Claudia Castro Luna
Civic Poet 2015-17
About Claudia Castro Luna
Claudia Castro Luna's muse is the city, from little libraries and food trucks to the green tunnels of Lincoln Park.
Claudia left her native El Salvador at the age of 14 escaping the Civil War with her family. Resilient to the low expectations of high school counselors, she went on to study Anthropology and French at the University of California Irvine and earned an MA in Urban Planning from UCLA. Fluent in German, she is a K-12 certified teacher with a passion for arts education and teaching immigrants.
In 2012 she earned an MFA in poetry from Mills College. She was a 2014 Jack Straw fellow and is a recent recipient of a King County 4Culture grant. Her poems have appeared in Milvia Street, The Womanist, Riverbabble, and forthcoming in the Taos Journal of Poetry and Art. She has been a featured reader for the Berkeley Poetry Festival and for NPR-affiliate KALW. Claudia is also writing a memoir, an excerpt of which appears in the 2014 Jack Straw Writers' Anthology. Living in English and Spanish, Claudia writes and teaches in Seattle where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.
You can learn more about Claudia on her blog or follow her on Twitter. Visit our blog for all of her events that we posted during her term.
Seattle Poetic Grid
Seattle Civic Poet, Claudia Castro Luna, launches a poetry map of the city. Seattle Poetic Grid is an interactive poetic cartography of the city and a culmination of Castro Luna's two-year Civic Poet residency. The Grid brings Seattle's poetic side to light. The project is intended to remain as a living testament of the city and includes a link for those who would like to make their poetic contributions.
In addition, Claudia participated in the Seattle Public Library's Sharing Our Voices project. The Library commissioned three original poems, recorded Luna reading her poems and recorded an oral interview with her identifying the inspiration and creation process inherent in poetry. The recordings will be added to the Library collection.