Episode 4: Claudia Castro Luna
5/13/23
I have seen Claudia Castro Luna perform at the Skagit River Poetry Festival and have admired her poetry for a long time. Her latest book, Cipota Under the Moon, which came out last May “scores a series of poems as an ode to the Salvadoran immigrant experience in the United States.” I have always appreciated how ecopoetics and social justice appear seamlessly in Claudia’s work and in this conversation I wanted to talk more about how she addresses beauty, place, and community. She has served as both Seattle Civic Poet and Washington State Poet Laureate and is currently a Writing the Land poet. Enjoy this conversation!
Claudia Castro Luna is an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate fellow (2019), WA State Poet Laureate (2018 – 2021) and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet (2015-2018). She is the author of Cipota Under the Moon (Tia Chucha Press, 2022); One River, A Thousand Voices (Chin Music Press); the Pushcart nominated Killing Marías (Two Sylvias Press) also shortlisted for WA State 2018 Book Award in poetry, and the chapbook This City (Floating Bridge Press). Her most recent non-fiction is in There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis (Vintage). Born in El Salvador, Castro Luna arrived in the United States in 1981. Living in English and Spanish, she writes and teaches in Seattle on unceded Duwamish lands where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.
https://www.claudiacastroluna.com/
https://poets.org/poem/farmers-market
Resources mentioned:
https://www.seattle.gov/arts/programs/civic-poet
https://www.humanities.org/program/wa-poet-laureate/
All episodes were recorded at Jack Straw Cultural Center in Seattle, WA and edited at my farm in the Skagit Valley called Harmony Fields. Thank you to sound engineer Ayesha Ubayatilaka.
We have four fascinating conversation in season one that will be released weekly-ish, starting on April 22nd on Substack!
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