The Stafford Challenge
Guest Poet Events

Starting January 17th, each month we will offer a Guest Poet Zoom event featuring accomplished poets who'll impart their wisdom, share their work, offer inspiration, and celebrate the magic of poetry. 

Please explore our growing list of poets below. 
We are in correspondence with other poets, who will be announced upon agreement.

Please note that links to books below are affiliate links, and I may make a small percentage for each sale. The funds help keep this site running. Thanks!

Kim Stafford

Past Poet Laureate of Oregon


Friday, January 17, 5pm PT

Kim Stafford, founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, teaches and travels to raise the human spirit. He is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft,  100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared, and Singer Come from Afar. His most recent poetry collection is As the Sky Begins to Change (Red Hen, 2024), and his poem A Proclamation for Peace has been translated in over 50 languages and published as a remarkable book by the same name. He has taught writing in dozens of schools and community centers, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan. In 2018 he was named Oregon’s 9th Poet Laureate by Governor Kate Brown for a two-year term.

Erika Meitner


Thursday, February 13, 5pm PT

Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010)—a 2009 National Poetry Series winner; Copia (BOA Editions, 2014); Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry; and Useful Junk (BOA Editions, 2022). Her poems have been published most recently in The New Yorker, Orion, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, Poetry, and elsewhere. Meitner is currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also directs the MFA program in Creative Writing and the Conney Project on Jewish Arts. Her newest book of poems, Assembled Audience, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2026.

Vince Gotera

Poet Laureate of Iowa

Thursday, March 20, 5pm PT

Vince Gotera is Poet Laureate of Iowa. He taught at the University of Northern Iowa for almost 30 years. Edited the North American Review (2000-2016) and Star*Line, the print journal of the international Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (2017-2020).

Poetry collections include Dragonfly, Ghost Wars, Fighting Kite, The Coolest Month. and Dragons & Rayguns. Books in circulation include a chapbook, Corona: Virus, written with the poet Lee Harlin Bahan; Aswang Love, a novel-in-poems about two mythical monsters in love; and Pacific Crossing. Recent poems in Dreams & Nightmares, The Ekphrastic Review, failed haiku, The MacGuffin, Philippines Graphic (Philippines), Rattle, Rosebud, The Wild Word (Germany), Yellow Medicine Review, and the anthologies Multiverse (UK), Dear America, and Hay(na)ku 15. About his poetry process, Gotera says, “I love to work in intricate poetic forms, for example, the terza rima haiku sonnet, which I invented in the late ‘70s; hay(na)ku, a form invented by Eileen Tabios and which I had the privilege of naming; and curtal sonnets."

Gotera is the bassist of the band Deja Blue and the guitarist of Groovy News, a duo with his daughter Amelia. He blogs at The Man with the Blue Guitar. That blog title reflects his love for the color blue, in all its dynamic shades and flavors: cobalt, electric, royal, robin's-egg, navy, cerulean, teal, indigo, sky.

Carrie Fountain

Former Poet Laureate of Texas

Tuesday, April 8, 5pm PT

Carrie Fountain is a poet, novelist, children’s book author, and screenwriter. She is the author of three poetry collections, The Life, Instant Winner, and Burn Lake, winner of the National Poetry Series Award, and the novel I’m Not Missing. Her children’s book, The Poem Forest, tells the story of American poet W.S. Merwin and the palm forest he grew from scratch on the island of Maui. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review and The New Yorker, among many others. In 2019, Fountain was named Poet Laureate of Texas. She lives in Austin.

    Keetje Kuipers

    Tuesday, May 20, 5pm PT

    Keetje Kuipers’ fourth collection of poetry, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, was the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award. Her poetry and prose have appeared in American Poetry Review, New York Times Magazine, and Poetry, and have been honored by publication in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Keetje has been a Stegner Fellow, NEA Literature Fellow in Creative Writing, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. She lives with her wife and children in Montana, where she is Editor of Poetry Northwest.

      Philip Metres

      Thursday, August 14, 5pm PT

      Philip Metres has written twelve books, including Fugitive/Refuge (2024) and Shrapnel Maps (2020). Winner of three Arab American Book Awards, a Guggenheim, and two NEA fellowships and a Pushcart Prize, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University. For three decades, he has worked with organizations for peace and justice, including Tikkun, Jewish Voice for Peace, the Palestine Youth Movement, Students for Justice in Palestine, and We Are Not Numbers. He invites all people of conscience to commit to work for the freedom, justice, and peace of the peoples of Palestine and Israel.

        Stuart Kestenbaum

        Former Poet Laureate of Maine

        Thursday, September 18, 5pm PT

        Stuart Kestenbaum is the author of six collections of poems, most recently Things Seemed to Be Breaking (Deerbrook Editions 2021), and a collection of essays The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press). He served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016-2021, and was the host of the Maine Public Radio program Poems from Here and the host/curator of the podcasts Make/Time and Voices of the Future. Most recently he and visual artist Susan Webster have collaborated on A Quiet Book (Brynmorgen Press 2024), a collection of collages and improvised handwritten text. Former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser has written “Stuart Kestenbaum writes the kind of poems I love to read, heartfelt responses to the privilege of having been given a life. No hidden agendas here, no theories to espouse, nothing but life, pure life, set down with craft and love.”

          CMarie Fuhrman

          Past Poet Laureate of Idaho, Writer in Residence, 2021–2023

          Thursday, October 23, 5pm PT

          CMarie Fuhrman is the author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems and co-editor of Cascadia: Art, Ecology, and Poetry and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. She has published or forthcoming poetry and nonfiction in multiple journals and anthologies. CMarie is an award-winning columnist for the Inlander and Director of the Elk River Writers Workshop. She is Associate Director and Director of Poetry at Western Colorado University, where she teaches nature writing. CMarie is the host of Terra Firma. She resides in the Salmon River Mountains of Idaho with dogs and wilderness. CMarieFuhrman.com

          Naomi Shihab Nye

          Youth Poet Laureate through the Poetry Foundation

          Thursday, December 18, 5pm PT

          Palestinian-American writer, editor and educator Naomi Shihab Nye grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she graduated from Trinity University and continues to live. She has been Young People’s Poet Laureate for the U.S. (Poetry Foundation), poetry editor for the New York Times magazine, and The Texas Observer, and a visiting writer in hundreds of schools and communities all over the world. Her books include Everything Comes Next, The Tiny Journalist, Voices in the Air, Sitti’s Secrets, Habibi, This Same Sky, and The Tree is Older than You Are: Poems & Paintings from Mexico. Her volume 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, was a finalist for the National Book Award. The Turtle of Oman and The Turtle of Michigan have both been part of the Little Read program, North Carolina. She received Lifetime Achievement Awards from The Texas Institute of Letters and the National Book Critics Circle. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

          Ready to make the commitment?

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