PORT TOWNSEND — The founder of the Cascadia Poetry Festival is coming for a joint reading at the Northwind Arts Center, 701 Water St., this Thursday, Feb. 4.
Paul Nelson of Seattle and Peter Munro of Alaska are the featured poets in this episode of the Northwind Reading Series, which will get started at 7 p.m. Admission is a suggested $3 to $5.
Poet steps in
Peter Munro is stepping in for poet Robert Hoffman, also of Alaska, who was forced to cancel his appearance due to illness.
Nelson, a poet, interviewer and essayist, has published works including 2015’s American Sentences, 2010’s A Time Before Slaughter and 2013’s Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies.
Along with establishing the annual Cascadia Poetry Festival, Nelson is founder of the Seattle Poetics LAB (splab.org). He has interviewed luminaries such as Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure and Sam Hamill, presented poetry in London, Brussels, Nanaimo and Beijing and had his work translated into Spanish, Chinese and Portuguese.
Munro was born in Fairbanks, Alaska in 1957.
He was raised in small fishing towns, going through his biggest changes in Sitka, Alaska.
This has left him permanently afflicted with a love of fishing.
Currently, he lives near Seattle, one of the world’s great fishing ports, with his wife and their two sons.
By day, Munro conducts research fishing in the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Alaska, and the Aleutian Islands.
The data is used to help estimate annual harvest levels of commercially important demersal fishes. When not at sea, Munro is chained to a computer, analyzing data and failing to write papers.
By night he makes and recites poems.
Munro’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in Poetry, the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Iowa Review, the Birmingham Poetry Review, Passages North, The Cortland Review, The Valparaiso Poetry Review, Compose, Rattle, Toe Good Poetry and elsewhere.
For more about the Northwind series and other activities at the nonprofit arts center, see www.northwindarts.org or contact Bill Mawhinney at 360-302-1159.
