Come join us for an unforgettable evening with Derek Sheffield, Washington State’s Poet Laureate, at the SoCo Downtown Arts Festival. This in-person event will be held on North Ione Street. Immerse yourself in the beauty of poetry and celebrate the arts with us!

Derek Sheffield is the 2025-2027 Washington State Poet Laureate. Hailing from the Wenatchee Valley, Sheffield is the author of Not for Luck, selected for Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, and Through the Second Skin, runner-up for the Emily Dickinson First Book Award. He is the co-editor of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, which won a 2024 Washington State Book Award. The first in his family to attend college, Sheffield is now on the English faculty at Wenatchee Valley College and is the poetry editor of Terrain.org. When he’s not crafting poems, Derek is teaching his beloved Northwest Nature Writing class, where he has shared his passion for the outdoors with students for the past 20 years.

“I write because the words of others saved me in the long blue silence of my childhood,” he says, “and making poems for me has come to be about living more deeply and widely.”

The Poet Laureate program is sponsored by Humanities Washington and The Washington State Arts Commission/ArtsWA, with the support of Governor Bob Ferguson.