songwriting

Hey! My name is Elian Garcia Carbone. That's Syrian, Mexican and Italian respectively. It's a colorful combination that drives my passion for community, narrative, movement and song. Since being a teenager, and through living abroad in India, Spain, Dominican Republic, South Africa, Cuba or New Zealand, I’ve carried a little notebook in my back pocket, ready to jot down the next "big" lyric. These songwriting notebooks have archived my connections to people and places and it is these relational stories that most readily inform my songwriting style. I currently work in operations at the Bellingham Food Bank and as Co-coordinator for the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop. I teach Cuban salsa dancing and am pursuing my masters in counseling psychology.

For the last two years, I have been a part of the most supportive songwriting group. It's a full life! What's the glue? I'm still figuring that out...It's a pleasure to meet you!

cross-genre

Kate Gray's passion stems from teaching and volunteering. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, two full-length poetry collections, and one novel. Kate and her partner live in a pine-and-oak forest in the mid-Columbia River Gorge with two impetuous dogs, Wasco and Snickers. Currently, Kate is wrestling with an old novel and a new form, flash fiction.

poetry

Jennifer (JP) Perrine is the author of four books of poetry: Again, The Body Is No Machine, In the Human Zoo, and No Confession, No Mass. Perrine’s recent poems, stories, and essays appear in Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, Nimrod, New Letters, Poetry Northwest, Orion Magazine, Southern Indiana Review, Plant-Human Quarterly, Harpur Palate, and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry. A 2022 Oregon Humanities Community Storytelling Fellow and a 2022-23 Independent Publishing Resource Center Artist-in-Residence, Perrine lives in Portland, Oregon, where they cohost the Incite: Queer Writers Read series, teach writing and gender studies, and serve as a wilderness guide.

creative nonfiction/memoir

J.R. Lara is an essayist and poet. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in River Teeth, Hippocampus, Sweet, The Eastern Iowa Review and elsewhere. She is an adjunct professor of literature and creative writing at Western Washington University and Whatcom Community College, and has served as poetry and nonfiction editor for the literary journals Psaltery & Lyre and The Bellingham Review. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.
 

​

artists' books

Hello. I’m Carolyn Terry, an artist/writer and a loyal attendee (being at most, if not every, session) of the Northwest Writers’ Weekend. This year, to my delight, I’ve been asked to teach workshops of my two favorite genres, art journaling and artists’ books. 

My main delight during a workshop is seeing people start with the basic book form and then run with it, inventing, elaborating on, and extending their work into creative ways I hadn’t even thought of. If you’re interested in making a repository for all of your great ideas and notes, or want to explore art making during the weekend, do join me. We’ll all have creative fun together!  

​

​