2017 Readings

January 27, 2017 — Laurel Leigh (poet)

Laurel Leigh is currently squatting in Washington’s Whatcom County with a dog who eats a lot. To afford all the dog food, she hires out to edit projects for individuals and publishers, including Chronicle Books, BenBella Books, and Connected Dots Media. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Sun, Bloomsbury Review, and Borderlands. Several of her stories and essays have been published in Bellingham’s Clover, A Literary Rag, and her recent essay “Nursey” has received a Pushcart nomination. In 2013, she received a Mayor’s Award for the Arts. She cofounded the San Francisco-based Dogpatch Writers Collective and writes the Dear Writers blog at dearwriters.com/. More at www.LaurelLeighWriter.com.

February 24, 2017 — Danielle K. L. Gregoire (storyteller)

Danielle K. L. Gregoire is the producer of the Seattle Moth storySLAM, the founder of the Comedy Womb, and started a storytelling show called “A Necessary Sadness” to help comedians deal with sorrow. She is a storyteller, comedian, and a spoken-word poet and has taught hundreds of workshops on finding your voice for children through the elderly. She has a special interest in stories of the struggles and joys of mental health and queerness, and spends her days parenting two precocious youngsters.

March 31, 2017 — Von Thompson-Wynn and Wren Thompson-Wynn (poets)

Wren Anderson and Von Thompson live the poetic life in the beautiful Sky Valley. They have five children, who keep them exploring and examining the world in unique ways, and live with the Tribulation of Tabbies, their feline muses. Wren is an elementary school teacher and visual artist whose work can be found in private collections and galleries around Texas. Von works in corporate training. They also teach poetry both privately and through public classes and curate the monthly Duvall Poetry reading. They are both graduates of the Solstice MFA at Pine Manor College. You can find their work in three Solstice anthologies: Cantilever, Unmasking, and Calling Back the Sun. Von has also been featured in Uncommon Ground journal and on the Good Men Project.

April 15, 2017 — Write Out

Individual writing (poetry, fiction, whatever you want). Great fun writing as a group! Optionally share your work aloud.

April 28, 2017 — Allen Braden (poet)

Allen Braden is the author of A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood and Elegy in the Passive Voice. He has received fellowships from the NEA and Artist Trust. His poems recently appeared in The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins. A native of White Swan, Washington, he is the assistant poetry editor of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built + Natural Environments.

May 26, 2017 — Curtis Manley (children’s literature)

Curtis Manley is the author of the children’s picture books The Crane Girl (an adaptation, with haiku, of a Japanese folktale; 2017), Shawn Loves Sharks (2017) and The Summer Nick Taught His Cats to Read (2016). He has been a geologist, a software performance engineer, and a technical writer. His poetry, flash fiction, nonfiction, and haiku have been published in local and national journals. Curtis grew up in Pennsylvania, moved across the country several times, and now lives on the Eastside with his wife, daughter, and a cat with no interest in learning to read. His website is www.curtismanley.com.

June 30, 2017 — Jane Wong (poet)

Jane Wong’s poems can be found in anthologies and journals such as Best American Poetry 2015, Best New Poets 2012, Pleiades, Third Coast, and others. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, Squaw Valley, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Along with three chapbooks, she is the author of the book Overpour (Action Books, 2016). This fall, she will be an assistant professor of creative writing at Western Washington University.

July 15, 2017 — Poets in the Park at Redmond’s Anderson Park

Featuring Washington State Poet Laureate Tod Marshall, Redmond Poet Laureate Shin Yu Pai, and many other guests!

Were you at Poets in the Park this year? Take a look at the 2017 photo gallery, where Tod Marshall, Washington State poet laureate was our headline reader. Attendees enjoyed more than 50 other readers, plus workshops, vendors, art installations, music, drama, mini golf, hula hoops, chalk art, and a book fair, and a cake to celebrate RASP’s 20th anniversary. And all under perfect summer weather, and all free! Poets in the Park in 2017 celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Redmond Association of Spokenword. See the Poets in the Park 2017 schedule.

July 28, 2017 — David Jacobson (children’s books, translation) and Dan D Shafer (book design)

David Jacobson is a longtime journalist and writer with a specialty in Japan. He has a BA in East Asian Studies from Yale University and was awarded a Mombusho scholarship to study at Tokyo’s Hitotsubashi University. While a journalist in print and broadcast media, his news articles and TV scripts appeared in the Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, The Japan Times, and on NHK and CNN. Since joining Seattle-based Chin Music Press in 2008, David has edited or copyedited titles including Yokohama Yankee, The Sun Gods, and Why Ghosts Appear. Are You an Echo? is his first book.

Dan D Shafer practices graphic design through his studio Dandy Co. (www.dandy-co.com) and teaches in the design department at Cornish College of the Arts. His studio practice focuses on book design and paper engineering, installation and environmental design, event promotion design for cultural and nonprofit institutions, and branding and collateral for small businesses. His self-initiated projects and installations explore the nebulous territory that exists between traditional definitions of “art” and “design,” and investigates how people interact with objects in their everyday lives.

August 25, 2017 — Ken Osborne (poet)

Ken Osborne is an Englishman. He played in a band as a boy doing many concerts, including a tour of Czechoslovakia. A disruptive child, he walked out of school on his 16th birthday and went to sea. After a trip to New Zealand he drifted from job to job, lived on a monastic island for a while and eventually becoming a senior executive in a large retail company. He also ran the Cambridge Poetry Group for many years. He writes and plays music and produces the occasional oil painting. Many of his poems appear in his book Within Without (2013). Recordings of his poems are available at kenspoetry.com.

September 29, 2017 — John Shaw (musician, lyricist)

John Shaw has been singing Woody Guthrie and Irving Berlin songs, as well as his own and many others, for more than thirty years, sometimes professionally. He has written and performed songs and music for several plays, weddings, political demonstrations, dance concerts, campfires, and rock shows. His book, This Land That I Love, examines America’s best-known national anthems, official and unofficial, through the twin prisms of Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” and Berlin’s “God Bless America,” the former of which was originally drafted as a rebuttal to the latter. John lives in Seattle with his family.

October 27, 2017 — Matt Briggs (novelist)

Matt Briggs is the author of eight works of fiction including The Remains of River Names and Virility Rituals of North American Teenage Boys. His first novel, Shoot the Buffalo, was a finalist for the 2006 Washington State Book Award and won the 2006 American Book Award. The Italian edition of The Remains of River Names was released last year by ad est dell’ equator (Napoli), and a new collection of prose is forthcoming from Dr. Cicero Books. His stories have appeared in The Chicago Review, Word Riot, Bull, Opium Magazine, Zyzyyva, and elsewhere. He’s online at http://www.suburgian.com.

November 17, 2017 — Paul Barach (memoir, comedian)

Paul Barach, a writer, wanderer, and Seattle native, never learned to sit still. After graduating from Carleton College, he backpacked across Europe, taught English in South Korea, bicycled across the United States, walked the 750-mile Shikoku pilgrimage in Japan (and wrote Fighting Monks and Burning Mountains about it), and most recently completed hiking the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada. His two biggest accomplishments are earning his black belt in Kyokushin karate and falling into the La Brea tarpits only once.

December 15, 2017 — Holiday Party Celebration

We had games poets play, our favorite snacks, and filled VALA Gallery with laughter and cheer having a good time!

December 29, 2017 — Pamela Denchfield (poet)

Pamela Denchfield came of age in a section-8 apartment on the banks of Cedar River. In this communal high-rise, she ate steamed rice and fish paste made by her adopted mom. Pamela now whips up vegan meals up the mountain from Snoqualmie River in Duvall, just east of Redmond. She serves on the board of RASP and does publicity for Duvall Poetry. The Cedar visits her often in her dreams. Her website is www.pameladenchfield.com.