February 19, 2009

Samuel Green was born in Sedro-Woolley, Washington, and raised in the nearby fishing and mill town of Anacortes. A 30-year veteran of the Poetry-in-the-Schools program, he has taught in literally hundreds of classrooms. Sam’s poems have appeared in hundreds of journals, including Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Poet & Critic, Poetry East, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and Puerto del Sol. Among his ten collections of poems are Vertebrae: Poems 1972–1994 (Eastern Washington University Press) and The Grace of Necessity (Carnegie-Mellon University Press), which won the 2008 Washington State Book Award for Poetry. He has lived for 26 years off the grid on remote Waldron Island off the Washington coast in a log house he built himself, and is, with his wife Sally, coeditor of the award-winning Brooding Heron Press. In December, 2007, he was named by Governor Christine Gregoire to a two-year term as the first poet laureate for the State of Washington, and in January of 2009, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry.

Read more about Sam and the Washington State poet laureate program.

Author photo by Sean McDowell.

Kim-An Lieberman is a writer of Vietnamese and Jewish-American descent, born in Rhode Island and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley and currently teaches writing and literature at Seattle’s Lakeside School. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Zyzzyva, Calyx, Threepenny Review, and the anthology Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace. Her first book, Breaking the Map, was published by Blue Begonia Press in 2008. Kim-An has a website at www.kalieberman.com.