the land itself to each person’s sense of being, and we all hold memories of the places that shape our days. View writing and thinking prompts created to engage with place, water, and season and to connect literacy and land with a sense of balance, agency, and regard of place.

Poetry in Public is presented by 4Culture, King County Metro, and Sound Transit.

The Guest Curator series is made possible by support from The Seattle Public Library Foundation, The Gary and Connie Kunis Foundation, and media sponsor The Seattle Times.

Host or Publisher SPL