Claudia Castro Luna is Washington’s State Poet Laureate (2018 – 2020) and served as Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet (2015-2017).
She is the author the collection Killing Marías (Two Sylvias Press) finalist for the WA State Book Award 2018, and the chapbook This City (Floating Bridge Press).
Born in El Salvador she came to the United States in 1981. She has an MA in Urban Planning, a teaching certificate and an MFA in Poetry.
Her non-fiction has most recently appeared in the anthology This is the Place (Seal Press) Living in English and Spanish,
Claudia writes and teaches in Seattle where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.
See Featured Poems for a poem she plans on reading.
Shankar Narayan explores identity, power, mythology, and technology in a world where the body is flung across borders yet possesses unrivaled power to transcend them.
Shankar is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the 2017 Flyway Sweet Corn Poetry Prize, and has been a fellow at Kundiman and at Hugo House.
He is a 4Culture grant recipient for Claiming Space, a project to lift the voices of writers of color, and his chapbook, Postcards From the New World, won the Paper Nautilus Debut Series chapbook prize.
Shankar draws strength from his global upbringing and from his work as a civil rights attorney for the ACLU. In Seattle, he awakens to the wonders of Cascadia every day, but his heart yearns east to his other hometown, Delhi.
Connect with him at shankarnarayan.net.
See Featured Poems for a poem he will read.
