The following description comes from the event organizer.

Join us for The Rainmakers Poetry Reading Series, where three poet friends with ties to the Great Pacific Northwest tour and share their work. Featured poets are Francesca Bell, Dion O’Reilly, and special guest Emily Ransdell. 

Francesca Bell was born in Spokane Washington and raised in Seattle in a family with deep, hardscrabble roots in the Northwest. Her writing appears in ELLE, Los Angeles Review of Books, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and Rattle. Her first book, Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019), was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. In 2023, Red Hen Press published What Small Sound, her second book of poetry, and Whoever Drowned Here, a collection of poems by Max Sessner that she has translated from German. She is translation editor at the Los Angeles Review and the Marin County Poet Laureate.


Dion O’Reilly's debut collection, Ghost Dogs, was shortlisted for The Catamaran Prize and The Eric Hoffer Award among others. Her second book, Sadness of the Apex Predator, was chosen by University of Wisconsin's Cornerstone Press for its Portage Poetry Series of new and emerging voices. Her work appears in The Sun, Rattle, Cincinnati Review, The Slowdown, Verse Daily and elsewhere. She is a podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, leads poetry workshops, and is a reader for Catamaran Literary Quarterly. She splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and her residence in Bellingham, Washington.


Emily Ransdell is a poet of the Pacific Northwest. For more than 30 years, Emily and her husband have divided their time between Camas, Washington and the North Oregon Coast. As evidenced in many poems, Emily holds these places dear— the scent of cedar and fir, the frequent drizzle of gray days. On the coast, she is active in the creative life of Manzanita’s Hoffman Center for the Arts, where she founded the biannual Word & Image project, a juried collaboration between writers and artists. She teaches poetry workshops for poets at all levels there as well. Her debut poetry collection, One Finch Singing, is available from Concrete Wolf Press

Other readings will be at the following venues: 

Soul Food Reading Series in Redmond May 16 with Dion O’Reilly and Francesca Bell

Margin Shift in Seattle May 17 with Vincent Rendoni, Francesca Bell, and Dion O’Reilly 

Village Books in Bellingham May 18th with Francesca Bell, Dion O’Reilly, and Vincent Rendoni