From the Natural World w/ Nadine Maestas, M. Elliott, & Vitoria Ramos

Elliott Bay Book Co. and Gamut present OFFICE HOURS: A Reading Series

The first of four evenings of collaboration between University of Washington Bothell faculty and students

Nadine Maestas, M. Elliott, and Vitoria Ramos read from select work on the natural world. This is followed by a discussion and Q&A.

Nadine Antoinette Maestas is a poet’s poet and believes that the empire of the sentence is an extremely oppressive totalitarian regime. She prefers the company of poems so much that she would rather read a bad poem than a good novel, but when she is not doing poetry, Nadine loves mountain biking and trail running in dangerous and remote places in the Pacific Northwest. She holds an M.F.A. from University of Michigan’s Hellen Zell Writer’s Program where she was awarded the Faraar award for playwriting. Her hybrid poem play “Hellen on Wheels: A Play of Rhyme and Reason” was performed at California College of the Arts. She is the co-author with Karen Weiser of Beneath the Bright Discus (Potes & Poets Press, 2000), and is a co-editor for the poetry anthology Make It True: Poetry from Cascadia. You can find her poems published in Ofrenda Magazine, Snail Trail Press, Pageboy Magazine, Lyric &, The Germ, Poor Mojo’s Almana(k), Really Serious Literature Disappearing Chapbooks, and the bilingual anthology Make It True Meets Medusario. Her dissertation, Calling out the State: Postmodern American Anthropoetics landed her a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Her first solo book, Imperialism As Sweet As Insult, was published by Really Serious Literature Press in April 2021. She currently teaches at Cornish College of the Arts.

M. Elliott is currently an MFA Candidate in the Creative Writing and Poetics program at UW Bothell. Her thesis is an homage to Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing America. She often writes about trees and has a special relationship with a red leaf.

Vitoria Ramos is a queer neurodivergent poet and writer from the Pacific Northwest. Vitoria views the human body as simply being another body in nature and finds kinship in relating her experiences with the natural world. Part of her creative practice includes researching various topics and spending time by the sea. Vitoria has had work published by Silly Goose Press, HNDL Magazine, Clamor and The Hyperbolic Review. She is currently earning her MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from the University of Washington Bothell.

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