The Cascadia Poetry Festival returns to Seattle for its ninth year, inviting poets, artists, and culture-makers to explore what it means to create place-based poetry in a time of ecological urgency and cultural transformation. Organized by Cascadia Poetics Lab, this four-day gathering brings together voices from across the bioregion for workshops, readings, panels, and performances rooted in the spirit of Cascadia—where the watersheds speak, the stories run deep, and the arts offer both refuge and revolution.

Since 2017, Rain Shadow Poetics Lab (formerly Cascadia Poetics Lab – Canada) has been bringing world-class poetry and bioregional poetics to the Comox Valley. This summer, in collaboration with Watershed Press, the Lab returns with the Rain Shadow Poetry Festival 2025, a powerful weekend celebration of language, land, and the poetic imagination. From Friday, August 22 through Sunday, August 24, the village of Cumberland, British Columbia will welcome poets, artists, and thinkers from across the Cascadia bioregion for a rich series of readings, workshops, and lectures.

David McCloskey, creator of the Cascadia Map, is excited to release his new map of the Ish River country. It is the companion to Cascadia—as a Ecoregion is a room in the house of a larger Bioregion…

For the 7th iteration of the Cascadia Poetry Festival, SPLAB moves its bioregional cultural investigation to The Multiverse on San Juan Island. A gallery and island cultural center run by Jennifer, Ian and Gavia Boyden will provide a more intimate setting for festival attendees to go deeper into the intersection of poetics and bioregionalism.

A decade into the 21st century, the world of books, the world of the arts, the world of criticism have all been caught up in violent, unpredictable change. A large part of this change has been unleashed by a continual stream of technological innovations that impact our daily lives and even our personal as well as professional relationships. Technology is changing how we read and what we read, is challenging the very forms and genres in which we write, and is making criticism and reflection more valuable and necessary than it’s ever been.

As part of our archive of writings on Cascadia and eco-poetics, the Department of Bioregion is excited to share the following writing on bioregional mapping, salmon, and perceptions of place.