PoetsWest Directory: Who's Who in Northwest Poetry

The PoetsWest Directory includes biographical profiles of well known Northwest poets and those not well enough known. While many of the poets have achieved recognition, PoetsWest also acknowledges the strengths and special gifts of other poets. Like so many of us living in the Pacific Northwest, many poets, especially those of an earlier generation, migrated here from other regions. Poets living and writing in the Northwest are often influenced by the expansive landscape, the water, and the weather (rain, usually). They recognize humanity's ambivalent relationship with the region and are witnesses to the effects of environmental destruction and unchecked urbanization. Their poetry often reveals a spiritual connection to the Native American and Asian cultures. The associations with the environment and other cultures, however, are more contemplative or subconscious, so there is not, as one might expect, a "regional" style of poetry. Each poet, including the Native American and Asian American, has his or her own style and distinctive voice. Links to individual web sites are highlighted. The list also includes those who have died. PoetsWest owes a debt of gratitude to Cory Hutzell, Western Washington University class of 2008, for his invaluable editorial assistance in providing updates of biographical profiles of the poets and writers in these pages. The listing will expand as we compile the information.

Click on letter corresponding to last name: A B C D | E F G H I J K L | M N O P Q | R S T U V W X Y Z

Carrington MacDuffie
A multi-media artist, Carrington writes and performs poetry and music, collaborates in both still photography and film. She has narrated over 100 audiobooks and received numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and Audie Award nominations. She was poetry editor for the journal, Square Lake. A native New Yorker, Carrington holds a B.A. in English from Boston University, where she was awarded the Undergraduate Poetry Prize, and did graduate work in poetry. She worked for a number of years as a fiction editor in New York City and as a cabaret singer/songwriter. For many years she had her own multimedia musical act in Los Angeles. She currently lives in Seattle but divides her time between Seattle, New York, and L.A. Carrington's poetry has been published in The Amicus Journal, Crab Creek Review, Ship of Fools, KotaPress Poetry Journal, Poetry Bone, ONTHEBUS, Dream International Quarterly, and in the chapbook anthology Whispering into the Wind. Her book, On the Dreaming Earth, was published in 2003 by Subaqueous Press. Her work focuses on "the power of the imagination, the confluence of physics and metaphysics, and the integration of the feminine into the collective creativity." Her audiobook/record album Many Things Invisible, spoken word with sound and music, composed and produced by Carrington MacDuffie & Bryan Nall (aka Near the Border) was released by Blackstone Audio in 2008.

Seán MacFalls
An Irish poet, born in Boston, Massachusetts. He moved to Shankill, Ireland in 1993 and studied Irish Literature and folklore in Dublin. His poetry first appeared in print while abroad and was eventually published at Poetry Ireland, and later in The London Magazine. He returned to the States in 1995 where he read for his Bachelor of Arts in English Literature at Dominican College of San Rafael, CA. He now makes his home in Port Angeles, WA.
He was twice nominated for fellowships to both Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony by the eminent critic Harold Bloom and poet Galway Kinnell. In 2002 he was invited to read for the Masters class of English at Simon Fraser University and was then offered a place in their Ph.D. poetics program on full scholarship.
Belonging to no group or movement and operating outside of literary fashions, his brand of symbolist poetry can, at first reading, appear difficult. His deft use of allusion, startling diction and subtle punning display submerged metaphor in his work. The overall effect being a fresh implementation of Imagism.
He has published two books of poetry and several chapbooks. His first collection of poems, 20 Poems (2001, ISBN 1929812051), received extraordinary praise, first from Oxford University don, John Carey, who compared the poet to W. B. Yeats, and later from Harold Bloom. Several of the poems were Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in major U.K. magazines such as The London Magazine and Stand Magazine. A second book, The Blue Falcon, was published in 2005.

Michael Magee
This lyric poet, playwright, free lance writer, and reviewer of art, film and drama is "grounded in earth and music by his Taurean nature." His plays, A Night In Reading Gaol With Oscar Wilde and Shank's Mare, have been produced in England and America. His poetry collections include A Trip To Jerusalem and Ireland's Eye. His poems also appear in PoetsWest and Poets Table Anthology. He won the Wellberry Poetry Prize and the 1998 Seattle Eisteddfod Poetry competition. He lived in England for two years, and worked with Billy Smart's Circus in London. Vaudeville is part of his family heritage. He is a board member of PoetsWest.

Deborah White Fox Marchant
Born in Athens, Georgia and raised in Seattle, this visionary poet at the age of fifty began a new chapter in her life with writing poetry and becoming peacefully involved in politics for the first time. Currently a graduate student at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, this part Native American poet is participating in the Masters in Public Administration - Tribal Concentration Degree- Class of 2010. Inspired by the service of the Zen teachings of Huang Po and the energy of compassion, she reads regularly to appreciative audiences at Seattle area poetry readings. She is working on her first book of poems.

John W. Marshall
This poet, essayist, and working owner of Open Books: A Poem Emporium, has B.A. in English from the University of Washington and M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Iowa. He was co-editor of Fine Madness magazine from 1984 to 1998. His poetry has been published in Poetry, Beloit Poetry Review, Seattle Review, Crab Creek Review, and other magazines. His essays and book reviews have been published in Switched-On Gutenberg, Seattle Weekly, and Literary Center Quarterly. He has given readings at the It's About Time Reading Series, Bumbershoot, Seattle Art Museum, Frye Art Museum, Bellevue Art Museum, Soil Art Gallery, Castalia Reading Series at the U of Washington, and other local venues. He is on the board of Wordscape and is a member of the advisory board for Floating Bridge Press. He is 2001 co-recipient of the Faith Beamer Cooke Award from the Washington Poets Association. His chapbook, Blue Mouth, was published in 2001 by Paul Hunter's Wood Works.

Tod Marshall
A native of Buffalo, NY, he now lives in Spokane and teaches at Gonzaga University. He holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University and a Ph.D from the University of Kansas. He is widely published and his poetry collection, Dare Say, won the University of Georgia's Contemporary Poetry Series. He was 2003 Wilson Visiting Poet at Albion College in Michigan.

Carlos Martinez (1950- )
A native New Yorker, Carlos Martinez is a graduate of the Antioch University LA MFA Program and currently lives in Bellingham. He has taught at Western Washington University since 2002. He has published in various magazines and anthologies including Crab Creek Review, Cranky, Poet Lore, Pittsburgh Quarterly and various issues of Pontoon and Jeopardy. He frequently reads at various western Washington venues. He participated in the 2004 and 2006 Skagit River Poetry Festivals. In 2005, he was a Jack Straw Productions Writing Fellow. His fourth chapbook, The Raw Silk of the Dark, is forthcoming the winter of 2009.

Doug Marx
Is a poet, children's author, and essayist. As a journalist, he has written porfiles and interviews of literary figures including Carolyn Forché, Barry Lopez and Czeslaw Milosz. His collection of poetry, Sufficiency, was an Oregon Book Award finalist. He also is a founding member of Northwest Writers Inc. and a board member of Oregon Literary Arts.

David Mason
This award-winning poet and writer grew up in Bellingham, Washington and has lived in many parts of the U.S. as well as abroad. His books of poetry include The Buried House (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Prize), The Country I Remember (Story Line Press, 1996 and winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award) and Arrivals (Story Line Press, 2004). His verse novel, Ludlow (Red Hen Press, 2007), uses fact and fiction to recreate the story of immigrants working in the Colorado coal mines who were massacred by the Colorado National Guard in 1914.

The author of a collection of essays, The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry (Story Line Press, 2000), Mason has also co-edited several textbooks and anthologies, including Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, Twentieth Century American Poetry, and Twentieth Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry. His poetry, prose and translations have appeared in such periodicals as Harper's, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, Agenda, Modern Poetry in Translation, The New Criterion, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, The Irish Times, and The Southern Review. A former Fulbright Fellow to Greece, he lives in the mountains outside Colorado Springs with his wife, Anne Lennox, and teaches at his alma mater, Colorado College.

Ed Mast
Poet and playwright and author of poetry volumes Suzy and Her Husbands, and The Love Songs of Mister Atom, as well as plays Sahmatah, No Tongue and The Million Bells of Ocean. Is a human rights activist who has traveled many times to Occupied Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement. Articles include "Sahmatah: Awakening History" and "Stepping Off the Sidewalk" in the recently published anthology Live from Palestine. S2, his play in the vein of Clockwork Orange, was produced by the Annex Theatre in the spring of 2008.

Jack McCarthy
Jack McCarthy is a retired Boston-area working guy. He's been writing poetry since the mid-60's. Orphaned as a teenager, Jack went through Exeter and Dartmouth on scholarships and graduated with honors (though not without incident). He'd been averaging about a poem a year until 1992-93, when two things happened. First, his new wife, Carol, blackmailed him into attending a workshop with Galway Kinnell; then he brought his daughter Annie, for her birthday, to the open mike at the Cantab Lounge in Central Square, Cambridge, hoping she'd get excited about poetry. Jack was the one who got hooked.

Since then he's brought out Grace Notes, two chapbooks (Actual Grace Notes and Too Old to Make Excuses (But Still Young Enough to Make Love)), a 60-minute cassette tape (Poems for Hannah), and a CD (Breaking Down Outside a Gas Station). A major book, Say Goodnight, Grace Notes, was released in 2003 by EM Press to rave reviews. His work has appeared in a number of anthologies, including The Spoken Word Revolution.

He was a member of the 1996 Boston National Slam Team, and is an engaging minor character in the feature film, Slamnation, which documents those proceedings; he was a member of the Worcester team at the 2000 National Poetry Slam, where he finished as the 10th ranked individual, and at the 2002 Nationals he was the first poet to represent New Hampshire. The Boston Phoenix has named him "Best Standup Poet," the Boston Poetry Awards "Best Love Poet," and the Cambridge Poetry Awards "Best Spoken Word" and "Best Humorous Poet ." The Boston Globe says, "In the poetry world, he's a rock star."

Among his influences he numbers Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, and Garrison Keillor. He doesn't think of himself as a "performance poet," but as a "standup poetry guy." "Standup Poetry" was, in fact, the name of his Billerica cable TV show, on which he traded poems with many of the best slam poets, including Taylor Mali and Patricia Smith, but also national figures like Thomas Lux, Donald Hall and Stephen Dobyns.

Poet Stephen Dobyns has written, "Jack McCarthy is one of the wonders of contemporary poetry. He writes-and often performs-dazzling narratives full of wit and humor, sadness and hard thinking. He should be cloned."

Of Say Goodnight, Grace Notes, ALA Booklist says, "McCarthy brings his compelling experiences to his poetry with nimble humor, hard-won wisdom, and a raconteur's knack for telling diabolically barbed stories.concrete, candid, personal, and utterly captivating.caustic, sexy and smart."

Thomas Lux has written, "The only ambition he seems to have is to tell the truth as best he can in poems." That is a very worthy ambition, but it's not his only one. He also hopes to be remembered as an integral member of the movement to restore poetry to its rightful place in everyday American life. So that when Americans think of poetry, they don't think of school and homework, but of laughter and tears; a shortcut to the heart.

Recently relocated to the state of Washington, Jack's website is standupoet.net, and he can be reached at standupoet@yahoo.com.

Caron McCloud
Spent most of her life in the San Francisco Bay area where she designed and manufactured apparel and had two art galleries. She now lives in Port Townsend, Washington where she writes and performs poetry. Her primary consideration is that her work be accessible (user-friendly) in exploring and celebrating the physical world as the ultimate goal and expression of Spirit. Her chapbooks, February Soul, Strip Search, Hem of the Garment, Love and Anguished Cries, Spells from the Midnight Watch, Gull, My Son the Hero, The Bells of Shannon, Pink Clouds & Peonies, The Wedding Song, Seed for Cantos in Red, The Lillian Line, Investigation into the Celebration, and The Partner are available from Ironing Board Press. She can be contacted via e-mail: soncloud@olypen.com.

Colleen McElroy
A native of St. Louis, Colleen McElroy is a noted poet and writer of short fiction, memoirs, and nonfiction. She is a world traveler and it shows in the versatility of her writing. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, and is currently professor of English and creative writing at the University of Washington.

Her several awards include:
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (twice)
Fulbright Fellowship (twice)
DuPont Visiting Scholar Fellowship
Rockefeller Fellowship

Her publications include:
Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar, Univ. of Washington Press, 1999
Traveling Music (poems), Story Line Press, 1998, (Bronze Finalist for Foreword Magazine Book of the Year, 1998)
A Long Way from St. Louie (travel memoir), Coffee House Press, 1997
Driving Under the Cardboard Pines (short fiction), Creative Arts Books Co., 1990
What Madness Brought He Here: New and Selected Poems 1968-1988, Wesleyan University Press, 1990
Jesus and Fat Tuesday (short fiction), Creative Arts Books Co., 1987
Bone Flames (poems), Wesleyan University Press, 1987
Queen of the Ebony Isles (poems), Wesleyan University Press, 1984, (Winner of American Book Award, 1985)
Looking for a Country under Its Original Name (poems), Blue Begonia Press, 1984
Winters Without Snow (nonfiction), I. Reed Books, 1979.

David McFadden (1940- )

Michael David McGriff
Attended the University of Oregon where he received both the 2002 Kidd Prize judged by Garrett Hongo and 2003 Kidd Prize judged by Mark Doty. He also received the 2003 C Hamilton Bailey Poetry fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts. His poems have appeared in journals such as American Literary Review, Allegheny Review, Blue Collar Review, canary river review, Oregon Quarterly, and Red Rock Review. In the fall of 2003 he will begin a James A. Michener Fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin.

Heather McHugh (1948- )
Was born in San Diego, CA, raised in Virginia, and educated at Harvard (B.A. cum laude 1970) and University of Denver. The author of books of poetry, translation, and essays, McHugh has taught 2/3 time as Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington since 1984. She is a core faculty member in the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC, and frequently visits MFA programs at other colleges and universities. Her new and selected poems Hinge & Sign was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1998. Her 1999 collection, The Father of the Predicaments, won the 2000 Wa. State Governor's Award and was a finalist for the 2000 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. In 1999 she was appointed a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2000 a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Five years ago, she received an award of $105,000 from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest fund, and in the spring of 2000 she won the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. For their translation of Paul Celan's Glottal Stop: 101 Poems (published, November 2000), Heather McHugh and Nikolai Popov received the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the Washington State Book Award in 2001. Her latest collection of poetry, Eyeshot, from Wesleyan University Press (2003) focuses on aging.

Don McKay (1942- )

Robert McNamara (1950- )
Born in New York City, educated at Amherst College, Colorado State University and the University of Washington, Robert McNamara is the author of two books of poetry, Second Messengers (Wesleyan, 1990) and The Body & the Day (David Robert Books, 2007). He has also translated with the author a book-length collection of the poems of the contemporary Bengali poet, Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, The Cat Under the Stairs, published by Eastern Washington University Press in 2008.

On the faculty of the English Department at the University of Washington, Bob teaches in Interdisciplinary Writing Program and serves as University Director of the Puget Sound Writing Project. He has also taught for the Experimental College at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the Rocky Mountain Writers Guild, and in the Certificate Program in Creative Writing offered by UW Extension.

He has received a number of awards and fellowships for his writing and translating, among them a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA and a Fulbright Fellowship for language study and translation in Calcutta, India. In 1976 he founded L'Epervier Press, which in its fourteen years of activity published forty-five titles by more than thirty poets and received three grants from the NEA. Read more about his activities and poetry at his home page faculty.washington.edu/rmcnamar.

Tim McNulty
Tim McNulty is a poet, essayist, and nature writer. He was born and grew up in Connecticut's Quinnipiac River Valley, and attended Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts in Boston. There, he met poet Denise Levertov who inspired him with her powerful fusion of visionary poetics and political activism. Tim came to the Northwest in 1972 and lives with his wife and daughter in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains. A passionate spokesman for the Wild, he remains active in the Northwest's environmental community.

Tim's poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications in the U.S. and abroad, and his natural history writings have been translated into German and Japanese. He is the author of ten books of natural history, and has received the Washington Governor's Writer's Award and the American Outdoor Book Award. Tim's award-winning books on nature include: The Art of Nature, Washington's Wild Rivers, Olympic National Park, A Natural History, Washington's Mount Rainier National Park and Grand Canyon, Window on the River of Time. Tim's poetry collections are In Blue Mountain Dusk (Pleasure Boat Studio, 1992) and Pawtracks (Copper Canyon Press, 1978). He is the author of seven chapbooks, including Through High Still Air, A Season at Sourdough Mountain Lookout (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2005), Reflected Light (Tangram Press), Tundra Songs (Empty Bowl Press), As a Heron Unsettles a Shallow Pond (Exiled-in-America Press), and Last Year's Poverty (Brooding Heron Press).

Of his poetry, Tim writes,

"For as long as I can recall, I've found inspiration, meaning, and solace in the natural world. Poetry is the form that most closely evokes and articulates that experience. To be sure, my poems celebrate my own community of family and friends, but always within that larger natural community that holds us."

Maureen McQuerry
Is a writer and teacher living in Richland, Washington. She is the author of Nuclear Legacy and Student Inquiry. Her fantasy novel, Wolfproof, is scheduled for publication in the fall of 2006 with Idylls Press. Her poetry was a finalist for the Hearst, Pablo Neruda and Beulah Rose Awards and appears in numerous journals including: Smartish Pace, The Atlanta Review, Southern Review, North American Review, and Nimrod. It can also be found in the anthologies Margins, Pontoon8 and The Washington Poetry Association collection Tattoos on Cedar. Most recently she won the New Eden Chapbook Competition for her collection Wingward.

Maureen gives author presentations and workshops for students in 5th-12th grade on poetry and fiction writing. She also coordinates a gifted middle school program. She was the McAuliffe Fellow for Washington State in 2000. For more information on school visits check out the contact link on her website maureenmcquerry.com.

David Memmott
Lives in La Grande, Oregon. He has published four books of poetry, a story collection and has a novel forthcoming. Has published over 125 poems in various magazines and anthologies, most recently in Deer Drink the Moon: Oregon Poetry, edited by Liz Nakazawa, Ooligan Press, and in High Desert Journal. His most recent poetry book, Watermarked, was published by Traprock Books in Eugene, Oregon. Has also been involved in helping poets network in Oregon and has organized, along with Erik Muller of Eugene, two Poets Gatherings, the most recent in September 2006 in La Grande. Is the primary organizer of a monthly readings series in La Grande, First Thursday Readings & Lectures, which is held at the La Grande Public Library and sponsored by RondeHouse Media Arts Konsortium. www.wordcraftoforegon.com.

Roy Miki (1942- )

Joseph Millar
Originally from Pennsylvania, he lived a number of years in the San Francisco Bay area working at a variety of jobs. He holds an M.A. from John Hopkins. His poems have appeared in Shenandoah, DoubleTake, Ploughshares, Manoa, and New Letters TriQuarterly. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Oregon Literary Arts and Montalvo Center for the Arts. His book, Overtime (Eastern WA University Press) was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. He teaches at Oregon State University.

Sid Miller
Studied at both Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff and Portland State University. He is the founding editor of Burnside Review based in Portland, Oregon. His poetry has been published in numerous magazines and journals, including Rattle, Hawaii Pacific Review, Runes, South Dakota Review, Poetry Southeast, Goodfoot, Open Spaces, Inkwell, Homestead Review, Curbside Review, and Yalobusha Review. His collection Sunbathing in the Ukraine was published in 2007 by Finishing Line Press.

Deborah Miranda
This Native American (Chumash/Ohlone-Costanoan Esslen) is the author of the poetry collection, Indian Cartography. Her poetry, essays and articles have appeared widely.

James Masao Mitsui (1940- )
James Mitsui, a Nisei (second generation) Japanese American, was born in Skykomish, Washington where his father worked on the Great Northern Railroad. He spent two of his early years in the Tule Lake Relocation Camp. He went to high school in Odessa, Washington, a wheat-farming community. He earned a B.A. in Education from Eastern Washington University, and B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Washington. His writing teachers included Richard Blessing, Nelson Bentley, Richard Hugo, William Stafford, and David Wagoner. He retired in 1999 after teaching high school English and Creative Writing for thirty-four years.

"Art influences my poetry, from Asian art to people like Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. I was affected by the imagery of William Carlos Williams. My favorite poets are James Wright and Pablo Neruda. Places; locations are also important to me."

Jim Mitsui's poetry collections include:
From a Three-Cornered World: New and Selected Poems, U of Washington Press, 1997
After the Long Train: Poems, The Bieler Press, Minneapolis, 1986
Crossing the Phantom River, Graywolf Press, 1978
Journal of the Sun, Copper Canyon Press, 1974.

Melinda Mueller

Kay Mullen
A native of Iowa, she was an elementary school teacher for many years and worked as a school counselor and in private practice. In 1996 she completed an Advanced Poetry Writing Certificate from the University of Washington. Her work has appeared in various journals, including The Antigonish Review, Appalachia, PoetsWest, Women Writing, and The Floating Bridge Press spring anthology, Pontoon. She won first place in the 2002 William Stafford Award from the Washington Poets Association Poetry Competition. Her first book of poems, Let Morning Begin, was published in the fall of 2001 by Caritas Communications in Mequon, Wisconsin.

Jean Musser
Born in Akron, Ohio, this poet and playwright moved to the Northwest after graduating from Smith. As Jean Batie, she was the art critic for the Seattle Times during the late sixties. She was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 1998 edited the Raven Chronicles. The Northwest with its accessibility to Native American and Asian cultures exerted a powerful influence on her life and thought as did the summers she spent on lookouts in the Malheur Forest. While studying with Nelson Bentley, she found her true path as a writer. She serves on the advisory board of PoetsWest; her poems have appeared in PoetsWest and she is a frequent reader at PoetsWest performances.

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Jed Myers (1952- )
Born in Philadelphia, Myers was composing poems and songs while still a boy in a row house neighborhood, majored in Creative Writing at Tufts, where he also fell into the role of Editor for the Tufts Literary Magazine, had his experimental prose poems published in This (co-edited by his teacher Robert Grenier), went on to study medicine, then trained in psychiatry in Seattle, settled into a private psychotherapy practice and teaching at the University of Washington, continued writing poems and songs, felt broken open by the tragedy of 9/11, and intensified his writing involvement.

His poems have been heard on NPR, featured on websites such as Satya Center, Friends Journal, on line whispers & [shouts], and Arabesques, and printed in journals such as Chrysanthemum (for which he served as Guest Co-Editor), Cascade, Golden Handcuffs Review, POEM, StringTown, Drash, Poetica, Prairie Schooner, and Fugue. Jed's poems have won awards such as Writers' Haven's First Prize in 2004, and he won Third Prize in the 2005 Bart Baxter Poetry in Performance contest at Richard Hugo House. He has performed on numerous stages, including Burning Word's Main Stage in 2006, before Seattle City Council, at the Frye Art Museum, at various arts fests, in cafés and clubs, in benefit events, in synagogues, and in schools, often integrating music with poetry in varied and experimental ways.

He has hosted a variety of reading series, and regularly hosts NorthEndForum, an open gathering for poets and musicians in Seattle's Ravenna neighborhood, first Monday nights in the lounge at Bai Pai (fine Thai cuisine) and other Mondays at Casa d'Italia. Jed believes the expressive arts such as poetry and music ultimately offer the greatest hope for a peaceful planetary culture. medjyers@hotmail.com.

Paul E. Nelson
Poet/teacher/father/broadcaster Paul Nelson founded Global Voices Radio and co-founded the Northwest SPokenword LAB SPLAB in Auburn, Washington. He earned his M.A. from Lesley University in Organic Poetry. Poetry and essays have been published around the world in Dirt, The Argotist, Golden Handcuffs Review, The Raven Chronicles, Unlikely Stories, Fulcrum, & the OlsonNow blog among other publications, on and off-line, and he has performed his work at Bumbershoot, the Seattle Poetry Festival, the Sacred Activism conference and many other venues. A broadcaster for 26 years, he interviewed Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Michael McClure, Robin Blaser, Wanda Coleman, Jerome Rothenberg, Joanne Kyger, Eileen Myles, George Bowering and other North American poets and uses sound from those interviews in poetry workshops, having facilitated more than 300. He is working on an epic poem re-enacting Auburn history titled A Time Before Slaughter, writes at least one American Sentence everyday and teaches Office Skills at the Muckleshoot Tribal College in the shadow of Tahoma.

Duane Niatum (1938- )
Duane Niatum, an enrolled member of the Klallam tribe (Jamestown band), was born in Seattle and spent most of his life in "that once upon a time evergreen city." He received a B.A. from the University of Washington (1970) where he studied under Nelson Bentley, Theodore Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop. He then earned his M.A. from John Hopkins (1972) and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan (1997). His dissertation discusses the life and art of the Aleut sculptor, John Hoover. He has written several essays on contemporary American Indian literature and art, but he is better known for his poems and short stories. He edited two anthologies, Carriers of the Dream Wheel (1975) and Harper's Anthology of Twentieth Century Native American Poetry (1988). His writing has been translated into thirteen languages, including French, Spanish, Italian, and Greek, and has appeared in over forty-five anthologies in American, Europe and Russia. Drawings of the Song Animals: New and Selected Poems (Holy Cow! Press, 1991) was his fifth volume of poetry. The Crooked Beak of Love was published in January, 2000 by West End Press. The Pull of the Green Kite, another collection of poetry, is making the rounds of the publishers. A collection of twenty stories based upon his Klallam people's myths and legends is forthcoming.

Other books by Duane Niatum include:
Songs for the Harvester of Dreams (poems), University of Washington Press, 1981
Digging Out the Roots (poems), Harper and Row, 1977
Ascending Red Cedar Moon (poems), Harper and Row, 1974
After the Death of an Elder Klallam (poems), Baleen Press, 1970.

bpNichol (Barrie Phillip) (1944-1988)
Canadian poet born in Vancouver, BC. and perhaps best known for his concrete poetry in the 1960s and '70s. He worked in a variety of genres and forms, including visual images of the Roman alphabet as elements in themselves, comic book forms, xerox images, computer text, as well as performance work. His best known work is The Martyrology, a long poem of nine books in six volumes. An advocate of poetry and small presses, he has a street in Toronto named after him.

Sheryl Noethe
Teacher and author, Sheryl Noethe currently resides in Missoula, Montana where she is artistic director of the Missoula Writing Collaborative, Poets in the School Program. Her poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies including Cutbank, Berkeley Review, The Christian Science Monitor, Ohio Review, Northern Lights, and in McGraw-Hill's 1994 Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry.
The Ghost Openings (poems), Grace Court Press, (Winner of the 2001 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Annual Award for poetry)
Poetry Everywhere (with Jack Collom), New York: Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 1994
The Descent of Heaven over the Lake (poems), New Rivers Press, 1984.

Mike O'Connor
Mike is well known as a translator of Chinese literature. A Northwest native, he received his B.A. from Evergreen State College in Olympia and his M.F.A. from the Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO. He lived in Taiwan from 1979 until 1995, where he studied Chinese culture and worked as an editor for The China Economic News. In 1995 he returned to his Northwest roots and currently lives in Port Townsend, Washington. His works of translation include Setting Out, a novel by Tung Nien; a collection of poetry, The Tienanmen Square Poems; and Only a Friend Can Know (poems and poetics) for the electronic journal, Mudlark.

His other publications include:
When the Tiger Weeps (poems and translations), Pleasure Boat, 2005
When I Find You Again, It Will Be in Mountains: Selected Poems of Chia Tao (translator), Wisdom Publications, Somerville, MA, 2000
The Clouds Should Know Me by Now: Buddhist Poet Monks of China (co-editor and translator), Wisdom Publications, 1999
The Basin: Life in a Chinese Province (poetry), Empty Bowl Press, Port Townsend, WA
The Rainshadow (poetry), Empty Bowl Press.

William A. O'Daly (1951- )
William O'Daly was born in Santa Monica, California. He attended the University of California (Santa Barbara) from 1969-1972 where he studied with poets Kenneth Rexroth, Frederick Turner, and Alan Stephens, and with literary critic Hugh Kenner. He holds a B.A. in English from California State University (Fresno, 1977) where he studied with poet Philip Levine, and Master of Fine Arts, Poetry and Translation from Eastern Washington University (1981).

He is probably best known for his translations of six volumes of Pablo Neruda's late poems, all published by Copper Canyon Press between 1984 and 1991. Selected poems from the series have been recorded on compact disc (The Postman, Miramax Records, 1995) and cassette tape (Homecomings, Common Fire Productions, 1994). In the early 1970s, O'Daly joined Sam Hamill, James Gautney, and Tree Swenson in starting Copper Canyon Press, but left the press, among other reasons, to focus on his writing.

O'Daly's poems, essays, translations and other articles have appeared in anthologies, journals, and other periodicals too numerous to list here, but include American Poetry Review, Bloomsbury Review, The Taos Review, Northwest Review, Crab Creek Review, Willow Springs, Fine Madness, and Portland Review.

This award-winning poet also worked several years at Microsoft Corporation as senior developer/producer of audio/video content for Microsoft Interactive products, including Windows NT, and as technical production editor for MS OS/2. O'Daly taught English and Creative Writing at Eastern Washington University and, for many years, was literary editor of its literary journal, Willow Springs, Issues #5 - 18. In addition, he has taught at Centrum Foundation's Summer Writing Workshops (1991 and 1987) and has been a literary panelist for several Northwest arts commissions.

Bill O'Daly, who currently lives in California, writes about the origins of his poetry:

"It was the sound of poetry, even more than its striking imagery and sense of urgency, that first captivated me, transcending the individual poet's voice as a shadow of the music that resonates through all things. At the same time, I was seriously questioning my birth religion, reading Ghandi, Melville, and Stephen Crane, forming my understanding of and opposition to the Vietnam War, longing for love and feeling way out of place in the San Fernando Valley.

A shy but not retiring high-school student, I had begun my conscious search for meaning several years earlier in an orange grove near our family home, twenty acres of trees that were later fallen in a single day. My neighborhood friends and I built our first treehouse in that leafy kingdom, which offered beauty and protection, excitement and solace, just a couple blocks off heavily franchised Reseda Blvd. The physical presence of those evergreen trees sheltered our personal histories, and with their bright fruit they nurtured our imaginations long after we stopped playing there, long after they were gone.

If familial love, and sometimes the love of friends, keeps us alive through our darkest days, then it is not an affectation when I say that poetry saved my inner life. In my late teens and early twenties, reading and writing poems became a house built of rustling leaves and ancient echoes, commitments of the heart and natural koans, as well as celebrations of love, which accompanied me wherever I went and when I had little else. No refuge, poetry seemed to replace the need for confabulation with a longing for particular kinds of truth. My first poem that I called a poem, "The Kalahari Bushman," was an attempt to gather and redeem on a personal level the available light, the secret human truths, of the famous hoax of Piltdown, which inadvertently or otherwise provided for forty-five years the "missing link"—a skull consisting of a human cranium fused with the jawbone of an ape.

In the practice of poetry, I have benefited from Ezra Pound's poetics and the incredible musical textures of the Cantos, been instructed by William Carlos Williams' "No ideas but in things" (and his great heart), and been inspired by the duende, the deep song of Federico Garcia Lorca, Kenneth Rexroth, Adrienne Rich, Philip Levine, Denise Levertov, and Pablo Neruda. I have marveled at the courage and skill of contemporary Central American women poets, and the shrewd honesty and clarity of ancient Chinese poets. But what's certain, this list of influences, from the beginning to present day, is hopelessly incomplete, and my attempts to honor the lessons I have learned from those many poets, from orange trees and their shadows, are ongoing."

Nancy Pagh
Was born and raised on Fidalgo Island in Anacortes, Washington. She burst onto the literary scene at age twelve with the publication of her poem "Is a Clam Clammy, or Is It Just Wet?" in a local boating magazine. Before earning Master's degrees in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of New Hampshire, and a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of British Columbia, she worked in the scientific publications unit of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration in Seattle. She teaches English and Canadian Studies at Western Washington University and lives in Bellingham.

Nancy's first collection of poems, No Sweeter Fat, won the Autumn House Press book prize and was published in 2007. Her work appears in Prairie Schooner, The Fourth River, Poetry Northwest, Crab Creek Review, Rattle, Grain, Pontoon, The Bellingham Review, Room of One's Own, B.C. Studies, Stories with Grace, Rock Salt Plum, and O Magazine. She was a featured reader at the 2008 Skagit River Poetry Festival. Her manuscript, After, won the Floating Bridge Press chapbook competition and is forthcoming in Fall 2008.

Suzanne Paola
Currently teaches at Western Washington University in Bellingham. She has received grants from the Artists Trust and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including Fourth Genre, Kenyon Review and Boulevard. Her publications include:
Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir, 2001
Bardo, University of Wisconsin, 1998 (Winner of Brittingham Prize)

Tyler C. Pedersen
Native Montanan from Helena. After graduating in 2006 from the University of Montana with a BA degree in ecology and a minor in Art History and Criticism, he has pursued active application through service. "Last year, I was a crew member with the Montana Conservation Corps and this year I am an Americorps volunteer in Gresham, OR with the Northwest Service Academy. As the Biodiversity Conservation Coordinator in Gresham, I am actively involved with watershed restoration projects, community outreach and stewardship education with local schools and the monitoring and protection of native amphibians and reptiles."

He enjoys hiking, running, photography, drawing, and writing about the natural world. His first published work is a book of poetry and photographs, Nostalgia, Naturally. He can be reached at tylerpedersen02@hotmail.com or check his book website www.nostalgianaturally.com.

Peter Pereira
Peter is a family physician in Seattle and a founding editor of Floating Bridge Press www.scn.org/arts/floatingbridge. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including the Seattle Review, Poetry East, Willow Springs, Crab Creek Review, Mudfish, PoetsWest, and The Nation. He was a winner of a 1997 King County Arts Special Projects Award, 1999 Artist Trust Fellowship and 2000-01 Seattle Arts Commission Writers Award. His first chapbook of poems, The Lost Twin, was published in 2000 by Grey Spider Press of Sedro-Woolley. His collection, Saying the World (Copper Canyon Press, 2003), won the 2002 Hayden Carruth Award. Copper Canyon Press also published his latest collection What's Written on the Body in 2007.

"I am inspired by the poetry of Charles Wright, Louise Glück, and Carolyn Forché, as well as by the work of my fellow writing-group members: T. Clear, Jeff Crandall, Gary Winans, and Ted McMahon. Our writing group has been meeting, in one form or another, for almost ten years, and I count on them as some of my closest friends."

Lucia Perillo (1958- )
Lucia Perillo is well-known in Northwest poetry circles. She grew up in the suburbs of New York City in the 1960s. After graduating from McGill University in Montreal (l979) with a major in wildlife management, she worked for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service at the Denver Wildlife Research Center and San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

While living in California, she attended night-time adult education classes in poetry that were taught by Robert Hass at San Jose State. In 1984 she returned to graduate school at Syracuse University, where she studied creative writing under the poets Tess Gallagher, Philip Booth and Stephen Dobyns.

During graduate school, Perillo worked seasonally at Mount Rainier National Park, and in l987 she moved to Olympia, Washington, where she began teaching at Saint Martin's College, a small school affiliated with a Benedictine Monastery. Since l991, she has taught in the Creative Writing Program at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois, commuting regularly to Washington state, where her husband works as a stage technician. In the spring of 2000 she received a MacArthur Fellowship Award. She is now on leave from her teaching duties so she can live in Olympia and devote her time to writing.

Perillo's poetry has appeared in The New Yorker and The Atlantic, in addition to many literary magazines, and has been reprinted in both the Pushcart and Best American Poetry volumes. She has written four books. Her first, Dangerous Life, won the Samuel French Morse prize from Northeastern University Press (who published it in l989), plus the Norma Farber award from the Poetry Society of America, given for the best "first book" each year. Her second book received the prestigious Revson Prize from PEN while still in manuscript. It was published by Purdue University Press in l996 as The Body Mutinies, which then won three national awards. Her third book, The Oldest Map with the Name America, published in l999 by Random House, received the sixth annual Chad Walsh Poetry Award. Her book, Luck is Luck, was a finalist for L.A. Times Book Prize and included in the NY Public Library's list of "books to remember" from 2005). Her latest prose book, I've Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature was published by Trinity Press in 2007.

Perillo has also written both fiction and essays, having received an Illinois Arts Council grant in nonfiction in l993. She writes reviews for The Chicago Tribune and occasional essays for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Her fiction has appeared in literary magazines like Quarterly West and The New England Review and was reprinted in the 1999 volume of The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.

Paulann Petersen (1942- )
A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she's received two Carolyn Kizer Poetry Awards, several nominations for a Pushcart Prize, the 2006 Stewart Holbrook Award for Outstanding Contributions to Oregon's Literary Life, and was a finalist for the 2006 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

Her three chapbooks are:
Fabrication (26 Books, 1996)
The Animal Bride (Trask House Press, 1994)
Under the Sign of a Neon Wolf (Confluence Press, 1989)

Her four full-length books are:
Kindle, Mountains & (Rivers Press, 2008)
A Bride of Narrow Escape (Cloudbank Books, 2006)
Blood-Silk (Quiet Lion Press, 2004)
The Wild Awake (Confluence Press, 2002).

In addition to having taught high school English (West Linn High School, West Linn, Oregon, and at Mazama High School, Klamath Falls, Oregon), she has taught a number of poetry workshops for colleges, libraries, and writers' conferences, including Oregon Writers' Workshop in Portland (Northwest College of Art, Portland Art Museum), Mountain Writers Series, Oregon State Poetry Association, The Creative Arts Community at Menucha, Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, the Lifelong Learning Institute at Chemeketa Community College, and Fishtrap.

She attended Pomona College; Southern Oregon University (B.S. and M.S. in Humanities, Fine and Performing Arts--graduating summa cum laude, and as the Outstanding Graduate Student of 1984); and Stanford University (doing graduate work as a Stegner Fellow in poetry). She serves on the board of Friends of William Stafford, organizing the annual January Stafford Birthday Events. Her web site is www.paulann.net.

John Peterson
Poet and Publisher, his books include a chapbook, This Warrior is Always at Peace, with poetry written in the first few years after his tour in Vietnam. Also, the volume Two Races One Face Two Faces One Race was written with Tomás Gayton and explores the lives of two friends of different races, bonded together with the times they live in. After starting the small poetry press Poetic Matrix Press he published dark hills and wild mountains, a book with the magic of the hills and mountains that have been so important in his life. He is currently working on News of the Day and a book of essays, writings, poetry and meditations called Exploring the Poetic Matrix. Poetic Matrix Press was started in the high mountain beauty of Yosemite National Park in 1997 where he worked for a number of years. As Publisher he has published a number of fine poets including Brandon Cesmat, Tomás Gayton, Sandra Stillwell, James Downs, Rayne Roberts, Gail Entrekin, and Joe Milosch. He is currently at work on the new Slim Volume Series book, The Unequivocality of a Rose by Joel Netsky due out spring 2007. Poetic Matrix Press books are available through amazon.com and other on-line bookstores and at www.poeticmatrix.com. Ask for them at your local bookstore.

Anne Pitkin
Currently a psychotherapist in private practice, she has taught community college English and conducted poetry workshops throughout the region and in the Artist-in-the-Schools program. Her work has appeared in many periodicals and anthologies including Poetry, Malahat Review, Prairie Schooner, The Nation, and Ploughshares. She is the author of Yellow, and a chapbook, Notes for Continuing the Performance.

Scott Poole (1970- )
Scott Poole has bachelor's degrees in English and Psychology from Washington State University. He also has an MFA in poetry from Eastern Washington University. Writing since 1990, he has published in numerous poetry journals and newspapers throughout the Northwest. Currently he is the 'house poet' for Oregon Public Broadcasting's radio show "Live Wire!". Recently he was the writer-residence at the University Club in Portland. For four years he also read poems weekly during Spokane Public Radio's Morning Edition program. He is also the founding director of "Get Lit!" Spokane's annual book festival and the founding director of "Wordstock", Portland, Oregon's annual book festival. His first book of poetry, The Cheap Seats was a finalist for Forward Magazine's book of the year award. Currently he is living in Vancouver, Washington with his family where he works as a Software Developer.

Publications: Hiding from Salesmen (poetry), Lost Horse Press, 2003
The Cheap Seats (poetry), Lost Horse Press, 1998

Geoff Pope
Is a graduate of the University of Iowa where he was an editor for the International Writing Program from 1988-1993. He studied under Heather McHugh one summerwith the Iowa Writers' Workshop and he has been writing and editing poetry for twenty years. He is a winner of the 1999 King County Metro Poetry and Art on Buses Project. His poetry has appeared in Chronicles, Poets at the Kent Canterbury Faire, Lilliput Review, Voice of Many Waters: A Sacred Anthology for Today, Pontoon: An Anthology of Washington State Poets, King County's Poetry on Buses, Christianity and Lite! rature, and Radix. Geoff currently teaches for the University of Phoenix (Washington Campus) and at Educational Advancement Academy in Bellevue, WA.

Charles Potts (1943- )
Charles Potts was born in Idaho Falls, Idaho and raised on a ranch east of Mackay, Idaho. A graduate of Idaho State University with a B.A. in English in 1965, he has been a published poet since 1963. In 1994 he was presented with the Distinguished Professional Achievement Award from the College of Arts & Sciences at Idaho State University.

He received the Distinguished Professional Achievement Award in 1994 from the College of Arts and Sciences of Idaho State University. He founded Litmus Inc., which published eighteen books in Salt Lake City including Charles Bukowski's Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8-Story Window in 1968. He also received the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Washington Poets Association.

His work has appeared in several anthologies, including Vol Pupuli from the Seattle Poetry Festival, Portland Lights, Maverick Western Verse from Gibbs Smith, Men of Our Time from the University of Georgia, and Will Work for Peace from Zeropanik Press. He reads across the United States and has been a featured reader at Bumbershoot in Seattle, LitEruption in Portland, the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, and Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles. Charles Potts appears frequently on nationwide radio and TV. His biography and accomplishments are recited in Marquis Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, and Who's Who in the West.

A master practitioner in the Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and accomplished toastmaster, from 1988-1994, he was the Northwest representative for the Pinxxiee Corporation and Chinese Computer Communications, Inc. A real estate broker, president and founder of Palouse Management Inc., Potts served as a director of the Washington Apartment Association in the 1980s and has been a candidate for city council and port commissioner. From 1993 to 1996 he represented the 5th Congressional District on the Executive Committee of the Washington State Democratic Party. He spent a year in Fukuoka, Japan, in the mid-nineties where he studied the structure of Japanese language and culture.

His more recent collections of poetry include:
Kiot: selected early poems 1963-1977, Blue Begonia Press, Yakima WA, 2005
Across the North Pacific (prose and poetry), Slough Press, Austin, Texas, 2002
Nature Lovers, Pleasure Boat Studio, Bainbridge Island WA, 2000
Lost River Mountain, Blue Begonia Press, Yakima WA, 1999
100 Years in Idaho, Tsunami, Inc., Walla Walla WA, 1996
The Dictatorship of the Environment, Druid Books, Ephriam, Wisconsin, 1991
Pacific Northwest Spiritual Poetry (Editor), Tsunami, Inc., 1998
Rocky Mountain Man, The Smith Press, New York City, 1978.

Other books:
How the South Finally Won the Civil War, And Controls the Political Future of the United States, (nonfiction)
Loading Las Vegas (fiction), Current Press, Walla Walla WA, 1991, (Winner of Manuscript International's 14th annual First Place Novel Award).

Charles Potts can be reached through The Temple Bookstore.com or PO Box 1773, Walla Walla, WA 99362.

Marjorie Power
Grew up in Stamford, Connecticut and moved to the West Coast in her late teens. In 1969 she received her B.A. in English from San Francisco State. While working on a graduate degree at the University of Washington in the early '70s, she encountered Nelson Bentley. Though she has taken workshops from a number of other well known poets, Bentley remains by far the strongest influence on her writing. She has given readings on and off for the past twenty-five years, at places as Traditions Cafe in Olympia, Elliott Bay Books, Frye Art Museum, Third Place Books, the University district Barnes and Noble (Love of Life Poets, Daniel Pearl), Esther Altschul Helfgott's reading series in the University District, and St. David's Parish Hall in Shelton for Carolyn Maddux's reading series. Her poetry collections include Living with It, Wampeter Press, 1983; Tishku after She Created Men, Lone Willow Press, 1996; and Cave Poems, Lone Willow Press, 1998. Lone Willow will also publish The Complete Tishku in 2003. Approximately 250 journals include her poems: The Atlanta Review, Fine Madness, The Malahat Review, Poet Lore, The Seattle Review, and others. I've also got work in about a dozen anthologies: PoetsWest, The Practice of Peace, The Random House Treasury of Light Verse, and others. She lives in Olympia with her husband. Her interests include ballroom dance, knitting, furniture painting, camping and hiking, and attending the theater, especially the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Her fifth collection, Faith in the Color Turquoise, was published by Pudding House Press in 2003.

Cameron Prow
Native Oregonian raised with rural, post-Depression values. Product of Salem Public Schools and Life Experience university. Bend, Oregon, resident since 1981. Director, Farewell Bend Writers Roundtable, 1993-2006; concessions manager, Cascade Festival of Music, 1999-2000; program founder/chair of Treasures in Time, 2001-04; and board of directors (newsletter & membership), Friends of the Bend Library, 2000-04. Founder of TYPE-Write II, The Professional's Professional since 1981, a writing-editing service for businesses, authors, job-seekers, and governmental agencies. Edited award-winning biography: John Nosler, Going Ballistic. Published in PoetsWest Literary Journal, PoetsWest Online, Fishtrap Anthology V, The Bulletin, Cascade Reader, Focus on Friends, FBWR Connections, Organized Chaos, Graphic Words, Full Hand, and Reflections: A Collection Of Central Oregon Writings. Featured poet at PoetsWest, Literary Harvest, From the Heart, People of Letters & Lyrics, and Readings in Remembrance. Open-mic venues include memorial services plus The Wit's End Bookstore, Barnes & Noble Poets Café, OSPA at Barnes & Noble, Orphaned in Eden: Search for Family in the West et al. An extroverted introvert and hopeful romantic, she enjoys word prospecting in natural and interior landscapes.

Mike Puhallo (1953- )
Born in Kamloops BC. Graduated 1974, 2 yr. Diploma Course: Agricultural Management, Northern Lights College, Dawson Creek, BC. Has been a working cowboy, a saddle bronc rider, a packer, rancher and a horse trainer. He spent more than thirty years ranching in partnership with his younger brother. Many of his poems and stories are about the unique history and heritage of Cowboy Culture the Pacific Northwest. Mike was instrumental in establishing The BC Cowboy Hall of Fame, and has served ten years as president of the BC Cowboy Heritage Society. He is the only cowboy poet to have had his work read into the official record at a NASA launch, and in the Canadian House of Commons. He performs at cowboy gatherings and festivals, as well as taking his poetry into schools, libraries and community halls throughout the West. One of the few poets in the world able to almost make a living from his work, Mike still judges a few rodeos and spends most of his summers working with cattle and training horses. Mike has had six books of poetry published by Hancock House and has self produced three CDs of his work.

His fifth book Piled Higher and Deeper received (2002) received the Will Rogers Medallion Award. Nominated several times for Cowboy Poet of the Year at the prestigious Will Rogers Awards in Fort Worth, Texas. Mike has also been nominated for Best Cowboy Poetry Book (four times), Best Cowboy Poetry Album (twice) and Best Western Song (Cinnamon 1998). In 2003 Mike received The Queens Golden Jubilee Medallion Award and in 2006 he was a nominee for Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate. Winner of 2007 Will Rogers Medallion Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Publishing of Cowboy Poetry from the Academy of Western Artists for his collection Rhymes & Damn Lies (Hancock House Publishers, Blaine, WA) Mike's first book, Rhymes on the Range (1997) is going into second printing and will be available again soon. See web site www.twilightranch.com.

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