Archives West Finding Aid

Vassilis Zambaras was born in Greece in 1944, then moved to the small town of Raymond, WA at four years old. He attended the University of Washington but dropped out after a year. He spent 1963-1964 travelling in Europe and in Greece, settling in Munich until getting drafted into the US Army. After his discharge, he completed his sophomore year at Grays Harbor College in Aberdeen, WA, then transferred to UW where he received an MA in English. In 1970, he co-founded the poetry magazine Madrona with J.K. Osborne, and also worked for the Seattle Housing Authority before returning to Greece in 1972. His poems have been published in various literary magazines in the US and abroad. Many of his poems were included in the anthology How The Net Is Gripped: A Selection of Contemporary American Poetry, Stride, UK, 1992, and he has two collections of poetry, Sentences, Querencia Books, 1976, and Aural, Singing Horse Press, 1984.

Daniel Joseph Berrigan (May 9, 1921 – April 30, 2016) was an American Jesuit priest, anti-war activist, Christian pacifist, playwright, poet, and author. Philip Francis Berrigan (October 5, 1923 – December 6, 2002) was an American peace activist and Roman Catholic priest. Together, they were nominated in 1998 for the Nobel Peace Prize by 1976 laureate Mairead Maguire.Seattle educator Richard Carbray was one of the leaders of the Catholic ecumenical peace movement during the Vietnam War.

Poet David Dwyer moved from New York City to Lemmon, South Dakota with his wife, writer Kathleen Norris, when she inherited her maternal grandparents’ farm. Dwyer’s first collection of poetry, Ariana Olisvos: Her Last Works and Days, won the Juniper Prize. Dwyer also published numerous poems in anthologies and literary magazines. David Dwyer died in 2003 at the age of 57 after a lengthy illness. Kathleen Norris is the award-winning poet, writer, and author of the New York Times bestsellers The Cloister Walk, Amazing Grace, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, and Acedia & Me. She is a Benedictine oblate of Assumption Abbey.

Nanija Kiršfelds (September 13, 1915-April 17, 1973) had a Masters in Library Science from the University of Rutgers and worked as a Slavic language specialist at the University of Princeton Library, in part due to her Latvian heritage. She was married to Reverend Ansis Kiršfelds.

John Levy (b. 1951) works as a public defender in Tucson, Arizona. A contributing editor to the very first series of Shearsman in 1981-2, his publications include Oblivion, Tyrants, Crumbs.

Eve Triem (November 2, 1902-December 26, 1992) was a poet. Her work mainly concerned her marriage but also included translations of classical Greek poems. She married Paul Ellsworth Triem in 1924 and they moved to Dubuque, Iowa in 1936. They moved to San Francisco in 1956, where they resided until moving to Seattle in 1960. Triem's work appeared in many literary periodicals and anthologies, and she gave many readings and lectures. In 1984, she won a Western States Book award for lifetime achievement. Her published collections of poems are: Parade of Doves, E.P. Dutton, 1946; Poems by Eve Triem, Alan Swallow, 1965; The Process, Querencia, 1976; Dark to Glow, Querencia, 1979; Midsummer Rites, Seal Press, 1982; New as a Wave: A Retrospective, 1937-1983, Dragon Gate, 1984; and Nobody Dies in the Summer: Selected Poems, Broken Moon Press, 1993.

Paul Triem (March 4, 1882-April 14, 1976) was a writer and newspaper editor specializing in westerns and detective stories. He married poet Eve Triem in 1924.

Mitchell Goodman (December 10, 1923 – February 1, 1997) was an American writer, teacher, and activist. He is best known for his role in the Vietnam draft resistance movement, which led to the high-profile 1968 federal prosecution of the "Boston Five." Priscilla Denise Levertov (24 October 1923 – 20 December 1997) was an English-born poet, essayist and political activist who wrote matter-of-fact verse on both personal and political themes. She's known for such works as The Sorrow Dance and The Freeing of the Dust. They married in 1948, and divorced in 1975.

Richard Hugo was born in 1923 in Seattle, Washington and raised by his grandparents in White Center, Washington. He served in the Army Air Corps in World War II. After the war, he attended the University of Washington where he earned his B.A. in 1948 and his M.A in 1952; at UW he studied under Theodore Roethke, who influenced Hugo's work and lifestyle. His first book of poetry, A Run of Jacks, was published in 1961, followed by Death of Kapowsin Tavern, in 1965. He later published The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir (1973), What Thou Lovest Well Remains American (1975), 31 Letters and 13 Dreams (1977), White Center (1980) and The Right Madness on Skye (1980). He was offered a position teaching creative writing at the University of Montana, where he would become head of the creative writing program. He also taught at the University of Washington and the University of Iowa. By the end of his life Hugo had accumulated many prizes and awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation creative writing grant, and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Prize. Richard Hugo died of leukemia in 1982.

Isaac Bashevis Singer (November 21, 1902 – July 24, 1991) was a Polish-American writer. He was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, writing and publishing only in Yiddish. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, and was also awarded two U.S. National Book Awards, one in Children's Literature for his memoir A Day Of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (1970) and one in Fiction for his collection A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (1974). In 1938, he met Alma Wassermann née Haimann (1907–1996), a German-Jewish refugee from Munich, and they married in 1940.