Third Place Books is delighted to welcome contributors to the Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry for a presentation and celebration of their work at our Seward Park store! The evening will include readings from local 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. This event is free and open to the public.

For important updates, registration is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!

Cascadia stretches from Southeast Alaska to Northern California and from the Pacific Ocean to the Continental Divide. Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry blends art and science to celebrate this diverse yet interconnected region through natural and cultural histories, poetry, and illustrations. Organized into 13 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!

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About Cascadia Field Guide. . .

Science and art combine to create a poetic ecology–a field guide and literary anthology that celebrates the natural beauty of the Cascadia bioregion

Have you ever been so filled up with the wonder of a place that it wants to spill out as a song? Well, here is the songbook. I imagine walking through a forest and pausing to read these illuminating pages aloud to a listening cedar or a dipper. There are field guides that help us to see, and to name, and to know; Cascadia Field Guide does all of that and more. This is a guide to relationship, a gift in reciprocity for the gifts of the land. – Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass

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. All writers and artists have deep ties to the region.

This project was supported, in part, by a grant from 4Culture

Betsy Aoki is a poet, game producer and fiction writer. Her debut poetry collection about women in tech, Breakpoint, was a National Poetry Series Finalist and winner of the Patricia Bibby First Book Award.

Kathleen Flenniken‘s most recent poetry collection is Post Romantic (University of Washington Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in the anthologies Poetry Unbound, I Sing the Salmon Home, and Cascadia Field Guide, all published in 2023. She served as Washington State Poet Laureate from 2012 – 2014.

Rebecca Hoogs is the author of Self-Storage (Stephen F. Austin University Press) which was a finalist for the 2013 Washington State Book Award in Poetry, and a chapbook, Grenade (GreenTower Press). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, AGNI, FIELD, Crazyhorse, and others. She is the Executive Director of Seattle Arts & Lectures.

Sierra Nelson is a Seattle-based poet and performance artist, author of The Lachrymose Report (PoetryNW Editions) and collaborations with Loren Erdrich, I Take Back the Sponge Cake and Isolation. Her poems have appeared on Metro Buses and publications such as I Sing the Salmon Home, Narrative, Tin House, and Pleiades.

Kevin Craft directs the Written Arts Program at Everett College. His books include Solar Prominence (2004), Vagrants & Accidentals (2017), and the forthcoming Traverse (2023). He’s a recent Writer in Residence at Olympic NP, and at the UW Rome Center. Editor of Poetry Northwest from 2009 – 2016, he now serves Executive Editor / Publisher of Poetry NW Editions.

Christianne Balk loves open water swimming and the rhythms of everyday street talk. Her video-poem “Nets” (created with performing/visual artists Karen Yarborough, Norris Carlson, and Heather McMordie) was produced by the Creature Conserve/ Endangered Species Coalition. Books include The Holding Hours (UW Press), Desiring Flight, and Bindweed.

Laura Da’ is a poet and teacher. A lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest, Da’ studied creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her first book, Tributaries, won the 2016 American Book Award, and her latest book, Instruments of the True Measure, won the Washington State Book Award.

Kathleen Flenniken‘s most recent poetry collection is Post Romantic (University of Washington Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in the anthologies Poetry Unbound, I Sing the Salmon Home, and Cascadia Field Guide, all published in 2023. She served as Washington State Poet Laureate from 2012 – 2014.

Rebecca Hoogs is the author of Self-Storage (Stephen F. Austin University Press) which was a finalist for the 2013 Washington State Book Award in Poetry, and a chapbook, Grenade (GreenTower Press). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, AGNI, FIELD, Crazyhorse, and others. She is the Executive Director of Seattle Arts & Lectures.

Robert Lashley was a 2016 Jack Straw Fellow, Artist Trust Fellow, and a nominee for a Stranger Genius Award. His books include Green River Valley, Up South, and The Homeboy Songs. His poetry has appeared in The Seattle Review of Books, NAILED, Poetry Northwest, McSweeney’s, and The Cascadia Review, among others.

Claudia Castro Luna is an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate fellow (2019), WA State Poet Laureate (2018 – 2021) and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet (2015-2018). She is the author of Cipota Under The Moon (Tia Chucha Press, 2022) shortlisted for WA State 2023 Book Award in poetry, One River, A Thousand Voices (Chin Music Press); Killing Marías (Two Sylvias Press, 2017); and the chapbook This City (Floating Bridge Press).

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 five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the winner of prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, Hugo House, Jack Straw, Flyway, and River Heron. 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 at the intersection of civil rights and technology. 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.

Sierra Nelson is a Seattle-based poet and performance artist, author of The Lachrymose Report (PoetryNW Editions) and collaborations with Loren Erdrich, I Take Back the Sponge Cake and Isolation. Her poems have appeared on Metro Buses and publications such as I Sing the Salmon Home, Narrative, Tin House, and Pleiades.

About Third Place Books

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle’s Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.