An Evening of Poetry with Rena Priest took place on Thursday, November 14, 2024.  It made for an inspiring, laughter-filled, allbeit stormy, night on Vashon Island.  With the event sold out, the Vashon Maury Island Land Trust building was full. Readers included Seth Zuckerman, Katy Ellis, Katherine True, Ann Spiers, Holly Hughes, co-publisher of Empty Bowl Press, and WA State’s 6th Poet Laureate and Lummi tribal member Rena Priest!  

“For this unique collection celebrating salmon, Rena Priest, gathered poems from more than 150 Washington poets ranging from first graders to tribal elders, all inspired by the Northwest’s beloved, iconic salmon. A diverse chorus of voices, they join together in poems that praise salmon’s heroic journey, beauty, courage, and generosity and witness the threats salmon face from pollution, dams and warming oceans. As Priest writes in her preface: “It is my hope that the poems in this collection will carry into the hearts of readers a wish to preserve and protect the gifts of salmon bestowed by a beautiful living earth…. May their good work continue to sing the salmon home.” -- Holly Hughes

The event was hosted by Save Our wild Salmon Coalition (an NW Artists Against Extinction), Empty Bowl Press, Vashon Poets Laureate with support from the Vashon-Maury Island Land Trust, Vashon Nature Center, Vashon Bird Alliance.

I Sing the Salmon Home is the winner of the 2024 Washington State Book Award for Poetry.

You can purchase I Sing the Salmon Home at Empty Bowl Press.