PORT TOWNSEND — The Northwind Reading Series continues at 7 this evening.
Featured during this installment at the Northwind Arts Center at 701 Water St. are poets Tim McNulty and Saul Weisberg.
The suggested donation for entry is $3 to $5.
All proceeds benefit the Northwind Arts Center, a nonprofit organization that sponsors visual, musical and literary art events and education on the Olympic Peninsula.
McNulty, a Sequim poet and nature writer, is the author of three poetry collections: Ascendance, In Blue Mountain Dusk and Pawtracks, and 10 poetry chapbooks including Cloud Studies, Some Ducks and Through High Still Air.
McNulty has received the Washington State Book Award and the National Outdoor Book Award.
He is active in wilderness and conservation work.
Weisberg’s poetry grows out of the natural world, Weisberg said.
“I’ve always been drawn to mountains; I came late to the love of rivers,” he said.
“I was born near the East River on the lower east side of Manhattan and spent my childhood close to Ohio’s Cuyahoga River.”
After college, Weisberg said, he “followed friends and the writings of the beat poets to the Pacific Northwest.
“I got to know my new home place through work — mostly outside — doing whatever it took to keep me in this special part of the world.”
Weisberg’s poems “have been born from these experiences,” he said.
He mostly writes outdoors, “seasoned by solitude, sunrises, campfire smoke and morning dew,” he said.
Weisberg and friends started North Cascades Institute, a conservation nonprofit, in 1986.
The institute’s goal is to help people of all ages experience and enjoy the mountains, rivers, forests, people and wildlife of the Pacific Northwest.
In 2005, the institute opened North Cascades Environmental Learning Center on the shores of Diablo Lake in North Cascades National Park.
For more information about the reading series, contact Bill Mawhinney at 360-302-1159 or visit www.northwindarts.org.
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Reporter Chris McDaniel can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or cmcdaniel@peninsuladailynews.com.
