Join us for a reading and conversation with writers Kim Stafford, Ann Stinson, and Jessica Gigot.
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Kim Stafford is a writer in Oregon who teaches and travels to raise the human spirit. He founded the Northwest Writing Institute in 1986, and co-founded the Fishtrap Writers Gathering in 1987. He is the author of a dozen books of poetry a prose, including Having Everything Right: Essays of Place, and Singer Come from Afar.
In our time is a great thing not yet done--it is the marriage of Woody Guthrie's gusto and the Internet. It is the composing and wide sharing of stories, poems, songs, and blessings by those with voice, for those with need.
In 2018, Gov. Kate Brown named him Oregon's ninth poet laureate, and he visited over a hundred groups statewide to share the reading and writing of poetry.
Why write poems in a time of technology and haste? Writing a poem can help us slow down, think, wonder, notice, and jot a few words to improve our sense of well-being. And writing deepens our connection with the inner life, with each other, and with the Earth.
He has taught writing in dozens of schools and colleges, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan.
All around us, daily news inflicts attrition because it is incomplete--it gives facts, events, quotations, but without offering meaning. Writing a poem can ease this injury, providing a way to "talk back to all that darkness" by exploring questions, offering remedies, and making connections between what we have experienced and what we might say.
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Ann Stinson grew up near Toledo, Washington. After high school, her interests took her to Japan, New York City, and Portland, Oregon. She earned a BA in English from Western Washington University and a MA in East Asian Languages and Culture from Columbia University. A former school teacher, she is president of the Family Forest Foundation and is on the board of the Washington Farm Forestry Association.
Ann Stinson writes about life on a working forest in SW Washington State in her first book, The Ground at My Feet: Sustaining a Family and a Forest. It was published by Oregon State University Press in November 2021 and a finalist for the Oregon Book Award.
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Jessica Gigot, PhD, is a poet, farmer, and coach. She lives on a little sheep farm in the Skagit Valley. Her second book of poems, Feeding Hour (Wandering Aengus Press, 2020) was a finalist for the 2021 Washington State Book Award. Jessica’s writing and reviews appear in several publications, such as Orion, The New York Times, The Seattle Times, Ecotone, Terrain.org, Gastronomica, Crab Creek Review, and Poetry Northwest. Her award-winning memoir, A Little Bit of Land, was published by Oregon State University Press in September 2022.