Only at BookTree will you find a monthly FREE workshop/reading and open mic combo at least One Saturday per month!
Free Workshop with Koon Woon (at 4:30PM) followed by our PoetryIsEverything Reading and open mic with featured readers: Koon Woon and Thomas Hubbard.
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Koon Woon was just featured in the PBS News Hour feature on Seattle's Poetry Grid!
Bios
Koon Woon obtained his BA in Creative Writing from Antioch University and an MLS degree in Literary Arts from Fort Hays State University. His two full-length collections of poetry are from Kaya Press, winners of the Pen Oakland Award and an American Book Award. He is the publisher of Five Willows Literary Review (online) and the literary press Goldfish Press in Seattle, now with 15 titles to its credit. Koon's poems and short fiction has appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies internationally. He is also the founder of the Chrysanthemum Literary Society, a nonprofit charitable organization for the promotion of literature, education, and world peace.
Thomas Hubbard: Since retiring from his teaching position at Heritage High School on Tulalip Rez, Thomas Hubbard has published Guiding the Stars to Their Campfire, Driving the Salmon to Their Beds, a collection of indigenous poetry by Tiffany Midge, Junkyard Dogz, a chapbook of his own poetry and graphics, Junkyard Dogz CD, (a spoken word performance), Nailed to The Sky (a poetry collection) by M. Anne Sweet, The Five Stages of Quitting Farming (a poetry collection) by John Kulm, Wisdom for a Dance In the Street, (a spoken word/music CD) by Dave Caserio, Affliction, a collection of poems about the sex industry by Jennifer Haggerty, What I Can Hold In My Hands, and At First Light, two collections of poems by Mary Eliza Crane and injunz, a chapbook of his own poetry about mixedblood life. These add to his previously published Nail and other Hardworking Poems (originally published by Year of the Dragon Press, 1994, with a second edition under the Gazoobi Tales imprint) and Children Remember Their Fathers, an anthology of poems about fathers.has authored several poetry collections. His poetry has appeared in various literary journals such as Emeralds in the Ash, Omniscient, PoetsWest, Square Lake, Vox Populi 2001, and others; most recently in the Washington Poets Association Anthology of 2005, Mute Note Earthward. He also reviews books and often his reviews appear in Raven Chronicles.
A mixed-blood descendant of Cherokee, Irish, Miami and English ancestry, Hubbard grew up among factory workers and went to work in a glass factory, making bottles and jars. After six years in factories around the country, hitch-hiking for months on end during layoffs, he quit the trade and earned a teaching degree in English and Sociology, graduating Ball State University in 1969. Because of his anti-war involvement with SDS and underground newspapers, he was employable only in very needy schools. His teaching career began in Gary. Over the next thirty years he was in and out of teaching mostly in ghetto schools, working also as a carpenter, blues musician and freelance writer, and attending various graduate schools. During these years he fathered four sons. He arrived in Seattle in 1991, newly divorced and broke.
After his father's death in 1994 Hubbard began a memorial project. Over the next five years he compiled, edited and in 2000, published Children Remember Their Fathers, an anthology of works by performance poets from around the country. Many of the poems in CRTF were gathered from slam poets during his appearance at the National Poetry Slam in Ann Arbor, 1995, as winner of the Seattle Grand Slam. Two years later Hubbard retired from teaching written expression in Tulalip Reservation's Heritage School to focus on his Gazoobi Tales imprint, publishing works of merit that might not get a reading elsewhere.