Join us for a conversation and reading to celebrate the  2025 winner of our Poetry Prize for West Coast poets, Aaron Tyler Hand. The event will launch his award winning poetry book Floodchaser. Aaron will be joined by poet Kathy Fagan for a discussion and poetry reading from Floodchaser.

The poetry collection Floodchaser by Aaron Tyler Hand from Portland Oregon was the winner of the 2025 Catamaran Poetry Prize for West Coast Poets. The book was selected by the judge, poet Mary Szybist, from many manuscripts submitted from poets living in California, Oregon , Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii.

Floodchaser unfolds through two interwoven narratives: one that revisits the biblical flood story through Ozark myth and regional lore, and another rooted in contemporary experiences of departure, grief, and irretrievable loss. Across both strands, water moves as destruction, inheritance, and transformation.

Blending scripture with back-road prophecy and lived memory, the poems trace how catastrophe echoes across generations. Rather than offering redemption, Floodchaser lingers in the uneasy space between ruin and renewal, asking what it means to survive—and what survival demands of us.

Aaron Tyler Hand is a Portland, Oregon based creative writer and literary critic with an MFA from Texas State University. He has previously been published in Poem-a-Day, San Antonio Express-News, Houston Chronicle, Porter House Review, Faultline Journal, GASHER Journal, HASH Journal, Funicular Magazine, among others. In addition to his own creative writing pursuits, Aaron volunteers his time to the prison teaching non-profit Rough Draft and hosts the poetry podcast The Personhood Project.

Kathy Fagan's sixth poetry collection is Bad Hobby (Milkweed Editions, 2022, the winner of the 2023 William Carlos Williams Award. Her previous book, Sycamore (Milkweed, 2017), was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, she's been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, an Ingram Merrill fellowship, residencies at The Frost Place, Yaddo and MacDowell, and was named Ohio Poet of the Year for 2017. Fagan's work has appeared in venues such as The Atlantic, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, The Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best American Poetry. She co-founded the MFA Program at The Ohio State University, where she teaches poetry and co-edits the Wheeler Poetry Prize Book Series for The Journal and OSU Press.

Floodchaser Launch Event