Our community-responsive programming is guest-curated by Seattle-area artists, to increase opportunities where Seattle’s community voices can be seen and heard.
This spring our Guest Curated Series celebrates Poetry in Public, a project that honors and fosters local voices.
Poet Planner Laura Da’ and the 4Culture team worked with Community Liaisons from Poetry in Public’s 2023-2024 Communities of Focus to develop and implement community workshops, and to customize outreach in their communities. Through a submission process open to all King County residents, poems inspired by the theme Places of Landing were shared with the public on transit.
Poetry in Public—formerly known as Poetry on Buses—celebrates local voices in one of our most vital shared spaces: transit. The most recent theme “Places of Landing” embraces the poetry of our daily lives. It honors the movements, places, and feelings that tell the stories of our days.
Every day, thousands of people use transit—to commute to work, visit family, go to school and return home. It’s a unique public space, rich with stories. For a short while, all of us are moving in the same direction. Poetry in Public fills that space with poems written by the person across the aisle, that kid in the back, and the professional poet alike. Everyone can be a poet!
Poetry in Public is presented by 4Culture, King County Metro, and Sound Transit.
Many of our transportation hubs, roads, docks, and recreational spaces exist directly over Indigenous places of landing. As our community grows and changes, new paths will arise. The concept of landings extends from the land itself to each person’s sense of being, and we all hold memories of the places that shape our days. View writing and thinking prompts created to engage with place, water and season and to connect literacy and land with a sense of balance, agency and regard of place.
A poet and a public school teacher, Laura Da’ studied creative writing at the University of Washington and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is the author of the collections “Instruments of the True Measure” (University of Arizona Press, 2018), winner of the Washington State Book Award, and “Tributaries” (University of Arizona Press, 2015), winner of the 2016 American Book Award and the chapbook “The Tecumseh Motel.” Her work has appeared in the anthologies “New Poets of Native Nations” (Graywolf Press, 2018) and “Effigies II” (Salt Publishing, 2014). Da’ is the current Poet Laureate of Redmond and a recent writer-in-residence at Hugo House.
A member of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe, she received a Native American Arts and Cultures Fellowship. Da’ has also been a Made at Hugo House fellow and a Jack Straw fellow. She is a lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest and lives in Newcastle, Washington, with her husband and son.
The Community Liaisons represent Poetry in Public’s 2023-2024 Communities of Focus.
D.A. Navoti, Indigenous Community Liaison
D.A. Navoti is a multidisciplinary storyteller, composer and writer of the Gila River Indian Community. The author of essays and stories, his artistic work spans three “landscapes”—written, musical, and visual—a hybrid form that explores what it means to be Indigenous in the 21st century. Recipient of the 2022 Artist Trust Fellowship, D.A. also served as the 2022-23 Native-Artist-in-Residence at Seattle Rep. Learn more at www.danavoti.com.
Jose Luis Montero, Spanish-Speaking Community Liaison
José Luis Montero is a bilingual writer who is passionate about storytelling regardless of the medium. A 2021 Jack Straw Writer, his work captures the fusion of his Mexican roots with his American life journey. After earning master’s degrees
in narrative and poetry, he interned at Copper Canyon Press and served as assistant editor for Narrative Magazine. He worked as president of Seattle Escribe and currently serves as co-president of the board for Seattle City of Literature.
Miz Floes, African-American Community Liaison
Miz Floes is an ever-evolving artist; an author, playwright, theater producer, director, actress, spoken word artist and vocalist. The GAP Award-winning artistic implant is a current member of the African American Writers Alliance and has worked with the Griot Party Experience poetry group. Her style of writing has been described as refreshing, informative, intellectual, funny and even sensual.
Sierra Nelson, Youth Community Liaison
Sierra Nelson is a poet, multimedia performance and installation artist, and teacher, bringing her extensive collaboration experience and love of marine sciences to her artistic and teaching practices. Nelson’s books include “The Lachrymose Report” (PoetryNW Editions) and “I Take Back the Sponge Cake” (Rose Metal Press). For over 25 years, Nelson has facilitated generative creative writing workshops with students as young as three years old to elders, across diverse settings including schools, hospitals, libraries and parks.
Troy Osaki, Filipino Community Liaison
Troy Osaki is a Filipino Japanese poet, organizer and attorney. A three-time grand slam poetry champion, he has received fellowships from Kundiman, Hugo House, the Jack Straw Cultural Center, and the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. His work has been featured in Poetry, The Missouri Review, The Offing, and other publications, and is anthologized in “The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration.”
We have offered guest-curated programming since 2021.