January 17, 2013

Kathleen Flenniken is the 2012–2014 Poet Laureate of Washington State. Her first book, Famous (University of Nebraska, 2006), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association and a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her new collection, Plume (University of Washington Press, 2012), selected by Linda Bierds for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, is a meditation on the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington State. Flenniken’s awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust and a 2012 Pushcart prize.

Tim Kelly was born in Ohio, educated in Oberlin and Boston, and has been in the Northwest for more than thirty years, living in Olympia since 1982, working as a physical therapist, and writing poetry. His poems revolve around the body, its fragility and resiliency, and the intimacy of working on them. He has four volumes of poetry, the second of which won the Field Prize, and the third the Floating Bridge chapbook competition. He’s had poems in The Iowa Review, Northwest Review, Seattle Review, and many other journals.