Celebrated poet and professor Derek Sheffield will soon become Washington’s eighth State Poet Laureate. Sheffield lives in the Wenatchee Valley and serves as a professor of English at Wenatchee Valley College. He has published several poetry collections and edits poetry for Terrian.org, and has also received fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Artist Trust, the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, and the Spring Creek Foundation for his poetry. He will take over the role from current Laureate Arianne True.

Sheffield is particularly passionate about the mental health crisis affecting young people. “As laureate, I want to engage more of our teenagers with poetry. Whether we are writing them or reading them, poems make for good medicine,” he wrote. “Poetry helps us slow down and dwell more consciously in place and time. When we give our attention to poetry, we tend to choose sky time over screen time. Like no other pursuit I know of, poetry honors the individual life as it offers glimpses of the scintillant interiority living inside each of us.”

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