Terminus, or Geological Time Will Tell

Poetry, like geology, teaches us something about the nature of time. Slow time. Deep time. The material sublime. In a culture of daily grind and distraction, the better part of wonder, not to say wisdom, is often embedded in layers of rock and wood and ice. Drawing from his time as an artist in residence at Olympic National Park, Craft taps the songs of non-human nature, from avalanche meadow to magma chamber, from migratory flyway to glacial moraine, aiming to grow our notion of what it means to be alive in this human-changed / human-changing world.

Kevin Craft lives in Seattle and directs the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College. For two decades he served as a faculty director of the University of Washington’s Writers in Rome Program. His books include Solar Prominence, selected by Vern Rutsala for the Gorsline Prize from Cloudbank Books (2005), and Vagrants & Accidentals, published in the Pacific Northwest Poets Series of the University of Washington Press (2017). He has received fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, MacDowell Colony, the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), the Camargo Foundation (France), 4Culture, The Jack Straw Cultural Center, PLAYA, and Artist Trust. In 2022 he was Artist in Residence at Olympic National Park, and often volunteers as a lookout steward in the North Cascades. Editor of Poetry Northwest from 2009 – 2016, he now serves as Executive Editor of Poetry NW Editions.