Guest Artists

Simone LaDrumma has been composing and performing on hand drums since 1987, first with several Seattle-based bands and then, for eight years, as founder and Director of Ladies Don't Drum, a unique all-woman percussion ensemble who performed with the Seattle Men's Chorus, Maya Angelou, Holly Near and Bobby McFerrin, among others. In 1991, Simone began teaching drumming "for a loving" and continues to do so today, bringing the magic of rhythmical expression to people of all ages, levels and genders, to special populations and not-so-special populations, and wherever the Spirit leads her.

Koon Woon is the author of The Truth in Rented Rooms and editor and publisher of Chrysanthemum magazine and Goldfish Press. Currently he is a graduate student at Antioch University's Whole Systems Design program.

Esther Sugai, a composer and flutist, performs with Aono Jikken Ensemble, an experimental music ensemble. Her compositions have been performed at the Center On Contemporary Art (COCA), New Music Across America Festival, Barge Music (New York), Marzena and Soundwork Northwest, and she has performed at the Vancouver Jazz Festival, Seattle Festival of Improvised Music, Bumbershoot, COCA, On The Boards, Seattle Art Museum and Seattle Asian Art Museum. Esther has received grants from Meet The Composer and ASCAP and is a past Seattle Arts Commission composer-in-residence.

Jourdan Keith, Seattle's Poet Populist 2006-07, a Cottages at Hedgebrook Alum and student of Sonia Sanchez, is a poet, naturalist, educator, and storyteller. Her work blends the textures of political, personal and natural landscapes to offer voices from the margins of American lives.  She is a 2006 Jack Straw Writer's Program recipient. In 2004, she received a grant from the city of Seattle for her choreopoem, The Uterine Files: Episode I, Voices Spitting Out Rainbows. Her work appears in the anthology, Ma-Ka, Diasporic Juks and the video, Silence...Broken. She is the founder and director of Urban Wilderness Project, which provides storytelling, restoration, adventure and wilderness programming.

JT Stewart -- poet, writer, playwright and editor -- is Curator for Seattle's Jack Straw Writers Program and has had an award created in her name at Hedgebrook, the private retreat for women writers on Whidbey Island.  In addition to her readings for Bumbershoot and National Public Radio, a representative sample of her work has appeared in Raven Chronicles, Fine Madness, The Greenfield Review, The Seattle Review, The Seattle Times, The Portland Oregonian, Gathering Ground: New Writing and Art by Northwest Women of Color (Seal Press), and Raven Brings Light to This House of Stories, a commissioned collaborative permanent art exhibit in the Paul Allen Library at the University of Washington.

Judith Roche is the author of two collections of poetry, Myrrh/My Life as a Screamer and Ghosts, is co-editor of First Fish, First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim, which won an American Book Award, and has edited a number of poetry anthologies. A new poetry collection, Wisdom of the Body, is forthcoming from Black Heron Press.

Nancy Dahlberg, a Seattle poet with roots in Chicago, serves on the advisory board of PoetsWest and is Membership Chair of Washington Poets Association. She has been featured in PoetsWest at The Frye and was a finalist in Seattle’s 2006 Poet Populist competition. Her poetry has been published in many literary journals, on Seattle’s Poetry on Buses 2004, and anthologized in Poets Table Anthology and Mute Note Earthward.

Don Kentop graduated from New York University and Columbia. After retirement, he began writing poetry, completed the Writers Program at The University of Washington, appeared at the Frye Art Museum with Poets West, won several poetry awards, was a Jack Straw writer for 2004, a 2005 Seattle Poet Populist finalist, and appears in five poetry anthologies. On the board of the Washington Poets Association, Don published On Paper Wings through Rose Alley Press.