Kevin Craft lives in Seattle and directs the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College. His books include Traverse (Lynx House Press, 2024), Vagrants & Accidentals (UW Press, 2017), and Solar Prominence (Cloudbank Books, 2005). He recently served as a Writer in Residence at the UW Rome Center, as well as for Olympic National Park. Editor of Poetry Northwest from 2009 – 2016, he is currently Executive Editor of Poetry NW Editions.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

Traverse explores the hidden forces and quirks of circumstance that constitute a human life, and shape us into the people we become. It’s a book of family origins and discovery, an adoptee’s journey toward self-knowledge, a son’s journey toward becoming (and losing) a parent. Navigating the crosscurrents of estrangement and acceptance, ecological peril and ambiguous loss, Traverse finds love in the geological record, underlying an expansive vision of familial belonging.

Prodigal

There was a time when not fitting in

meant wandering the backwoods kicking up leaves

to press into the genealogy

of any book you carried into fall.

I sifted through each page

a baleful disposition, lavish without

hope tossing stones into a stream,

a trick of luck to make me someone’s son.

There was a time. Blue begat bloom

begat blood from a stone arcing in thin air—

stone I threw at my brother’s keeper

singing its way back to the cliff it fell from

dissembling. There was a time before

there was a time it was impossible to tell

memory from summer, summer from a scab

on the knee. As sunburn is my witness,

​as long as the day is lonesome, no one to lift

me from the bicycle bent against the tree.

Every myth happened to someone once

before the alibi intervenes. On the trail

you can be anything you read about—

one son abiding, the other wandering

far from his inheritance—mile after sinkhole mile

to mark who had gone before.

2015 Writers Program (curator)

2008 Writers Program

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