this evening in Seattle

This evening, Tuesday, Januaray 23, 2024, at 7:00pm, Third Place Books will welcome contributors to the Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry for a presentation and celebration of their work at the Seward Park location. The evening will include readings from writers and artists including Betsy Aoki, Kevin Craft, Laura Da’, Kathleen Flenniken, Rebecca Hoogs, Robert Lashley, Claudia Castro Luna, Shankar Narayan, Sierra Nelson, Christianne Balk, and Martha Silano. The event is free and open to the public, but space is limited, so visit the Third Street Books event page for tickets.

Cascadia Field Guide

The Cascadia Field Guide, which debuted with a splash at AWP in Seattle, has announced a robust itinerary of readings and events, in-person and online, throughout Cascadia for September and October. Editors Elizabeth Bradfield, CMarie Fuhrman, and Derek Sheffield will be joined by various contributors offering a selection of voices from Cascadia.

The impressive volume “brings together art, poetry, and stories holding scientific, sensory, and cultural knowledge to celebrate and illuminate Cascadia, the diverse ecoregion stretching from Alaska’s Prince William Sound to Northern California and from the Pacific Coast to the Continental Divide.”

Learn more on the Cascadia Field Guide website (while you’re there, scroll down for an excellent map of Cascadia), grab a copy at your local independent bookstore, and mark your calendar for an upcoming event near you.

Thursday in Portland

Join Cascadia Field Guide co-editor Derek Sheffield and contributors Barbara Drake, David Oates, Joe Wilkins, Kim Stafford, Nancy Slavin, Paulann Petersen, and Travis London, this Thursday, July 27, 2023, at 7:00pm, at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon.

Cascadia stretches from Southeast Alaska to Northern California and from the Pacific Ocean to the Continental Divide. Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry (Mountaineers Books) blends art and science to celebrate this diverse yet interconnected region through natural and cultural histories, poetry, and illustrations. Organized into thirteen bioregions, the guide includes entries for everything from cryptobiotic soil and the western thatching ant to the giant Pacific octopus and Sitka spruce, as well as the likes of common raven, hoary marmot, Idaho giant salamander, snowberry, and 120 more! Both well-established and new writers are included, representing a diverse spectrum of voices, with poems that range from comic to serious, colloquial to scientific, urban to off-the-grid, narrative to postmodern. Likewise, the artists span styles and mediums, using classic natural history drawing, form line design, graffiti, sketch, and more.

a taste of Cascadia

If you’re a regular here at The Poetry Department, you may have noticed that we favor the term Cascadia rather than Northwest or Pacific Northwest and our posts reach out into the various corners of that bioregion.

The Mountaineers shines a bright light on Cascadia with the release of Cascadia Field Guide, a 400-page collection of “cultural histories, poetry, and artwork depicting many of the plants and animals who call Cascadia home.” Edited by Derek Sheffield, CMarie Fuhrman, and Elizabeth Bradfield, the book features the work of writers and artists with deep ties to the region.

You can sample six art-poem collaborations from the critically acclaimed Cascadia Field Guide at Terrain.org.