Claudia Castro Luna is Washington’s State Poet Laureate (2018 – 2021), an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet (2015-2017). She is the author the collection Killing Marías (Two Sylvias) finalist for the Washington State Book Award 2018, the chapbook This City (Floating Bridge) and One River, a Thousand Voices, from Chin Music Press. Castro Luna has an MA in Urban Planning, a K-12 teaching certificate and an MFA in Poetry. Born in El Salvador she came to the United States in 1981. Living in English and Spanish, Claudia writes and teaches in Seattle where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.