Plan to attend 10th Skagit River Poetry Festival

It is time to buy your tickets for the 10th Biennial Skagit River Poetry Festival, May 17-20, in La Conner. The celebrated four-day event, with performances, readings, workshops and discussions, features some of the most renowned and diverse names in poetry, including Robert Pinsky, three-time U.S. Poet Laureate, and award-winning poet Ellen Bass. Her most recent book is “Like a Beggar.”

The festival opens Thursday with the Poets Table Soiree, a mixer that includes wine, delicious locally sourced hors d’oeuvres and a chance for attendees to meet the poets one-on-one. The reading is titled Dear America: Poems of Resistance and Hope in a Time of Turmoil: An Evening with Robert Pinsky, Ada Limon, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and Brian Turner. Music, by Hot Damn Scandal, starts at 7:30 p.m.

The festival’s poets, reflect cultures from around the world including:

• Matthew Dickman, award- winning Portland poet and author of All-American Poem

• Ada Limon, author of Bright Dead Things and finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry

• Quenton Baker, two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of This Glittering Republic

• Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, American writer of Palestinian, Syrian and Jordanian heritage.

• Tina Chang the first female to be named Poet Laureate of Brooklyn

• Irish poet Tony Curtis returns with his new book Approximately in the key of C’

Northwest poets include Claudia Castro Luna, the new Washington State Poet Laureate and Seattle’s first Civic Poet, Seattle Civic poet Anastacia Renee Tolbert, former Washington state poet laureate, Sam Green, Youth Poet Laureate of Seattle, Lily Baumgart and La Conner Poet Georgia Johnson. Seattle poets attending, who work with the Poets in the Schools project, are Daemond Arrindell, Jourdan Keith and Matt Gano.

Sunday offers writing workshops with festival poets. A full schedule is on the website.

Tickets are for purchase at.skagitriverpoetry.org/festival/festival-tickets/ Festival passes include everything except Poet Soiree and Workshops. Special discounts are available for seniors over 62; students attend free with a student ID. Unless sold out, tickets will also be available at the door. The biennial festival takes place in venues throughout La Conner. “The festival turns La Conner into a town filled with poetry, from its churches to its museums, its community center and its bed and breakfasts,” says Seattle poet Susan Rich. “Where else can a person sleep, eat, live and breathe poetry for a spring weekend?”

The festival, one of the largest celebrations of poetry on the West Coast, is put on by the Skagit River Poetry Foundation, a non-profit organization that brings poets into school classrooms year-round to promote literacy, an appreciation of language and youth participation in culturally diverse communities. All proceeds benefit the foundation’s mission to support lifelong literacy and cultural diversity through the writing, reading, performing and teaching of poetry in Northwest Washington schools and communities.

For more information: skagitriverpoetry.org, [email protected] or 360-399-1550.