Tagged: literature

A  Metro bus ride inspires poet, novelist and teaching artist Karen Finneyfrock to find a delightfully surprising personification for Northwest springtime in her poem "Monster."

As spring edges out winter and previously bare tree limbs are suddenly effusive with blossoms, there's a sense that almost anything -- or anyone -- deserves a second chance. In her poem "A Quiet," poet Marjorie Manwaring meditates on alternative endings and the possibility of redemption.

In her poem "What Stays Here," Colleen McElroy imagines life as a female soldier who must choose between loyalty to herself, and loyalty to a military code that says "keep quiet" and "get along." Like many of the poems in McElroy's ninth collection, "Here I Throw Down My Heart," (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012) the poem awakens us to voices and stories we might otherwise never hear with such intimacy and power.

Charles Mitchell was a teenage slave of  Washington’s surveyor general, James Tilton. In 1860, with the help of the West’s underground railroad, Charles Mitchell escaped to Victoria, British Columbia, and won his freedom. Public historian Lorraine McConaghy tells Ross Reynolds the story and discusses how she came to write her latest book, "Free Boy: A True Story of Slave and Master."