Join us for an evening of readings and conversation with four poets from the Pacific Northwest.

Allisa Cherry is the author of An Exodus of Sparks (Michigan State University Press) and the 2024 recipient of the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize from the RCAH Center for Poetry. Her work has appeared in journals such as TriQuarterly, The Journal, The Penn Review, and The McNeese Review and was a finalist for the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize at Persea Books and the Sewanee Review Award for Poetry. She currently lives in Portland where she teaches classes and workshops for immigrants and refugees transitioning to their lives in the U.S. and serves as a poetry editor for West Trade Review."

Carrie Aberle is a poet and essayist whose writing has appeared in literary journals and anthologies including Prairie Schooner, Image, Cream City Review, Boulevard and others. Her forthcoming poetry collection Prophet Mother was a finalist for the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. Carrie received her MFA from Pacific University and was a 2022 fellow in the Jack Straw Writers Program. She has served as a teaching assistant of creative writing at Seattle University and holds a post-MFA certificate in teaching creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Carrie grew up in a German-American farming community in rural Kansas on Kaw, Osage, and Jiwere land, and now lives near Seattle on Suquamish land.

H. G. Dierdorff is a poet from the scablands and pine savannas of eastern Washington, the ancestral, unceded land of the interior Salish people. She is the author of Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter, which was selected for the 2022 Betsy Joiner Flanagan Award in Poetry and was published by the University of Nevada Press in 2024. Her work has been awarded a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and appeared in journals such as Cut Bank, Arkansas International, and Willow Springs. You can currently find them in Oregon, where they volunteer with Write Around Portland and teach poetry through Literary Arts.

Jennifer Pons is originally from Chicago, Jennifer Pons has lived in the Portland area for the past 26 years. She's a writer and an educator, and she teaches writing at Clackamas Community College. Her poems appear in Portland Review, West Trade Review, Red Rocks Literary Review, Ninth Letter, Mom Egg Review, CutBank Online, Whale Road Review, and others. A finalist for the Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry and the Pamet River Prize and a semifinalist for the Black River Chapbook Competition, she holds MFAs from the University of Arizona and Seattle Pacific University. If the garden is a metaphor (and it is), she lives it in the real with her partner and their children. No metaphor (every metaphor) required. She's currently pursuing a credential in biblio-poetry therapy (and is happy to share about what the heck that means).