Cascadia Day Poetry Eruption! Seattle May 18
Join Cascadia Democratic Action as we celebrate Cascadia Day with a lively reading by four poets in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Join us at 7 pm, Monday, May 18 at Vermilion Bar & Gallery at 1508 11th Ave. for an evening of poetry inspired by the Cascadia bioregion. May 18th is the day Loowit (also known as Mount St. Helen) erupted in 1980, and that date serves a reminder of the magnificent power of nature in the Pacific Northwest — and the strength and resiliency of the people live here. Four poets will celebrate the day: Paul Nelson, Matt Trease, Nadine Maestas, and Rhea Melina. The event is free but we encourage those attending to donate to the Migrant Survival Fund, a mutual aid effort supporting at-risk immigrant families, and the Kawaguchi O’Connor Foundation (KOI), a mutual aid group that supports trans people in Seattle who have fled hostile states.
Matt Trease is a poet, artist, teacher, and astrologer. He volunteers and teaches poetics through the Cascadia Poetics Lab, co-curates the Margin Shift reading series, serves as the poetry editor for the Celestial Arts Education Library Institute (CAELi) Review, and is the founder of InTransit, an
astrology, poetry, and spiritual ecology consulting business. He is the author of the poetry collection, The Outside (Carbonation Press, 2025). He lives in the Salish Sea region of Cascadia on the homeland of the Duwamish people. Connect with him at https://bio.site/mj.
Poet & interviewer Paul E. Nelson is the son of a labor activist father and Cuban immigrant mother. Born on Chicago’s west side in 1961, he’s lived in King County since 1988. He founded the Cascadia Poetics Lab, the Cascadia Poetry Festival & co-founded the Poetry Postcard Fest. Books include DaySong Miracle (Past 62) (2024); Cascadian Prophets (Interviews 1999-2023) (2024); Haibun de la Serna (2022); A Time Before Slaughter/Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia (2020); American Prophets (interviews 1994-2012) (2018); American Sentences (2015, 2021); and A Time Before Slaughter (2009). He’s co-editor of several anthologies. Shortlisted for a Genius Award in Literature from The Stranger in 2010, he was awarded a residency at The Lake in 2012, by the Morris Graves Foundation and in 2026, awarded a Fellowship at the Clyfford Still Museum Institute. He’s Literary Executor for the late poet Sam Hamill and lives in Rainier Beach, alongside dxʷwuqʷeb Creek.
Nadine Antoinette Maestas is a poet’s poet and believes that the empire of the sentence is an extremely oppressive totalitarian regime. She prefers the company of poems so much that she would rather read a bad poem than a good novel, but when she is not doing poetry, Nadine loves mountain biking and trail running in dangerous and remote places in the Northwest. Her hybrid poem play “Hellen on Wheels: A Play of Rhyme and Reason” was performed at California College of the Arts.
She is the author of Imperialism As Sweet As Insult (Really Serious Literature Press), the co-author with Karen Weiser of “Beneath the Bright Discus” (Potes & Poets Press, 2000) and is a co-editor for the poetry anthology Make It True: Poetry from Cascadia. You can find more of her poems published in Snail Trail Press, Pageboy Magazine, Lyric &, The Germ, the bilingual anthology Make It True Meets Medusario, and Ofrenda Magazine. She has poems forthcoming in The Glittering Field: A Gathering of New Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Poetry. She currently teaches at Cornish College of the Arts at Seattle University and in the MFA program at UW Bothell.
Rhea Melina is a multi-ethnic poet who has been writing and putting out poetry since the early 2000’s. She writes as a practice of processing, protest and documentation. Her first full-length collection, found confetti, is available now from Carbonation Press.