CAMINANTE, NO HAY CAMINO

ANTONIO MACHADO (1875 – 1939) was a Spanish poet and one of the leading figures of the Spanish literary movement known as the Generation of ’98. His work, initially modernist, evolved towards an intimate form of symbolism with romantic traits. He gradually developed a style characterized by both an engagement with humanity on one side and an almost Taoist contemplation of existence on the other, a synthesis that, according to Machado, echoed the most ancient popular wisdom. In Gerardo Diego’s words, Machado “spoke in verse and lived in poetry.”

CANINE SUPERPOWERS

MICHAEL KLEBER-DIGGS is a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator. He is the author of My Weight in Water, a memoir about his complicated relationship with lap swimming (forthcoming with Spiegel & Grau, 2026). Michael’s debut poetry collection Worldly Things won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and was published by Milkweed Editions in 2021. His poems and essays often explore themes of intimacy, community, empathy, and grace, practices he believes are simultaneously distinct and interdependent. Michael is a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Literature, and he teaches creative writing at Augsburg University and through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.

https://michaelkleberdiggs.com/

FOR CALLING THE SPIRIT BACK FROM WANDERING THE EARTH IN ITS HUMAN FEET

JOY HARJO is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019-2022 and is winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2024 Frost Medal, Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and was recently honored with a National Humanities Medal.

The author of ten books of poetry, including the highly acclaimed, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years, several plays, children’s books, and non-fiction works, and two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, her many honors include the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

As a musician and performer, Harjo has produced seven award-winning music albums including her newest, I Pray for My Enemies. She has edited three anthologies of Native literature, including When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through — A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, and Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry, the companion anthology to her signature Poet Laureate project. Harjo lives on the Muscogee Nation Reservation in Oklahoma.

https://www.joyharjo.com/

GLANCING UP

SHIZUE IWATSUKI (1896-1984) was a self-taught poet who wrote in the tanka style. A Japanese immigrant, she became a community leader in Hood River, Oregon, as well as an internationally recognized poet. In 1974, Iwatsuki’s tanka was honored by Emperor Hirohito as one of ten award winners from 32,000 worldwide submissions. The Japanese government gave her the Sixth Class, Order of the Precious Crown for her cultural achievements and community service, not only the first woman but the first Japanese American to receive this decoration from the Emperor. Hood River County named her their Woman of the Year.

At a time when only six years of schooling were required in Japan, Shizue graduated from Ashimori Entei Girls’ High School and learned practical crafts for marriage, including sewing, doll making, and flower arranging. Independent and eager to see America, nineteen year old Shizue married twenty-nine year old Kamegoro Iwatsuki and joined him when he returned to Hood River, Oregon, in 1916.

During World War II, when Americans of Japanese descent were forced to leave their West Coast homes, the Iwatsukis and youngest daughter Josie were incarcerated at internment camps in north-central California and southern Idaho. After the government’s exclusion order was rescinded, the Iwatsukis returned in 1945 to a hometown community that had gained national notoriety for the extent of its anti-Japanese actions. Iwatsuki wrote her poem that is featured on the Poetry Walk when she returned to the Hood River Valley.

In 2024, Portland Opera presented Shizue: An American Story, an opera illuminating Iwatsuki’s remarkable life embodying the concept of gaman, which means “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.”

IN A DREAM, AN ANCESTOR AND I BECOME ONE WITH THE EARTH 

VIC XOCHITL CHAVEZ is a queer disabled Mexican American poet in Chicago, IL. They hold a BA in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago, where they were an assistant editor for both Columbia Poetry Reviewand Hair Trigger. Their poetry has been published in Southside Weekly, Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT, and in Columbia College’s Poetry Review and Allium Journal. They are a senior poetry editor at Mulberry Literary, previously published in the magazine prior to taking up an editorial role. They are a co-founder of Chicago Poet Society, an artist collective focused on bringing community healing through the comfort and fluidity of poetry. They can often be found behind a film camera and buzzing somewhere between flowers.

https://www.latimes.com/delos/story/2023-11-01/latino-poetry-series-jose-olivarez-nature

https://linktr.ee/vxochitlchavez

https://www.vicxochitlchavez.com/

LOST

DAVID WAGONER (1926-2021) was recognized as the leading poet of the Pacific Northwest, often compared to his early mentor Theodore Roethke, and highly praised for his skillful, insightful and serious body of work. He won numerous prestigious literary awards including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and was nominated twice for the National Book Award. The author of ten acclaimed novels, Wagoner’s fiction has been awarded the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Award. Professor emeritus at the University of Washington, Wagoner enjoyed an excellent reputation as both a writer and a teacher of writing. He was selected to serve as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1978, replacing Robert Lowell, and was the editor of Poetry Northwest until 2002.

Born in Ohio and raised in Indiana, Wagoner was initially influenced by family ties, ethnic neighborhoods, industrial production and pollution, and the urban environment. His move to the Pacific Northwest in 1954 changed both his outlook and his poetry. Writing in the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Wagoner recalls: “when I drove down out of the Cascades and saw the region that was to become my home territory for the next thirty years, my extreme uneasiness turned into awe. I had never seen or imagined such greenness, such a promise of healing growth. Everything I saw appeared to be living ancestral forms of the dead earth where I’d tried to grow up.”

THREE DEER

TINA CASTAÑARES, a longtime resident of the mid-Columbia, loves poetry for its ambiguity, its elusiveness, its spareness, its role in expressing things that prose can never capture.  She has written poetry since childhood and reads poetry daily, often sharing poems with family and friends (whether they welcome it or not).  She’s had the privilege of being many things in her life, among them a medical doctor, film buff, public speaker, activist for peace and human rights, youth mentor, and advocate for elders, caregivers, farmworkers, immigrants, and community health workers.  Her poetry has been published in six journals and included in two Oregon anthologies. 

VIGIL

EARLE THOMPSON (1950-2006) was a Native American writer and poet. His work has been included in numerous anthologies and magazines, including 20th Century Native America Poets, Dancing on the Rim of the World, Akewon, AtlAtl, Argus, Blue Cloud Quarterly, Contact II, Greenfield Review, Prison Writing Quarterly and the Real Change anthology No Apologies. His first poetry chapbook was published by Blue Cloud Quarterly in the early 1970s; his last chapbook was published by Real Change in 2003. In a foreword to the Real Change chapbook, Sherman Alexie wrote, “His poems make me cry and laugh. His poems shake and change me. His poems are necessary, essential and elemental.”

WILD GEESE

MARY OLIVER (1935-2019) is regarded as one of America’s finest poets. She received numerous literary awards and honors, including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. A prolific writer of both poetry and prose, Oliver routinely published a new book every year or two. In 2007, she was declared the best-selling poet in the United States.

As a child, Oliver often retreated from a difficult home to the nearby woods, where she would build huts of sticks and grass and write poems. She was reticent about her private life and gave very few interviews, saying she preferred for her writing to speak for itself. She lived with her long-time partner Molly Malone Cook in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the surrounding Cape Cod landscape had a marked influence on her work.

Known for its clear and poignant observations and evocative use of the natural world, Oliver’s poetry is firmly rooted in place and the Romantic nature tradition. Her main themes were the intersection between the human and the natural world, as well as the limits of human consciousness and language in articulating such a meeting.