LiTFUSE

Marvin Bell

Marvin Bell has been referred to as "an insider who thinks like an outsider," and his writing has been called "ambitious without pretension.” Three Bell books are being released in 2011: Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems, from Copper Canyon Press; Whiteout, a collaboration with the photographer Nathan Lyons, from Lodima Press; and a children's picture book with illustrations by Chris Raschka, based on the poem, “A Primer about the Flag,” from Candlewick Press. These books were preceded by the wartime collection, Mars Being Red, and 7 Poets, 4 Days, 1 Book, a collaboration of poets from five countries. A song cycle, "The Animals," commissioned by composer David Gompper, premiered in 2009. Mr. Bell’s other collections include Rampant (2004); Nightworks: Poems, 1962-2000 (2000); Ardor: The Book of the Dead Man, Volume 2 (1997); A Marvin Bell Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose (Middlebury College Press, 1994); The Book of the Dead Man (Copper Canyon Press, 1994); Iris of Creation (1990); New and Selected Poems ( Atheneum, 1987); and Segues:A Correspondence in Poetry (with William Stafford) (1983); Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See (1977); Residue of Song (1974); The Escape into You (1971); A Probable Volume of Dreams (Atheneum, 1969); and Things We Dreamt We Died For (Stone Wall Press 1966).

Mr. Bell edited poetry, for five years apiece, for Statements, The Iowa Review at its birth, and The North American Review at its rebirth. For several years he wrote an informal column about poetry and the creative process for The American Poetry Review. He designed and led for five years a ten-day workshop for teachers from the urban after-school program, “America Scores.” He conceived and edited for five years the Lost Horse Press series, New Poets / Short Books.

Mr. Bell was for many years Flannery O’Connor Professor of Letters at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and served as Iowa's first Poet Laureate. He has taught also for Goddard College, the University of Hawaii, the University of Washington and Portland State University. He teaches now for the brief-residency MFA based in Oregon at Pacific University, and lives mainly in Iowa City, Iowa, and Port Townsend, Washington. He and his wife, Dorothy, have lived also in Mexico, Spain, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Honolulu, Seattle, Portland, Chicago, Indianapolis and rural Vermont.

Judith Roche is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Wisdom of the Body, an American Book Award winner, which was also nominated for a Pushcart. She has published widely in various journals and magazines, and has poems installed on several Seattle area public art projects, including a forthcoming installation at the Brightwater Treatment Plant in King County. She has written extensively about our Northwest native salmon and edited First Fish, First People, Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim (published byUniversity of Washington Press and also and American Book Award winner), and has salmon poems installed at the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks in Seattle. As Literary Arts Director for One Reel she produced the Bumbershoot Bookfair and Literary Program for over twenty years and was instrumental in the poetry community of Seattle. She was Distinguished Northwest Writer-in-Residence at Seattle University in 2007, taught at Cornish College of the Arts in 2009 and currently teaches at Richard Hugo House Literary Center and around the state for the Washington State Humanities Commission’s Inquiring Mind series.She is a Fellow in the Black Earth Institute, a progressive think tank exploring the links between nature, spirit and social justice.

Carolyne Wright’s  nine books and chapbooks of poetry include Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire (Carnegie Mellon U Press/ EWU Books, 2nd edition 2005), which won the Blue Lynx Prize and American Book Award; and A Change of Maps (Lost Horse Press, 2006), finalist for the Idaho Prize and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and winner of the 2007 Independent Book Publishers Bronze Award in Poetry.  Just published is Mania Klepto: the Book of Eulene (Turning Point Books), featuring the post-modern alter-ego Eulene.  Also published are a collection of essays and four volumes of poetry translated from Spanish and Bengali.  A Seattle native who studied with Elizabeth Bishop and Richard Hugo, Wright spent a year in Chile on a Fulbright-Hayes Study Grant during the presidency of Salvador Allende.  She serves on the faculty of the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts’ Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA Program. She returned to Chile in late 2008, giving readings and workshops with Eugenia Toledo, and reconnecting with her Chilean past.  Her volume of translations of Chilean poet Jorge Teillier, In Order to Talk with the Dead (U of Texas Press, 1993), won the ALTA National Translation Award.  A poem of hers appears in The Best American Poetry 2009 (ed. David Wagoner) and the Pushcart Prize XXXIV: Best of the Small Presses (2010).

Eugenia Toledo was born in Temuco, Chile, and grew up in the same neighborhood as Pablo Neruda. She came to the U.S. in 1975 to pursue a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature at the University of Washington.She has published eight texts and two manuals for Adult Education (Ministry of Education, OEA, Chile, 1986); a book about the Spanish writer Fray Luis de León (Editorial Cíclope, Santiago, 1986); two books of poetry, Arquitectura de ausencias / Architecture of Absences (Editorial Torremozas, España, 2006); Tiempo de metales y volcanes / Time of Metals and Volcanoes (Editorial 400 Elefantes, Nicaragua, 2007); and a chapbook “Leaf of Glass,” which won an Artella contest in 2005.Eugenia also writes literary articles and creates “book-objects,” combining words and graphic materials.At Seattle's Richard Hugo House, she has taught poetry writing in Spanish, and with Carolyne Wright, team-taught a course on Pablo Neruda. A new manuscript of poems, Trazas de mapa / Map Traces, written after her return to Chile with Carolyne Wright in late 2008, won a 2009 grant from 4Culture. Other poems of hers in translation by Carolyne Wright have appeared in Los Angeles Review, New Letters, Palabra, PoetryInternational, Rio Grande Review, ZYZZYVA, and the chapbook, La luz ambarina de la lluvia: Letras de Temuko / The Rain’s Amber Light: Letters from Temuco.

Karen Kevorkian’s poetry collections are Lizard Dream and White Stucco Black Wing. For the last two years she’s taught poetry and fiction writing workshops at UCLA, and before that in the creative writing program at the University of Virginia. In Los Angeles she’s a member of the Glass Table Collective, a group composed of LA artists and writers, whose literary publishing imprint is What Books Press. Journals publishing Kevorkian’s poetry and fiction include Antioch Review, Agni, Massachusetts Review, Quarterly West, Virginia Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mississippi Review, Witness, VOLT, Shenandoah, and Fiction International. Her fellowships include those with the Ucross, the Millay, the MacDowell, the Djerassi, and most recently the Wurlitzer foundations. Born in Texas, she moved to the Bay Area where she was publications editor for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. She is married to Dell Upton and has four children.

Allen Braden is the author of A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood (VQR Poetry Series/University of Georgia Press) and Detail of the Four Chambers to the Horse’s Heart, a fine letterpress accordion chapbook.Part of the last generation to grow alfalfa, wheat, barley and beef cattle on his family’s farm in the lower Yakima Valley, he earned a BA in English from Central Washington University then an MA in literature and an MFA creative writing from McNeese State University.He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and from Artist Trust as well as the Emerging Writers Prize from Witness magazine, the Grolier Poetry Prize, the Dana Award in Poetry and other honors.Former poet-in-residence for the Poetry Center and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Braden teaches at Tacoma Community College.

Lauren Zuniga is a nationally touring poet and teaching artist. She has represented Oklahoma in seven national poetry competitions.   She was a top twenty finisher at the 2009 and 2010 Women of the World Poetry Slam. She is the 2009 Tulsa Living Arts Slam Champion. She is the co-creator of WordPulp, a monthly hip hop and poetry show and the co-founder of Oklahoma Young Writers, a nonprofit organization committed to expanding literary opportunities for youth. She has performed in prisons, churches and schools as well as highly esteemed poetry venues such as The Green Mill Lounge in Chicago, The Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York and The Mercury Cafe in Denver.  She has been featured on the Marianne Williamson show on the Oprah and Friends Network (XM radio.) She has recently been published in the Lamplighter Review, On the Issues, Pedestal, Muzzle Magazine (for which she was nominated for 2010 Best of The Web Anthology) and the Write Bloody Anthology, “The Good Things About America.”  Her first full length manuscript, The Nickel Tour, was released on Penmanship Books in 2009. Her work spans the gritty and splendid, integrating politics, spirituality and humanity through her love for vivid language and imagery.

Roberto Carlos Ascalon Born and bred in New York City, Roberto has taught poetry with an array of the best Seattle youth poetry programs for the last eight years: Arts Corps, Writers in the Schools, the Richard Hugo House, and Youthspeaks. He's curated poetry programs, produced major installations and performed for hundreds in venues across the country. Because of the success of the poetry and sound installation "I Wish I Knew Who I Was Before I Was Me" at the Frye Art Museum in 2010, he and his students received a once in lifetime invitation to the White House by First Lady Michelle Obama. He lives in a converted turn of the century schoolhouse in West Seattle, with a cat, a beautiful girl and a blackboard.

Jane Alynn is the author of Necessity of Flight (Cherry Grove Collections, 2011), and Threads & Dust, a poetry chapbook (Finishing Line Press, 2005). She has been the recipient of a William Stafford Award from Washington Poets Association. Her poems and prose have appeared in a number of journals and magazines, including Calyx, Floating Bridge Review, Manorborn, The Pacific Review, Quercus Review, Snowy Egret, StringTown, The Sun, and Switched-on Gutenberg, as well as in several anthologies. In addition to writing poetry, Jane has taught private workshops in creative writing and in creative vision: the art of seeing. As a fine art photographer her work has won several awards. She currently lives in Anacortes, Washington, with her photographer husband and two cats.

Joannie Kervran Stangeland is the author of two poetry chapbooks—A Steady Longing for Flight, which won the Floating Bridge Press chapbook award, and Weathered Steps. Her third collection is scheduled to be released by Ravenna Press in 2011. Joannie has won the Dallas Poets Community National Poetry Competition, and her poems have appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Floating Bridge Review, Raven Chronicles, Crab Creek Review, and other publications—as well as in the Rose Alley Press anthologies Limbs of the Pine, Peaks of the Range and Many Trails to the Summit, and on Seattle-area buses. Joannie has been a Jack Straw Artist in Residence, she has taught classes at Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and currently she is the poetry editor for the online journal The Smoking Poet. Joannie holds strong ties to Tieton. Her mother grew up there, in a house surrounded by orchards, and her aunt and uncle continue to live and farm there.

Carol Trenga practices and teaches Feldenkrais®, Yoga and meditation.She began these practices during twenty years of studying, teaching and working in biological sciences.She recently became a mentor of The Embodied Life™, which combines movement, meditation and guided inquiry to help bring presence and curiosity to each moment.These practices renew our capacity to be creative and joyful in life.Her classes emphasize body awareness, integrated movement, and living with clear intention.Carol is a Certified Yoga Instructor and a Guild-Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner, and holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Health from UW.

Doug Johnson, is the founder and editor of Cave Moon Press, a non-profit dedicated to bridging global and local issues through literary arts. He publishes a monthly poetry e-zine dedicated to emerging poets. His original books include, Ten Years to Hold your Breath, Home on the Range, Frank's Diary, and Black Mountain Whispers: A tribute to Raymond Carver. He teaches English at Carver’s old high school in Yakima. His poems, short stories, photos, and artwork have appeared in various literary arts journals, including Audience Review, Tipton Review ESC Magazine, Whitefish, Poesia, and Skive Short Story Quarterly (Australia). His drawings entitled the Cracked Pot series of drawings appeared in Houston Literary Review and in Gallery of Thum as a featured artist. He won "Best Letter Press Design" from Bumbershoot Arts Festival in 1998. Naomi Shihab Nye has called Doug a “visionary artist of words and visual images, [who] responds deeply and generously to the mysteries and complexities we are living through.”

Jessika Kitzman, cellist, has been playing the cello since 1991. She has contributed her musical talent on albums recorded at NW studios such as London Bridge Studios, Jupiter Studios and Soundhouse Recordings, as well as played as a live performance guest musician for many NW bands.  With Melissa Levi, Jessika forms one-half of the soulful band Seeing Blind.  Jessika has continued to further her musical education as a student of Mara Finkelstein (Principle Cellist for the Northwest Sinfonietta) since 2007.  Her favorite food is fruit pizza.

Michael Schein, LiTFUSE Director, is the author of a literary crime novel, two historical novels, a play, and a logorrhea of poems.  Bones Beneath Our Feet (2011) is Michael’s new historical novel about the conquest of Puget Sound by the “Boston” tribe. His first novel, Just Deceits, is based on a scandalous trial in 1793 Virginia.  Michael teaches poetry and fiction at Port Townsend Writers Conference. In addition to directing LiTFUSE, he is director of BURNING WORD at Icicle Creek.  Michael's poetry has been widely published, nominated for the Pushcart twice, and stuck to refrigerators by magnets.