This City

In this city, Claudia Castro Luna, Seattle’s first Civic Poet, presents a precise and eloquent study of people and things that often remain unexamined and brushed aside in the urban core. She explores how everyday language fuels both spaces of alienation and belonging and writes about the way memory anchors us to place, how it provides each of us with an individual road map to the city we inhabit. Castro Luna’s poems invite the reader to consider his/her personal implication in the status quo and to envision possibilities for change to engender saner, safer, more welcoming spaces for everyone. Claudia Castro Luna writes poetry and non-fiction. She is Seattle’s first Civic Poet (2015-2017), a King County 4Culture grant recipient, a 2014 Jack Straw Fellow and VONA alumna. Born in El Salvador she came to the United States in 1981 escaping civil war. She has an MA in Urban Planning, a teaching certificate and an MFA in poetry. Her poems appear in print and on-line in publications such as the Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art, La Bloga, ARCADE and Poetry Northwest among others. Living in English and Spanish, Claudia writes and teaches in Seattle where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.