Around Town

Meeting the Poets at the Library

Kara Briggs and Derek Sheffield, poets at the Darrington Library

Kara Briggs and Derek Sheffield shared their poetry with a small and very attentive group of listeners on April 24, 2026, a Friday afternoon at the Darrington Library. Seated next to each other, the two poets took turns reading from their work for the rapt audience. Although this was the first time these two had met, it was as if two friends were sharing a visit, surrounded by another group of friends, all courtesy of the Darrington Friends of the Library.

The new large window with Mt. Whitehorse showing through provided a perfect backdrop for these two poets, both of whom write about local areas, mountains, rivers, salmon, ancestors, among other important matters.

Derek Sheffield is the current Washington State Poet Laureate, meaning he is busy taking poetry to schools, libraries, and communities state-wide. The idea is to promote poetry as an activity all can enjoy and participate in as reader, listener, writer and/or all of the above. Sheffield visited a class at the local high school to work with students on their own creative writing. This self-described "poet-naturalist" lives near Leavenworth and teaches at Wenatchee Valley College. He has two books of poetry and has edited several anthologies of essays relating to the environment and the current state of America.

Kara Briggs, a career journalist, is a more recent writer of poetry, with a local connection to Darrington as a member of the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe. She is also a direct descendant of the Yakama Nation, and now resides at Tulalip. Her first book of poems, Rivers In My Veins, was published in 2024, the same year she earned her masters in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). Briggs also works with tribes across the West Coast as Vice President for Tribal Lands and Waters Stewardship at Ecotrust, a nonprofit collaborative for an equitable, climate aware future.

Listening to Kara Briggs

Reading from Rivers In My Veins, Briggs is soft spoken and powerful as she recites memorable lines such as these about how she is learning to weave:

my hands take the weft, alternating hands and yarns, one white, one
red my teacher calls this weaving with both hands flying

from "Weaving with my Grandmothers"

Ancestors, memory, and what has been lost yet in some ways remain – these themes play throughout Kara Brigg's poems. Her series of Acknowledgement poems are a stark reminder for those of us who like to recite our land acknowledgements, as if we are actually doing something. These lines are about her grandmother who as a child spoke three languages, translating for the adults until the child was sent away to boarding school.

With every year she was at school her words slipped away, her playfulness slipped away, her recollection slipped away. Or she hid it like someone in a witness protection program.

When I was a child and my grandmother was an old woman, we held hands and remembered what we couldn’t remember.

from "Acknowledgement Three"

An in depth interview with Briggs is available at the Chapter House Journal, where she mentions how she writes poetry, a distinctly different sort of writing from her journalism, and how she continues to do both. She also mentions several times her Sauk-Suiattle connection – it was in 2019 she started writing the poems that appear in Rivers In My Veins. Briggs says:

... I wanted to express something about the humanity of my Sauk-Suiattle people, of my Yakama relatives, and all Native peoples. I wanted to reassess the history of my tribes engagements with the state and the federal governments. And in this time, I had spent four years in an intensive study with my tribal elders of my Sauk-Suiattle history, cultures, land, and water rights.

from interview, Chapter House Journal

Briggs will soon have a second book of poems out from Saint Julian Press (Houston), and will be reading from this collection on July 18, 2026 in downtown Bothell.

Derek Sheffield, poet and teacher

Sheffield started his reading for us with a poem about salmonberries, as he mentioned he had just come in from a walk along the Sauk River noticing the salmonberries in prime bloom. I was immediately taken in, as I had myself come across perhaps that very same patch of salmonberry just the week before.

Salmonberry in bloom, Old Sauk Trail near Darrington, April 17, 2026

Later I searched in vain for Sheffield's poem about salmonberries in his collections, only to find that the poem he read for us was not his at all, but a poem by Rena Priest, another poet laureate from a few years ago. Of course he told us it was Rena Priet's poem, "Tour of a Salmonberry", but that didn't sink in. I'm afraid my mind wandered, struck with lines like "A salmonberry is a luminous spiral, a golden basket, ..." and "Every year they debut, spectacular in the landscape." Bringing poetry to people, Sheffield certainly did his job here as poet laureate.

When asked what influenced or inspired him to write poetry, Sheffield mentioned "Those Winter Sundays," a well known poem by Robert Hayden, about a father who gets up in the cold dark to start the fire, every day, unappreciated. Sheffield stood to recite from memory the fourteen lines of this poem, one that everyone should read for themself. Precise language that says so much in so few words, full of feeling, yet understated, this poem shows the power of poetry.

Derek Sheffield is himself a dedicated father to two daughters, who appear now and then in his poems, which explore, describe, and celebrate the natural world. Sheffield is also poetry editor for Terrain.org, an online site featuring literature, art, and essays that "focus on place, climate, and justice." With his interest in teaching and young people, Sheffield is currently editing the series "Words, Woods, and Wellness," seeking poems by young people age 21 and under, to be published at Terrain.org. Youth have until December of this year, 2026, to submit poems with a strong sense of place and attention to the non-human world; any form is okay.

After the reading, people visited with the poets, books were signed, one on one chats occurred with listeners and poets. And there were cookies and lemon bars from The Lonely Mountain Bakery.