July 16, 2009

Lorraine Ferra was born and raised in Vallejo, California. She was a nun for seven years in Fremont, California, where she majored in theology and education. After leaving the convent, she lived in Salt Lake City and pursued seminars in modern and contemporary poetry and creative writing under the directorship of Robert Mezey at the University of Utah. Lorraine has been a poet-in-residence since 1979 with various state arts commissions, working with students and teachers in Washington, Utah, Nevada, Delaware, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Her poems, critical reviews, and translations of Portuguese poetry have appeared in journals such as Bellowing Ark, CutBank, The Florida Review, Poet & Critic, Quarterly West, and Seattle Review, among many others. She is the author of Eating Bread, a chapbook of poems, and A Crow Doesn’t Need A Shadow: A Guide To Writing Poetry From Nature. She has lived in Port Townsend, Washington for twenty years.

Holly Hughes is the editor of Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease, published by Kent State University Press as part of their Literature and Medicine series this spring. Her chapbook Boxing the Compass won the Floating Bridge chapbook contest in 2007 and her poems have appeared in various anthologies, including America Zen: A Gathering of Poets, Dancing with Joy: 99 Poems, and, most recently, Working the Woods, Working the Sea, Come Together: Imagine Peace and The Poet’s Guide to the Birds. A graduate of the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program, she has taught poetry workshops for the Edmonds Write on the Sound writing conference, as well as nature-writing workshops at the North Cascades Institute. She spends summers working as a naturalist on boats in southeast Alaska and winters teaching writing at Edmonds Community College, where she codirects the Convergence Writers Series.