Join us for a poetry reading by PNW authors in the library! Featuring Daneen Bergland, Ciel Downing, Emily Ransdell, and Arizona poet Karen Rigby sharing from their new work.

Daneen Bergland grew up in the Midwest, but long ago found her way home to the Pacific Northwest.
She is a former recipient of an Oregon Literary Arts fellowship, a current co-editor for the poetry
collective Airlie Press, a professor at Portland State University, and author of The Goodbye Kit, whose
poems examine our relationships to each other and with the more than human world, and share in
common a sense of lament and wonder for the mutability of life.

Ciel Downing‘s work can be found most recently in Herstry, Word & Image, The Wrath Bearing Tree, The
Timberline Review, and North Coast Squid. She has won the Academy of American Poets Prize, came in
runner up in the Sally Albiso Award, and has Honorable Mentions in both the Kay Snow Award and
Elizabeth Lyons Award. Her debut collection is To Walk the North Direction. She lives and writes from her
cottage on the Oregon Coast.

Emily Ransdell is the author of One Finch Singing, winner of the 2022 Lewis Award by Concrete Wolf
Press. Her work appears regularly in journals such as Poetry Northwest, Terrain, New Letters and more.
Emily divides her time between Camas, Washington and Manzanita, Oregon, where she teaches poetry
classes at the Hoffman Center for the Arts and volunteers with writing events in support of the North
Coast writing community.

Karen Rigby is the author of Chinoiserie (Ahsahta Press), which won a 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, and
Fabulosa (JackLeg Press), which is one of Ms. Magazine’s Best Poetry of ’23-’24 selections. A National
Endowment for the Arts literature fellow, her poems appear in journals such as Bennington Review,
Poetry Northwest, The London Magazine, and Australian Book Review. Her work has featured on KNAU
public radio, Mixed Asian Media and elsewhere. She lives in Arizona.