Seattle City of Literature hosted a recent panel at the Nordic National Museum with visiting Icelandic crime fiction writers Ragnar Jonasson and Yrsa Sigurðardóttiron and me and Melanie Noel on how literature shapes place. The mayor of Reykjavik, Einar Porsteinsson also joined us. Grateful to Stesha Brandon for getting us together.
I had a wonderful time in September at the Outsider Festival in Ostuni, Italy, an event which was founded by Bolivian poet Norah Zapata-Prill. We read in public plazas, schools, a library, a cemetery, and many historic places with poets from Italy, France, Argentina, Bolivia, and me representing the U.S. Many new friends were made and I am grateful for the warmth and kindness of the Italian people.
The Poetry Society of America has awarded me with the 2024 Shelley Memorial Award, an award given by nomination to one poet a year for poetic genius. This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me in my 26 years of writing and publishing poetry. I share this prize with my artist mother, Noko Pai, and with all the small press publishers that ever believed in my work: La Alameda Press, 1913 Press, Press Lorentz, Convivio Bookworks, Booklyn Artists Alliance, Blue Cactus Press, and Empty Bowl.
My Poetry in Public campaign got some local attention from:
KUOW
Seattle Magazine
Northwest Asian Weekly
South Seattle Emerald
Crosscut
Thanks to the good folx at Seattle Channel for covering my National Poetry Month campaign.
For this poetry display at Friends of Little Saigon, my designer Jayme Yen chose a typeface created by a Vietnamese font designer which pairs visually well with the Vietnamese language. Bryna Antonia Cortes sent a wonderful poem about the neighborhood of Little Saigon that we asked if we could translate into Vietnamese. Her grandfather did the translation and it is the only poem in the public poetry campaign that appears in two languages.
Bryan Wilson’s poem explores the weather systems unique to the Pacific Northwest and overflows with images of water, rain, and atmospheric rivers. My designer Jayme Yen and I discussed how we might display this piece in two spaces that had more infrastructure, staffing, and support to create something more ambitious. Jayme created paper cutouts on architectural plotter paper with phrases from Bryan’s poem which were then suspended by the ceiling and light fixtures. The full installation is downtown at Seattle’s Municipal Tower Gallery on Fifth Avenue, and there’s a second mini installation of the poem at Bureau of Fearless Ideas in Greenwood, North Seattle, where Bryan works as a program manager and educator.
Poet and playwright Kathya Alexander submitted a poem about displacement of black neighbors in Seattle’s Central District. I partnered with Wa Na Wari, a black arts center to display the piece on their porch to bring attention to Kathya’s poem.
Emerging poet Cindy Luong sent me a poem about her memories of Seattle Public Library and the impact that the South Park library had on her as a young person. My designer Jayme Yen created a simple design using an existing standing banner in the SPL space that evokes the verticality of a book mark which we then installed in the youth section of the library downtown. We also made a display for the South Park branch in their windows and gave the library posters and postcards of the poem for distribution.
