The Stafford Challenge
Guest Poet Events

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.

• Click here to read poems by Kim Stafford

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.

• Click here to read poems by Erika

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.

• Click here to read The Jungle
• Click here to read Will You?

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.”

• Click here to read selected poems by Stuart Kestenbaum

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

• Click here to listen to Beargrass
• Click here to read Land Acknowledgment (The Inlander, October 2021)
  

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.

• Click here to read Red Brocade
• Click here to read Gate A-4