Paul Nelson

Paul E. Nelson

Poet & interviewer Paul E. Nelson is the son of a labor activist father and Cuban immigrant mother. Born on Chicago’s west side in 1961, he’s lived in King County since 1988. He founded the Cascadia Poetics Lab, the Cascadia Poetry Festival & co-founded the Poetry Postcard Fest. Since 1993, CPL has produced hundreds of poetry events & 700 hours of interview programming with legendary poets & whole systems activists including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Robin Blaser, Diane di Prima, Daphne Marlatt, Nate Mackey, George Bowering, Barry McKinnon, José Kozer, Brenda Hillman & many others. Poet & interviewer Paul E. Nelson is the son of a labor activist father and Cuban immigrant mother. Born on Chicago’s west side in 1961, he’s lived in King County since 1988. He founded the Cascadia Poetics LAB & the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Since 1993, CPL has produced hundreds of poetry events & 700 hours of interview programming with legendary poets & whole systems activists including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Robin Blaser, Diane di Prima, Daphne Marlatt, Nate Mackey, George Bowering, Barry McKinnon, José Kozer, Brenda Hillman & many others. He earned an M.A. in Organic Poetry from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA, in 2007.

Paul’s books include: DaySong Miracle (Past 62) (2024); Cascadian Prophets (Interviews 1999-2023) (2024);  Haibun de la Serna (2022); A Time Before Slaughter/Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia (2020); American Prophets (interviews 1994-2012) (2018); American Sentences (2015, 2021); A Time Before Slaughter (2009); and Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies (2013). Co-Editor of Winter in America (Again: Poets Respond to 2024 Election (2025, Carbonation Press); Cascadian Zen Volume I & II: Bioregional Writings on Cascadia Here and Now (2023, 2024, Watershed Press), Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia (2015), 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards (2017), Samthology: A Tribute to Sam Hamill (2019) Make it True meets Medusario (2019) (a bilingual anthology in Spanish and English.) He’s presented poetry/poetics in London, Brussels, Nanaimo, Los Angeles, Qinghai & Beijing, China, has had work translated into Spanish, Chinese & Portuguese & writes an American Sentence every day. He published a chapbook in late 2022 entitled: The Day Song of Casa del Colibrí and Another Day Song (1980) in spring 2023.

Awarded a residency at The Lake, from the Morris Graves Foundation in Loleta, CA, he’s published work in Golden Handcuffs Review, Zen Monster, Hambone, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2014 Robin Blaser Award from The Capilano Review, he serves as Literary Executor for the late poet Sam Hamill, is engaged in a 20 year bioregional cultural investigation of Cascadia and lives in Rainier Beach, in the Cascadia bioregion’s Cedar River watershed alongside dxʷwuqʷǝb Creek.

Paul is a member of Eishoji Soto Zen Temple in Rainier Beach, taking the Buddhist precepts on December 11, 2023 and being given the dharma name Ryukan. (See this.)