The Stafford Challenge
Guest Poet Events

Saturday, January 17, 2pm PT

Kim Stafford, founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, teaches and travels to raise the human spirit. He is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft,  100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared, and Singer Come from Afar. His most recent poetry collection is As the Sky Begins to Change (Red Hen, 2024), and his poem A Proclamation for Peace has been translated in over 50 languages and published as a remarkable book by the same name. He has taught writing in dozens of schools and community centers, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan. In 2018 he was named Oregon’s 9th Poet Laureate by Governor Kate Brown for a two-year term.

• Click here to read poems by Kim Stafford

Thursday, February 19, 5pm PT

Emmett Wheatfall lives in Portland, Oregon where he is a two-time nominate for Oregon Poet Laureate, and is the recipient of the 2024 Oregon Poetry Association Patricia Ruth Banta Award. He is the author numerous collections, including Contradictions from an Uncertain Silence , As Clean as a Bone, and Our Scarlet Blue Wounds. In 2020, Corban University produced a nine-part documentary titled Emmett Wheatfall: A Brief History highlighting Emmett’s life and poetry. 

For more information visit poet-emmettwheatfall.com

• Click here to read 3 poems by Emmett

Thursday, March 19, 4pm PT

Lauren Camp served as the second New Mexico Poet Laureate. She is the author of nine poetry collections, including In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024), winner of the New Mexico Book Award, which grew out of her experience as Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park, and Is Is Enough (Texas Review Press, 2026). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and Black Earth Institute, a Dorset Prize, and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, Best of the Net, and Adrienne Rich Award. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. www.laurencamp.com­

• Click to read Original Hope
• Click to read Smeary Flowers
• Click here to read Goodbye to Aggressions and Generous Gestures

Thursday, April 26, 5pm PT

Kevin Prufer’s newest books are The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), winner if the 2024 Rilke Prize, and Sleepaway: a Novel (Acre Books, 2024), a finalist for the Society of Midland Authors Award. Among his eight other books are Churches, which was named one of the best ten books of 2015 by The New York Times, and How He Loved Them, which was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book from the American literary press. Prufer’s work appears widely in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Paris Review, and Poetry, among others. He is the 2026 Texas Poet Laureate and Professor of English at The University of Houston, where he also directs The Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to rediscovering great, long forgotten authors.

• Click here to read A Dog Barking Into the Night
• Click here to read In the Bad Days
• Click here to read Into the Weeds

Tuesday, May 12, 5pm PT

Jacqueline Allen Trimble is a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, a Cave Canem Fellow, and a two-time Alabama State Council on the Arts Fellow. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Offing, The Rumpus, Poet Lore, and other journals and has been featured by Poem of the Day, Poem-a-Day, and Poetry Daily. Her first collection, American Happiness, won the Balcones Poetry Prize, and her next collection, How to Survive the Apocalypse, was named one of the ten best poetry books of 2022 by the New York Public Library. Trimble is Professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University. She'll begin her time as Poet Laureate of Alabama in 2026.

• Click here to read This Is Why People Burning Down Fast Food Joints and Whatnot | Video Reading by Ashely M. Jones
• Click here to read I Hear America SInging the Blues
• Click here to read The Language of Joy

Thursday, June 11, 5pm PT

Kelli Russell Agodon is a bi/queer poet from the Pacific Northwest. Her newest book is Accidental Devotions (Copper Canyon Press, 2026). Her previous collection, Dialogues with Rising Tides, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards. Kelli is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press and teaches in Pacific Lutheran University’s MFA program, the Rainier Writing Workshop. She is also the cohost of the poetry series Poems You Need with Melissa Studdard. She lives in a sleepy seaside community where she is an avid paddleboarder and hiker. www.agodon.com / www.twosylviaspress.com / www.youtube.com/@PoemsYouNeed

• Click here to read Dementia Is a New Way to Be Buddhist

• Click here to read Magpies Recognize Themselves in the Mirror

• Click here to read The Language of Joy

Tuesday, July 14, 5pm PT

Brad Aaron Modlin writes because he likes talking to strangers. His work appears in the 2025 Pushcart Prize Anthology; Poetry Unbound; The Slowdown, and A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford. His book Everyone at This Party Has Two Names is available from Black Lawrence Press. He writes fiction about dead people more like us than we’d guess. He has received support from The Banff Centre for the Arts, The Sewanee Writer’s Conference, & The Nebraska Arts Council. The Reynolds Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at University of Nebraska, Kearney, he teaches undergraduates & in the online master’s program.

• Click here to read To the Astronaut Who Hopes Life on Another Planet Will Be More Bearable
• Click here to read The World and You’d Think by Now We Could Spell “Apocalypse” Without Looking It Up
• Click here to read Hungry Because This World Is So Very Full

Wednesday, August 19, 5pm PT

Christopher Luna served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of Clark County, Washington from 2013-2017. A graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, he founded the anti-fascist, anti-racist, pro-science LGBTQ+ friendly, all ages and uncensored Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic in 2004. His most recent book is Voracity (Lightship Press, 2022).

Click here to read:

• Five poems from Andrei Codrescu's Exquisite Corpse
• "Father and son facing the same way"
• "To Whitman the song of the boys sounds like a strawberry oboe"

Tuesday, October 13, 5pm PT

CMarie Fuhrman is a writer whose work is inspired by the West. She is the author of Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return, the poetry chapbook Camped Beneath the Dam, as well as the co-editor of two significant anthologies, Cascadia: Art, Ecology, and Poetry and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. 

She has poetry and nonfiction published or forthcoming in a variety of publications, including Terrain.org, Emergence Magazine, Alta Magazine, Northwest Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Poetry Northwest, Big Sky Journal, and various anthologies. CMarie is the director of the Elk River Writers Workshop and an award-winning columnist for The Inlander. She is the Associate Director of Western Colorado University's Graduate Program in Creative Writing, and founder of Confluence Writing Community. CMarie is the host of Terra Firma, a Colorado Public Radio program. She is a former Idaho Writer in Residence and lives in the Salmon River Mountains of Idaho where she spends her summers as a parttime fire lookout.

CMarieFuhrman.com

• Click here to listen to Beargrass
• Click here to read Land Acknowledgment (The Inlander, October 2021)