EXPERIENCE POETRY ON THE SALISH SEA
Artistic Curator
Kathyrn Hunt
Kathryn Hunt is the author of When You Wake Near the Sea (forthcoming in spring 2027), winner of the 2026 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award, and of two earlier collections, Long Way Through Ruin and Seed Wheel. Autumn House Press selected her memoir, The Last Chance Motel, as runner-up for its 2026 AHP Nonfiction Award. She’s translated the work of Catalan poet Maria-Mercè Marçal and is the recipient of residencies and awards from Ucross, Artists Trust, Helen Whiteley Center, Hedgebrook, and Joya AIR (Spain). She directed films earlier in her creative life; her first film, No Place Like Home, premiered at the Venice Film Festival, in Italy. She is the founder and artistic curator of Poetry on the Salish Sea.
2026 Free Public Readings
Upcoming Poetry on the Salish Sea Readings
Poetry on the Salish Sea brings acclaimed poets and audiences together at Fort Worden State Park for free public readings that celebrate poetry, place, and community. Join Centrum this fall and winter for two evenings of poetry at Wheeler Theater, followed by receptions at Taps.Fall Poetry Reading
Melissa Kwasny, Rick Barot & Kathryn Hunt
Saturday, October 24, 2026 | 7:00 PM
Wheeler Theater, Fort Worden State Park
Free and open to the public
Join poets Melissa Kwasny, Rick Barot, and Kathryn Hunt for an autumn evening of poetry exploring place, memory, identity, perception, and our relationship to the landscapes we inhabit.
A free reception at Taps will follow the reading.
Winter Poetry Reading with Copper Canyon Press
Sherwin Bitsui, Pádraig Ó Tuama & Javier Peñalosa M.
Saturday, December 12, 2026 | 7:00 PM
Wheeler Theater, Fort Worden State Park
Free and open to the public
Centrum and Copper Canyon Press come together for a special winter reading featuring acclaimed poets Sherwin Bitsui, Pádraig Ó Tuama, and Javier Peñalosa M. The evening celebrates the poets’ work, the longstanding relationship between Centrum and Copper Canyon Press, and Port Townsend’s enduring connection to poetry.
A free reception at Taps will follow the reading.
2026 Poets
2026 Fall Workshop
2026 Fall Workshop w/ Rick Barot, Kathryn Hunt, and Melissa Kwasny
October 21 – 25, 2026
Fort Worden State Park
Port Townsend, Washington
Registration is open now. Here are the options to participate:
- $750 for just tuition
- $950 for tuition and meals
- $1,200 for tuition, meals, and lodging
Workshop Description
Centrum’s newest program, Poetry on the Salish Sea, offers a five-day poetry workshop, October 21 – 25, 2026, led by renowned poets Rick Barot, Kathryn Hunt, and Melissa Kwasny. With our time together, we will focus on the art and craft of poetry, including generative workshops, craft lectures, readings by teachers and participants, and thoughtful responses to your work. Poetry encourages us to dive deep, speak from the heart, go where the poem summons. All participants will have opportunities to work with Rick, Kathryn, and Melissa in concentrated sessions, and you will also have time to begin new work, polish existing drafts, and listen to the whispers of your own voice. Registration includes a private dorm room at Fort Worden State Park, a spectacular 433-acre expanse on the coast of the Salish Sea, with miles of walking trails and, on clear days, snow-capped mountains on both east and west horizons. Registration also includes delicious organic meals prepared fresh on campus. This immersive experience is designed to cultivate fresh energy, lead us down unexplored pathways, and inspire community. Quiet time in a dazzling place.
Faculty Bios
Kathryn Hunt is a poet and writer and makes her home on the coast of the Salish Sea. She is author of two poetry collections, Long Way Through Ruin and Seed Wheel and two chapbooks, The Country I Come From and She Who Walks the Earth. Her poems have appeared in the Orion, Radar, Missouri Review, Poetry Northwest, and Carolina Quarterly Review. She’s translated the work Catalan poet Maria-Mercè Marçal and is the recipient of residencies and awards from Ucross, Willapa Bay AIR, Artists Trust, Helen Whiteley Center, Hedgebrook, and Joya AIR (Spain). She directed films earlier in her life; her first film No Place Like Home premiered at the Venice Film Festival. She’s recently completed a memoir, The Last Chance Motel. Her poetry manuscript Paper Boat was a finalist for 2026 Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Prize. She is the instigator and artistic curator of Poetry on the Salish Sea, a poetry series that brings poets from around the Pacific Northwest and well beyond to the Olympic Peninsula, a lush expanse that is home to poetry lovers and orca whales and hundreds of miles of deep waterways.
Melissa Kwasny is the author of seven collections of poems, including The Cloud Path, Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today, Pictograph, and The Nine Senses. A portion of Pictograph received the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. Kwasny is also the author of Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision, and has edited multiple anthologies, including Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800–1950 and, with M.L. Smoker, I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Boston Review, and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral, among many other journals. She lives in Montana and is a former Montana Poet Laureate, a position she shared with M.L. Smoker.
Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. His fourth book of poems, The Galleons, was longlisted for the National Book Award. His collections include The Darker Fall, Want (a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and winner of the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize), and Chord, all from Sarabande Books. Rick's work has appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University. He lives in Tacoma and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop. His newest book, Moving the Bones (Milkweed), will be published in 2024.
2026 Fall Workshop Descriptions & Craft Lectures
Craft Lectures
Rick Barot
The Prose Poem
In American poetry during the last decade, there have been noteworthy instances when a particular form gained a heightened visibility because it seemed to manifest the aesthetic and social zeitgeists of the moment. Think of erasures. Or the sonnet. Or the Golden Shovel. This is recently true of the prose poem. The form has a rich history, encompassing brilliant canonical works like Charles Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee. Now, the form has taken on renewed freshness and urgency, serving as a site for poetry’s ongoing confrontations with silence, loss, wonder, history, memory, desire, joy. In this craft class, we’ll look at some powerful prose poems by a thrilling variety of writers, from Robert Hass to Diana Khoi Nguyen and discuss the question of what makes a prose poem a poem at all, when it eschews the line, which is usually thought of as a poem’s defining characteristic.
Kathryn Hunt
REvision
After the arrival of the first draft comes REvision. A time to peer into what we have and what the poem might become. A liminal time of transformation. Sometimes revision comes lickety-split like a hungry dog to its dish. Sometimes it takes years to discover exactly what the poem is trying to say and how to say it. Revision is a moment we can open to, trying to understand where the poem needs to go next and how to bring our craft to bear on this mysterious and potent process. Our job is to find the exact words—words!—that come as close to the poem’s meaning and impulse as we can get. We’ll mine the archives and look at early, mid-stream, and late drafts of poets like Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, and Seamus Heaney, considering line breaks, word choice, compression and expansion, and titles. Revision is where the magic is.
Melissa Kwasny
Developing and Sustaining a Creative Practice
How do we find the time to become the writer we wish to be? How do we feel inspired on a daily basis when we feel we have nothing to say? How do we match our practice to our urgencies and necessities? Referencing the creative practices of a wide variety of poets and writers, including, among others, Etal Aden, Brian Blanchfield, Victoria Chang, C.A. Conrad, Richard Siken, Rainer Maria Rilke, and René Char, this lecture will argue for the importance of establishing an individualized and sustainable writing discipline and share concrete and imaginative ways that writers have side-stepped writer's block, encouraged ongoing inspiration, and created practices in response to particular crises of form or content.
Workshops
Rick Barot
The Art of Description
In this workshop, we’ll examine how the work of description is a crucial part of the “world building” that we do in each poem we write. In poets like Elizabeth Bishop, we often prize description as a means of conveying clarity. But description can also be dynamically varied, encompassing opacity and other ways of withholding clarity. We’ll look at poets who present different kinds of visual complexity in their poems, as models for the complexity we can employ in our own poems. The workshop will end with a writing prompt that will put these ideas about description into action.
Kathryn Hunt
Prayers, Blessings, Curses, Laments
Prayer and curses are enduring poetic impulses. We’ve been raising our voices to beseech, bless, and praise—and to curse, lament, and condemn—since we first discovered language. Think Enheduanna, Beowulf, Antigone. Contemporary poets are no different. In this workshop we’ll consider the praise work of poets like Ada Limon, Chris Abani, C.P. Cavafy, and Naomi Shihab Nye, then mine the rich and eclectic tradition of some of the masters of the curse and lament, like Sappho, Akhmatova, Ilya Kaminsky, and Tracy K. Smith. During our workshop you’ll have prompts to work from and time to write drafts of your own prayers and curses, digging deep into feelings of gratitude and praise—and among the ruins—for whatever is waiting there. You’ll leave with the beginnings of poems you can later revise and reimagine.
Melissa Kwasny
Writing from Loss
Grief is universal. All peoples, and most animals, experience it. It is, paradoxically, also individual; we each suffer grief uniquely. It is perhaps our strongest emotion and yet the most difficult to describe to others. In this generative workshop, we will explore the ways that poems can provide a language for our deepest losses, examining work by Lucy Brock-Broido, Louise Gluck, Joy Harjo, Mark Doty, and Victoria Chang, among others, and beginning drafts of poems that pay particular attention to strategies employed in the traditional elegy, the epistolary poem, and the extended metaphor.
2026 Fall Workshop Schedule
October 2026 Poetry Workshop Schedule
Tentative Schedule
Wednesday, October 21
4:00p - Registration/check-in
5:30 – 6:30p Dinner
7:00p Orientation and Reception
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday
7:45 – 8:45a Breakfast
9:00 – 11:00a Generative workshops (one with each instructor, Rick, Melissa, Kathryn)
11:00a – 12:15p Free time to write, wander, and explore
12:15 – 1:15p Lunch
1:15 – 2:45p Free time to write, wander, and explore
3:00 – 4:00p Craft lecture
4:15 – 5:30p Small group gathering/sharing
5:30 – 6:30p Dinner
7:00p Participant readings Thursday & Friday evenings
Saturday Evening
7:00p Faculty reading at Wheeler - Rick, Kathryn, Melissa
Reception after at Taps
Sunday
7:45 – 8:45a Breakfast
11am Check out and Departure
Poetry on the Salish Sea Poets
2025
June 28, 2025
Elise Patchen
Sophic Cabot Black
Kathryn Hunt
October 5, 2025
Sherman Alexie
December 13, 2025
Jennifer Chang
Leila Chatti
Jenny George
2024
June 30, 2024
Anna Odessa Linzer
Tanya Holtland
Cedar Sigo
July 28, 2024
Rae Armantrout
Kay Ryan
Heather McHugh
August 25, 2024
Erin Malone
Luther Hughes
Arianne True
September 29, 2024
Rick Barot
Melissa Kwasny
Jacqueline Allen Trimble
2023
May 21, 2023
Tess Gallagher
Alice Derry
Kathryn Hunt
June 25, 2023
Kathleen Flenniken
Peter Pereira
T. Clear
July 23, 2023
Arianne True
Laura Da'
Lisbeth White
August 20, 2023
Sharon Carter
Sheila Bender
Samantha Della-DeVoney
September 10, 2023
Sati Mookherjee
Shin Yu Pai
Caitlin Scarano
October 1, 2023
Gary Copeland Lilley
Ruby Hansen Murray
Kate Miller
