Thanks to Tod Marshall for including me in his Washington State anthology of poetry WA129.

Poets & Writers funded a couple of readings that I did in the Seattle area this spring and asked me to blog about the experiences.

I’m very proud of the work that I did with Jack Straw last year and this podcast wherein I speak on identity, culture, motherhood and community and share the story of my first journey to Taiwan nearly 20 years ago.

In December, Jack Straw sponsored its last event of the 2016 writers in residence program. Writers were partnered with songwriters and I had a chance to work with Seattle musician Tai Shan. Tai wrote a piece based on my essay in the Jack Straw anthology and stories that I shared with her about my ancestors. We performed the piece together onstage.

I installed about 300 poetry balloons printed with two different haiku at Redmond Lights this year. They were given away for free – all within about half an hour to happy children.

Read at Poets in the Park a few weekends back and reunited with one of my oldest friends, my classmate Christopher Luna from the Jack Kerouac School. We studied together at Naropa nearly 20 years ago and worked together for the fundraising department catering fancy parties. Many of the early poems in my book Equivalence were about those strange times in Boulder. Chris looks pretty much the same as I remember him, with some grey in his beard these days. Chris is now Poet Laureate of Clark County (Vancouver, WA).

I’m excited to share that I’ll be part of the 2017-18 Speaker Bureau for Humanities Washington.

Thanks to Donna Miscolta and Debra Ross for hosting me at a special program on race and social equity for King County employees.

I’m having an onstage conversation with rapper/novelist Kate Tempest on her new novel The Bricks that Built the Houses tomorrow at 7 p.m. at Elliott Bay.