About
Holly J. Hughes is the author of Hold Fast, Passings, and Sailing by Ravens, coauthor of The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World, editor of the award-winning anthology Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease and co-editor of Contemplative Approaches to Sustainability in Higher Education. Her fine-art chapbook Passings received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 2017. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, were featured in An American Life in Poetry, have appeared in many anthologies—most recently, Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems—and have been set to music by Minneapolis composer Edie Hill.
She’s a graduate of Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program, Rainier Writing Workshop, and served on the staff for 13 years. She taught writing at Edmonds Community College for more than two decades, where she co-directed the Convergence Writer’s Series and co-founded the Sustainability Council, in addition to receiving several awards for her teaching. She has taught writing at conferences and workshops throughout the Northwest, including Fishtrap, the North Cascades Institute, Litfuse, Kachemak Bay Writer’s Conference, and Write on the Sound, among others. She’s a grateful recipient of an Artist Trust GAP fellowship and residencies at Hedgebrook, PLAYA, the Whiteley Center, Shotpouch Creek, the Anderson Center, Vermont Studio Center, Centrum, and Artsmith.
In addition to writing and teaching, Hughes spent over thirty summers working on the water in Alaska in a variety of roles: commercial fishing for salmon, skippering a 65-foot schooner, working as a naturalist on ships, and most recently co-leading writing and mindfulness workshops in Southeast Alaska. She stays connected to the fishing community by attending the annual FisherPoet’s Gathering in Astoria each year, where she’s been an active participant since it began in 1998.
Prior to her teaching career, she worked as a journalist reporting on environmental and fisheries issues, and she continues to write about these issues as well as sustainability and climate change. In her local communities, she’s involved in efforts to restore local salmon runs. She lives on the Olympic peninsula in Washington State, dividing her time between three acres in the Chimacum valley, and a 1930’s log cabin in Indianola, where she directs Flying Squirrel Studio Retreats and consults as an editor and writing coach.
Links:
Listen to Holly read at the 2019 FisherPoets Gathering at the Columbia Theater in Astoria, Oregon.
Listen to Holly’s interview with The Alaska Story Project to find out how writing, the practice of attention, and fishing in Alaska came together.
Watch the short film Women at the Helm, directed and produced by Helen Vandeman in 2018, to hear stories about her season as a captain of the 65-foot schooner Crusader. (Note: Holly’s interview is 30 minutes into the film, though the whole film is worth watching).
“Let us remember...that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live.”