Afrose Fatima Ahmed
afrose fatima ahmed (Seattle) is a hybrid Texan-Washingtonian who writes poems on emerald city streets and at the tops of evergreen trees. she is the daughter of Muslim immigrants from India. Her body and her art live in liminal spaces: polar US borderlands, the division between land and sea, the place where urban density drops off into rural solitude. afrose comes to poetry as just one avenue for creating experiences of beauty and communion for herself and other people. her writing emphasizes all the senses and acknowledges a world in which humans are suffering and experiencing bliss against wild landscapes that are simultaneously living and dying.
www.instagram.com/afrosefatimaahmed
David Francis
Dave Francis draws from his work experience as an archaeologist, visual art curator, college teacher, and public art coordinator. For nearly 30 years his poems have appeared in literary journals like Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, New Orleans Review, Switched on Gutenberg, and many others. His artwork has been juried into many group shows, including the upcoming Biennale at Bellevue Arts Museum. Francis currently serves as Public Art Coordinator for the City of Shoreline WA
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-francis-60618317
https://www.facebook.com/dave.francis.796
http://shorelinewa.gov/art
Dave Francis draws from his work experience as an archaeologist, visual art curator, college teacher, and public art coordinator. For nearly 30 years his poems have appeared in literary journals like Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, New Orleans Review, Switched on Gutenberg, and many others. His artwork has been juried into many group shows, including the upcoming Biennale at Bellevue Arts Museum. Francis currently serves as Public Art Coordinator for the City of Shoreline WA
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-francis-60618317
https://www.facebook.com/dave.francis.796
http://shorelinewa.gov/art
Janet Norman Knox
Of her poem for Meditation Circuit, Knox writes: I sought to make the poem’s form a small color block, but washed—without title, punctuation, or right-justification—to visually mimic the color fields on the banners. I picked up your e-circuit use of cell phone as a fresh, current component of meditation. Ageless mediation has always been electrical in the brain and nervous system. Today, the e-device may be used to heighten and enhance meditation and ubiety in nature.
Seven-time Pushcart nominee and finalist for the Discovery/The Nation Award, Janet Norman Knox's poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, 5 AM, Crab Creek Review, Rhino, Bellingham Review, Fourth River, Diner, Seattle Review, Adirondack Review, and Diagram. Her play, 9 Gs and the Red Telephone, was published by Feminist Studies. She received the Ruskin Poetry Prize (Red Hen Press) and the Los Angeles Review nominated her for Best New Poets. Her chapbook, Eastlake Cleaners when Quality & Price Count [a romance], received the Concrete Wolf Editor's Award.
http://www.rattle.com/ereviews/knoxeastlake.htm <http://www.rattle.com/ereviews/knoxeastlake.htm>
Janet was commissioned by eARTh to write and perform the play, ArtiFact Pattern, Observations on the Behavior of Homo Sapiens in Change.
Synopsis: What if naturalist David Attenborough collaborated with artist Meredith Monk, satirist Tom Lehrer, and storyteller Spaulding Gray to describe Climate Change and the human species in it? Bainbridge Island muse Janet Norman Knox stages her performance prose poem, ArtiFact Pattern with the humor and heaviness of climate and the Alaskan Way Viaduct in flux—weighing in on what both tell us about ourselves. Built on giant carbon feet, the viaduct is a monument to climate change—our Roman aqueduct, sending carbon like water to quench the empire's thirst. Climate change has many facts to connect and our very human brains want to decipher the patterns in poetry, music, humor, dance, in the quandaries of a society speeding headlong into an uncertainty where we may collide with ourselves.
Janet collaborates with artists Anne Beffel (Jack Straw Foundation and Duwamish Revealed Grants), Vaughn Bell (4Culture and Duwamish Revealed Grants), and Kristin Tollefson (AntiInaugural Butoh). Janet is an entrepreneur and Environmental Geochemist, her company turning 31.
Mercedes Lawry
Mercedes has published poetry in such journals as Poetry, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, and Harpur Palate. Thrice-nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she’s published three chapbooks, the most recent, “In the Early Garden With Reason”, was selected by Molly Peacock for the 2018 WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her manuscript “Small Measures” was selected for the Vachel Lindsay Poetry Prize from Twelve Winters Press and will be published soon. She was a finalist for the 2017 Airlie Press Prize and the 2017 Wheelbarrow Press Book Prize. She’s also published short fiction, essays as well as stories and poems for children. She lives in Seattle.
Find "In the Early Garden With Reason" at www.amazon.com/Early-Garden-Reason-Mercedes-Lawry/dp/171739468X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1540490232&sr=8-1&keywords=mercedes+lawry
Tom Stiles
Tom is a writer, meditator, and sound engineer in Seattle, WA