The first Salish Sea Poetry Festival opens Friday across Downtown Bellingham, with readings, food, visual arts and even improv.
From Nov. 7 to 9, Downtown Bellingham will host the first-ever Salish Sea Poetry Festival, a three-day celebration of verse in all its forms. The event will bring together poets from across Washington for free readings and workshops, poetry-themed food and drink, art installations, poetry nature walks, improv performances and film screenings. The weekend will culminate in the 2025 Salish Sea Poetry Slam, an audience-rated competition featuring some of the region’s most celebrated spoken word artists.
Presented by the nonprofit Whatcom Poetry Series, known for the long-running Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest, the festival continues a mission to bring poetry to the people.
For festival co-founder Elizabeth Vignali, the Salish Sea Poetry Festival is an outgrowth of years spent cultivating intimate poetry gatherings.
“I’ve been running a house reading series called Kitchen Sessions at my home for several years,” said Vignali. The community poetry readings are hosted in her living room. Often, her kids emcee the event and introduce a wide range of authors, from professors at Western Washington University to first-time writers. Guests are invited to bring snacks and wine to share. Occasionally Vignali’s cat makes an appearance when the room quiets.
“While it remains the darling of my poet’s heart, the reach of the series is limited by the number of folks I can have in my house,” Vignali said. “Since I’m passionate about poetry, I’ve pondered ways to expand.”
Vignali sees the festival as a natural extension of Whatcom County’s creative energy. “One of the festival’s missions is to showcase the variety of ways to enjoy poetry, from page to stage and everything between,” Vignali said. “We hope to make poetry accessible to people both by literally bringing poetry into the busy lives folks are already living but also by highlighting the range of ways to be a poet and show that there’s a type of poetry for everyone.”
Washington State Poet Laureate emerita Rena Priest, who helped plan early stages of the festival, said, “Adding a poem to an ordinary, everyday situation makes life a little magical.”
For both Priest and Vignali, accessibility remains central to the Salish Sea Poetry Festival. Nearly every event is free, from performances in local parks to evening readings at downtown venues.
“Our main big Saturday night event at Whatcom Museum Old City Hall is free and open to the public,” Vignali said. “The evening features Washington State Poet Laureate Derek Sheffield and his daughter, poet and Western student Zoey Sheffield; the Salish Sea Choir, whose members’ ages span from 4 to 94; spoken word artist and Washington Book Award nominee Ebo Barton; and a poetry slam featuring poets from all over the state.”
Vignali hopes festivalgoers will leave inspired. “I hope they’ll laugh, I hope they’ll cry, I hope they’ll find each other and themselves, I hope their hearts soften, I hope their hearts strengthen. The usual.”
Priest said she often begins her readings with humor or music to reach those who think poetry is not for them.
“It’s important to tell people that they don’t have to analyze anything,” she said. “They can just read a piece and feel something, anything. I like to start off my readings by offering poems with a little bit of music or humor in them. This disarms the poetry resisters by letting them know they won’t have to hear any mush or highfalutin confessions.”
For Priest, poetry also deepens her connection to the places she inhabits. She recalled a moment on the North Cascades Highway when she encountered a William Stafford poem etched on a plaque overlooking the Methow Valley:
Sometimes you look at an empty valley like this,
and suddenly the air is filled with snow.
That is the way the whole world happened—
there was nothing, and then…
Reading it against the sweep of the valley, she said, “was magical.”
When asked if there was a particular poem that is important right now, Vignali chose Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, “Gate A-4.”
“As a Palestinian American poet with both a genius grasp of language and unfathomable compassion, she crafted this gem of a poem that manages to make me want to be a better person and gives me hope,” she said. “Isn’t it incredible that something as simple as a poem can do that? This one might do it for you. It might not, but then there will be one out there somewhere that does. There’s a poem out there for everyone. I know it.”
The Salish Sea Poetry Festival invites everyone, seasoned writers and first-time listeners alike, to step into that long party and see what poetry can do when it walks into everyday spaces.
— By Mickey Mann
Also read in Salish Current:
• “Local voices: poetry and film in North Sound Film Festival,” Sept. 2, 2025
• “Poetry, for a ‘churning, burning world’,” Feb. 14, 2025
• “Bioregionalism, poetry and the democracy of the mind,” Dec. 3, 2024
• “‘Red Paint’ looks into the healing journey, ancestry of a Coast Salish poet,” March 8, 2024
• “’Seeing the Forest’ salon to benefit forest conservation,” July 28, 2023