5th and Water Street
Join the Olympia Poetry Network for its monthly reading series and open mic. Sign ups begin at 5:30 pm for 3-minute slot. All voices welcome! Featured March reader is Martha Silano. Silano received her BA from Grinnell College and her MFA from the University of Washington. After ten years of teaching at Edmonds Community College, Martha joined the faculty at Bellevue College in 2005. Martha has published five full-length poetry collections. Her newest, Gravity Assist, released in 2019. The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, chosen by Campbell McGrath as the winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She is also co-author of The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for your Writing Practice (Two Sylvias Press 2013). Martha’s poems have appeared widely, in such places as Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and North American Review, where she was awarded the 2014 James Hearst Poetry Prize, as well as in many anthologies, including American Poetry: The Next Generation and the Best American Poetry series. Martha has received writing fellowships from the Millay Colony for the Arts, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Playa, and Yaddo, among others, and she’s been awarded funding from Washington 4Culture and Washington State Artist Trust. She lives in Seattle with her partner Langdon Cook, their daughter, three cats, and several pet rodents.
