Kathleen Flenniken was the 2012-2014 Washington State Poet Laureate and is currently President of the Jack Straw Cultural Center, an audio arts studio in Seattle. She grew up in Richland, Washington--home to the Hanford Site where both she and her father worked. Her most recent book of poems, a meditation on Hanford entitled Plume, won the Washington State Book Award. Her previous book, Famous, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. She holds both an MFA in Creative Writing and an MS in Civil Engineering and she teaches poetry at Seattle University as well as in schools across Washington through the "Writers in Schools" program.

Organized by Shannon C. Cram (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Bothell) in conjunction with The Anthropocene, a crossdisciplinary research cluster of the Simpson Center for the Humanities.