Orca Books Poetry Reading

Orca Books and Blue Cactus Press held a night of poetry featuring three BCP authors and poets on November 18th, 2021. Our phenomenal readers included Robert Lashley, Esther Vincent Xueming, and Gina Hietpas! Each of the poets reads poems from their latest poetry collections, all of which examine themes of our ever-evolving identities and relationships to landscapes, including urban, rural, or lost in-between.

About the Readers

Robert Lashley is a 2016 Jack Straw Fellow, Artist Trust Fellow, and nominee for a Stranger Genius Award. Robert Lashley has had work published in The Seattle Review of Books, NAILED,  Poetry Northwest, McSweeney’s, and The Cascadia Review. His poetry was also featured in such anthologies as Many Trails to The Summitt, Foot Bridge Above The Falls, Get Lit,  Make It True, and It Was Written. His previous collections include THE HOMEBOY SONGS (Small Doggies Press, 2014), and UP SOUTH (Small Doggies Press, 2017). and THE GREEN RIVER VALLEY ( 2021)  In 2019, The Homeboy Songs was named by Entropy Magazine as one of the 25 most essential books to come out of the Seattle area.

Esther Vincent Xueming (Singapore) is the author of Red Earth (BCP, 2021), editor-in-chief and founder of The Tiger Moth Review, and editor of Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore and two poetry anthologies: Poetry Moves and Little Things.

Gina Hietpas lives on a small farm on the Olympic Peninsula. This space is shared with a variety of wildlife which then reappear in her poems. She is a self taught poet. Her poetry collection, TERRAIN, is a life journey rooted in the land and the challenges of relationship.  TERRAIN was a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards for Poetry.