Joe Chiveney

Joe Chiveney, President
since July 17, 2012, Board Member since June 15, 2011

Joe is a mental health professional, an athlete (running, hiking, biking) with a healthy lifestyle emotionally and spiritually. Since 1986, he has worked therapeutically with youth, families and individuals from many cultures and backgrounds in educational, community and home based settings.

Paul Nelson

Paul E Nelson
Founding Director, Treasurer

A broadcaster from 1980 to 2006, Paul has researched, hosted and produced over 450 original public affairs radio programs. On-air host, news anchor, and public affairs coordinator in Chicago, Seattle, Baltimore and other towns, he’s an award-winning journalist, a poet who has made presentations in Brussels and China, and a teacher very active in the Puget Sound literary community. Two published books are Organic Poetry (VDM, Verlag, Germany, October 2008) and A Time Before Slaughter (Apprentice House, Nov. 2009), shortlisted for the Stranger Genius Award in 2010.

Greg Bem

Greg Bem, Secretary
Board Member since June 5, 2012

Gregory Ellsworth Bem grew up in the land of blueberries, lobster, moose, and Florida RVs, and then, when finished, traveled down to the Ocean State. He spent time working for the government studying intermodal transportation, and then moved to the City of Brotherly Love. He settled in Cascadia, with a painter friend and a musician friend into a South Seattle apartment. Since moving to the City of Emerald, Bem has found wisdom in many new things–from the geoduck to the Rainier Mountain, to the potential of a previously- sleeping poetry scene. His own poetics, which should be left undefined, tap into the grotesque, the latent, and the terrorizing. They are, as Bem described it, born from a Community of Fire. Bem is a regular volunteer at the Rainier Valley Food Bank, SPL, the Ballard Landmark and is enrolled in the Online MLIS program at the University of Washington iSchool, studying information.. You can find him at gregbem.com/wordpress.

Nadine Maestas

Nadine Antoinette Maestas, Ph.D.
Board Member since November 1, 2012

Nadine Antoinette Maestas is a poet’s poet and believes that the empire of the sentence is an extremely oppressive totalitarian regime. She prefers the company of poems so much that she would rather read a bad poem than a good novel, but when she is not doing poetry, Nadine loves mountain biking in dangerous and remote places in the Northwest. She teaches at the University of Washington and North Seattle Community College. She has facilitated writing workshops at the University of Michigan, Youthspeaks and has helped to pioneer poetry workshops in several public schools in California and Michigan. Nadine holds an M.F.A. from University of Michigan where she was awarded the Faraar award for playwriting. Her hybrid poem play “Hellen on Wheels: a Play of Rhyme and Reason” was performed at California College of the Arts. She is the co-author with Karen Weiser of “Beneath the Bright Discus” (Potes & Poets Press, 2000), and earned her Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 2013 with a dissertation on postmodern American anthropoetics.

Mary Baylor
Board Member since March 30, 2013

Mary Baylor

Mary Baylor is a writer and poet based in Seattle. She has taught writing at Antioch University, 826 Seattle, and the University of Washington. She is the founder and editor of Palmlit.org, an online journal focusing on eco-literature. She has been a poetry editor with The Seattle Review and is on the board of the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Mary earned an MFA and was the Klepser Fellow in Poetry at the University of Washington.