Course Coordinator and Instructor Bios

Coordinator of the Course

Jared Leising has taught English at Cascadia College since the school’s inception, and in 2008 and 2014 was the recipient of the college's “Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Service” award. Jared is also the author of a poetry chapbook—The Widows and Orphans of Winesburg, Ohio—and has been a nominee for Seattle Poet Populist, curator for the 2010 Jack Straw Writers Program, and a Scholar for Humanities Washington. Before moving to Seattle, he received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Houston.

Course Instructors

Barry McKinnon was born in 1944 in Calgary, Alberta, where he grew up.  In 1965, after two years at Mount Royal College, he went to Sir George Williams University in Montreal and took poetry courses with Irving Layton.  He graduated in 1967 with a B.A. degree.  In 1969, he graduated with an M.A. from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and was hired that same year to teach English at the College of New Caledonia in Prince George where he has lived and worked ever since.  Barry McKinnon’s The the was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1980.  Pulp Log was the winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award for the B.C. Book Prizes in 1991 and Arrhythmia was the winner of the bp Nichol Chapbook Award for the best chapbook published in Canada in English in 1994. His chapbook Surety Disappears was the runner-up for the bp Nichol Award in 2008.

Members of the Cascadia Poetics Lab Links to an external site.

Joe Chiveney is current Board President of SPLAB, Seattle Poetics Lab. He is a practicing poet and amatuer Bhuddist living in the Olympia area, where he is a mental health therapist in private practice and at the Wa He Lut Indian School in Nisqually. He has made a personal commitment to be done with the writing or living of fiction.  His serial poem "Portrait of a Narcissist as a Young Man" is currently being dismantled and will be available outside bookstores next fall.   

Paul Nelson is a poet, interviewer, essayist. He founded Seattle Poetics LAB Links to an external site. & the Cascadia Poetry Festival & wrote American Sentences Links to an external site. (poems, 2015), A Time Before Slaughter Links to an external site. (shortlisted for a 2010 Genius Award by The Stranger) Organic Poetry (essays) and Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies (book-length-essay, Lumme Editions, Brazil, 2013).

He’s interviewed Links to an external site. Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Sam Hamill, José Kozer, Robin Blaser, Nate Mackey, Joanne Kyger, George Bowering, Brenda Hillman and Daphne Marlatt, presented poetry/poetics in London, Brussels, Nanaimo, Qinghai & Beijing, China, has had work translated into Spanish, Chinese & Portuguese & writes an American Sentence every day.

Awarded a residency at The Lake, from the Morris Graves Foundation in Loleta, CA, he’s published work in Golden Handcuffs Review, Zen Monster, Hambone, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2014 Robin Blaser Award from The Capilano Review, he lives in the Duwamish River watershed. www.PaulENelson.com Links to an external site.