Poetry Reading: Washington State Poet Laureate Elizabeth Austen & Olympia poet Tim Kelly

Elizabeth Austen, a Seattle-based poet, performer and teacher, and Washington’s Poet Laureate for 2014-16, will read from her book Every Dress A Decision.

Elizabeth spent her teens and twenties working in the theatre and writing poems. A six-month solo walkabout in the Andes region of South America led her to focus exclusively on poetry.

She is a dynamic performer of her own and others’ poems, and has been featured at the Skagit River Poetry Festival, Richard Hugo House Literary Series, Bumbershoot and elsewhere. She frequently teaches the art of poetry aloud, believing that “something magical is possible in a performance that doesn’t happen anywhere else—something electric, immediate, and entirely ephemeral…an exchange between performer and audience that is fluid and a little bit dangerous.”