Kim Stafford
Kim Stafford is Emeritus Professor at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. He writes, teaches, and travels to raise the human spirit through poetry. In 1986, he founded the Northwest Writing Institute, and he has published a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft and 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared. His most recent book is the poetry collection As the Sky Begins to Change (Red Hen Press, 2024). He has taught writing in dozens of schools and community centers, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan. In 2018 he was named Oregon’s 9th Poet Laureate for a two-year term.
Two recent books
As the Sky Begins to Change is a book of poems to wake the world, lyric anthems for earth and kin.
In his third poetry collection from Red Hen Press, Kim Stafford gathers poems that sing with empathy, humor, witness, and story. Poems in this book have been set to music, quoted in the New York Times, posted online in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, gathered in a chapbook sold to benefit Ukrainian refugees, posted online in response to Supreme Court decisions, composed for a painter’s gallery opening, and in other ways engaged with a world at war with itself, testifying for the human project hungry for kinship, exiled from bounty, and otherwise thirsting for the oxygen of healing song.
Our Singer Come from Afar
for Naomi Shihab Nye
Be our wren or warbler lit in willow
swaying with your tender weight
of songs, sipping the sky to tell us
hard things from far away you
freighted for our understanding and
comfort. Sing the mysterious harmony
of news and blessing, hurt and healing
offered with head high, eye bright
until with a friendly shrug
you flit away and leave us
strangely younger.
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from Singer Come from Afar
(Red Hen Press, 2021)