Book Launch: Traverse by Kevin Craft

Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum invites you to celebrate the launch of Traverse by author Kevin Craft. Traverse is the 24th installment in the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, published by Lynx House Press. 

Joining Kevin Craft are readers Chris Haugen (Acoustic Guitar), Rebecca Hoogs, Sierra Nelson, Katharine Ogle and Jason Whitmarsh.

Traverse, Craft’s third collection explores the music, the miscues, the hidden forces and quirks of circumstance that constitute a human life. It’s a book of family origins and discovery, an adoptee’s journey toward self-knowledge, a son’s journey toward becoming (and losing) a parent, navigating the cross-currents of estrangement and acceptance, ecological peril and ambiguous loss. It is also a history of walking, of moving through the world at human speed. As such, Traverse maps a new understanding of familial relation, from birth kin to chosen clan, from missing link to known donor children, arcing toward a wider embrace of the generational and archetypal substrates that inform identity, singular and plural alike. What kin are you to me? Craft asks, sifting through uncertainties, genealogies, and the geological record to find a deeper connection to both human and non-human nature, piecing together, step by step, a vision of expansive love and the fragile ecology in which our lives subsist.

Kevin Craft lives in Seattle and directs the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College. For two decades he served as a faculty director of the University of Washington’s Writers in Rome Program. His books include Solar Prominence, selected by Vern Rutsala for the Gorsline Prize from Cloudbank Books (2005), and Vagrants & Accidentals, published in the Pacific Northwest Poets Series of the University of Washington Press (2017). He has received fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, MacDowell Colony, the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), the Camargo Foundation (France), 4Culture, The Jack Straw Cultural Center, PLAYA, and Artist Trust. In 2022 he was Artist in Residence at Olympic National Park, and often volunteers as a lookout steward in the North Cascades. Editor of Poetry Northwest from 2009 – 2016, he now serves as Executive Editor of Poetry NW Editions.

Chris Haugen (Acoustic Guitar) is a nationally recognized guitarist and producer based on the West Coast. Chris is known for his fluid, innovative style, musical intuition, and warm soulful tone on both guitar and weissenborn. The San Francisco Chronicle describes Chris' music as "...haunting and otherworldly, like a time capsule from a lost kingdom, perhaps Atlantis."

Rebecca Hoogs is the Executive Director of Seattle Arts & Lectures. Her poetry books are Grenade and Self-Storage. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Zyzzyva, The Journal, Poetry Northwest, The Florida Review, and elsewhere.

Sierra Nelson is co-founder of literary performance art groups The Typing Explosion and Vis-à-Vis Society, and president of Seattle’s Cephalopod Appreciation Society. Her poetry books include The Lachrymose Report (Poetry NW Editions) and two collaborative books made with visual artist Loren Erdrich: I Take Back the Sponge Cake (Rose Metal Press) and artist book ISOLATION.

Katharine Ogle is currently a Provost Fellow and PhD candidate at the University of Southern California. Her poems and critical work have appeared in Quarterly West, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Meridian, and others.

Jason Whitmarsh is the author of Tomorrow's Living Room, which won the 2009 May Swenson prize. His second book, The Histories, was published as part of the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series in 2017. His poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, the Yale Review, Fence, the Cincinnati Review, and the Harvard Review.

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