Write New Poems in a Dazzling Place
A Poetry Workshop, October 21 – 25, 2026
Poetry on the Salish Sea is Centrum’s newest writing experience—five inspiring days of poetry, craft, and renewal at beautiful Fort Worden State Park, in Port Townsend. Join poets Rick Barot, Kathryn Hunt, and Melissa Kwasny for generative workshops, craft lectures, and thoughtful feedback. Time and space to energize your work. Connect and share with other writers. Head home with new poems in your pocket.
Registration is open now. We’d love to have you join us. Tiered enrollment options.
For more information and to register.
centrum.org/program/poetry-on-the-salish-sea/
Rick Barot, Kathryn Hunt, and Melissa Kwasny will read their poems on Saturday, October 24 at 7:00 pm at Wheeler Theater at Fort Worden. Free admission. Reception to follow at Taps, across the street from Wheeler Theater.
centrum.org/program/poetry-on-the-salish-sea/
Faculty Bios
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.
Kathryn Hunt is a poet and writer and makes her home on the coast of the Salish Sea. She is the author of two poetry collections, Long Way Through Ruin and Seed Wheel. 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 from Ucross, 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’s recently completed a memoir, The Last Chance Motel. She is the instigator and artistic curator of Poetry on the Salish Sea.
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.
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