Sierra Nelson, Laura Da' 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 Sierra Nelson, Poet Planner Laura Da' and featured community members.

About Sierra Nelson, Youth Community Liaison

Sierra Nelson is a poet, multimedia performance and installation artist, and teacher, bringing her extensive collaboration experience and love of marine sciences to her artistic and teaching practices. Nelson’s books include "The Lachrymose Report" (PoetryNW Editions) and "I Take Back the Sponge Cake" (Rose Metal Press). For over 25 years Nelson has facilitated generative creative writing workshops with students as young as three years old to elders, across diverse settings including schools, hospitals, libraries, and parks.

About Laura Da', Poet Planner
A poet and a public school teacher, Laura Da’ studied creative writing at the University of Washington and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is the author of the collections "Instruments of the True Measure" (University of Arizona Press, 2018), winner of the Washington State Book Award, and "Tributaries" (University of Arizona Press, 2015), winner of the 2016 American Book Award and the chapbook "The Tecumseh Motel." Her work has appeared in the anthologies "New Poets of Native Nations"(Graywolf Press, 2018) and "Effigies II" (Salt Publishing, 2014). Da’ is the current Poet Laureate of Redmond and a recent writer in residence at Hugo House.

A member of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe, she received a Native American Arts and Cultures Fellowship. Da’ has also been a Made at Hugo House fellow and a Jack Straw fellow. She is a lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest and lives in Newcastle, Washington, with her husband and son.

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