Seattleâs premier avian scribe follows
Mozartâs Starling with this look into how the âinnate connection between humans and the natural world is coming to the fore in a new way as academic research rises in support of truthsâ that are age-old. With an erudite and roving wit, Haupt writes about how trees can communicate with each other, and how we can connect with them simply by walking in the woods. And, of course, there are still birds.
Out now
Swimming to Freedom: My Escape from China and the Cultural Revolution by Kent Wong
His father was a Chinese official, but when the Cultural Revolution hit, Kent Wong and his siblings were separated into different villages. Eventually, heâd join an underground movement and become one of a half million who fled to Hong Kong via an open water swim that in some spots stretched six miles. His trip ultimately took him to Seattle. He recalls that journey in clear, direct prose in this memoir. You can read an excerpt
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Teach This Poem, though developed with a classroom in mind, can be easily adapted for remote learning, hybrid learning models, or in-person classes. Please see our suggestions for how to adapt this lesson for remote or blended learning. We have also noted suggestions when applicable and will continue to add to these suggestions online.
Featured Poem
Rizzuto, Angelo, photographer.
Woman by a Newsstand. United States New York New York State, 1954. [08/54] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2020636126/.
Classroom Activities
The following activities and questions are designed to help your students use their noticing skills to move through the poem and develop their thinking about its meaning with confidence, using what they’ve noticed as evidence for their interpretations. Read more about the framework upon which these activities are based.
Illustration by Myriam Wares, Published 14:35, Apr. 14, 2021
In 2017, the head of Canada’s largest labour organization sat down with Ahmed Hussen, then minister of immigration, to discuss an idea that had bubbled up from a building trades union in Toronto. The Canadian Labour Congress suggested testing a program that would invite an underground workforce into the light. According to the CLC’s estimates, thousands of carpenters, concrete finishers, and other foreign tradespeople were working in the region without the legal right to do so. Some had expired work permits; others had originally entered Canada as students or tourists and never had a work permit. With the construction sector expecting a quarter of its workforce to retire in the coming years, the building boom had come to rest on the labour of under-the-table workers. Instead of tracking workers down and deporting them, argued the CLC, why not set them on the path to citizenship?
Washington state names its first Native American poet laureate
A member of the Lummi Nation, Bellingham writer Rena Priest will bring attention to local poetry, climate change and the loss of vital natural resources.
by
On the first day of National Poetry Month, Bellingham-based Rena Priest is named the new Washington State Poet Laureate. She ll be a statewide ambassador for poetry during a two-year term. (Hillary Cagey)
After years of entering poetry contests and submitting to literary journals, Rena Priest had developed a habit: She would slip a copy of a New Yorker cartoon into the envelope along with her work. The image showed a car with a driver and passenger stuck in a sea of traffic. The caption: “Try honking again.”
Claudia Castro Luna is
Seattle’s Civic Poet, from 2015-2017 and is the author of the Pushcart nominated Killing Marías (Two Sylvias Press) and
This City, (Floating Bridge Press) and the creator of the acclaimed Seattle Poetic Grid. She is also a Hedgebrook and VONA alumna, a 2014 Jack Straw fellow, the recipient of a King County 4Culture grant and an individual artist grant from Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture. 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 poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest,