University Book Store Presents: The Poetry of Cascadia

"Have you ever been so filled up with the wonder of a place that it wants to spill out as a song? Well, here is the songbook. I imagine walking through a forest and pausing to read these illuminating pages aloud to a listening cedar or a dipper. There are field guides that help us to see, and to name, and to know; Cascadia Field Guide does all of that and more. This is a guide to relationship, a gift in reciprocity for the gifts of the land." – Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass

This event is free to attend, though registration is required through the link provided. We encourage all attendees to wear masks during the event and maintain social distancing. If you have questions about this event, please contact us at [email protected]. Thank you for supporting your local independent bookstore!

Cascadia stretches from Southeast Alaska to Northern California and from the Pacific Ocean to the Continental Divide. Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry blends art and science to celebrate this diverse yet interconnected region through natural and cultural histories, poetry, and illustrations. Organized into 13 bioregions, the guide includes entries for everything from cryptobiotic soil and the western thatching ant to the giant Pacific octopus and Sitka spruce, as well as the likes of common raven, hoary marmot, Idaho giant salamander, snowberry, and 120 more!
Both well-established and new writers are included, representing a diverse spectrum of voices, with poems that range from comic to serious, colloquial to scientific, urban to off-the-grid, narrative to postmodern. Likewise, the artists span styles and mediums, using classic natural history drawing, form line design, graffiti, sketch, and more. All writers and artists have deep ties to the region.

received a 2024 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. His other collections include Not for Luck, selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, Through the Second Skin, finalist for the Washington State Book Award, and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy. He teaches in Western Colorado University's low-residency MFA program, edits poetry for Terrain.org, and can often be found in the woods along the eastern slopes of the Cascade Range near Leavenworth, Washington.

is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Creative Writing at Rutgers University and the author of seven books of poetry, including To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press, 2021) and the forthcoming Data Mind (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press, 2024). Her poems have appeared on the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day newsletter, The Slowdown and Having a Coke with You podcasts and in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She first published with Hanging Loose Press as a teenager and became a co-editor in 2022.

teaches humanities and creative writing at the Pratt Institute. His first book of poems, The Case Against Happiness, was published by Alice James Books in 2006. He has also published three chapbooks, from Greying Ghost and one from Forklift, Ink and Subpress, as well as dozens of poems in venues such as Fence, Forklift, Ohio, Gulf Coast, Ping Pong and others.

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