Poetry reading set Saturday at Fort Worden

Published 1:30 am Thursday, April 9, 2026

PORT TOWNSEND — Seattle-based poet Luther “Lue” Hughes will share new poems about her evolving relationship with grief at Fort Worden on Saturday.

Hughes will be one of three poets to share the stage at Centrum’s Poetry on the Salish Sea. Also reading will be Portland-based poet Allisa Cherry and Alabama’s poet laureate Jacqueline Trimble.

Admittance is free, with donations accepted at the door. The reading will begin at 7 p.m. at the Wheeler Theater, 200 Battery Way.

After the reading, a party to honor the poets will be held at Taps at the Guardhouse. Food will be provided by Centrum and Taps, and a cash bar will be open.

In her first book, “A Shiver in the Leaves,” Hughes wrote about Seattle. The book was placed on The New Yorker’s best books of 2022 list.

Before authoring the poems that would be completed in 2020 and published in 2022, Hughes was adamant that she would not be a place-focused poet.

The book’s genesis came when, at the end of graduate school in St. Louis, following her thesis defense, Hughes was prompted somehow to think about the presence of crows in Seattle.

“I realized that there weren’t many crows, actually, in St. Louis,” she said. “Seattle is such a crow-vibrant city. That kind of began like my thinking about Seattle.”

Hughes then moved back to Seattle, where she started thinking and writing about the traumas of home, family ties, police brutality, suicidal ideation, the flora and fauna, the rivers and ocean.

Ultimately, the work took seven or eight years to complete.

Hughes will read some poems from “A Shiver in the Leaves” but plans to focus much of her reading on newer work. Her next manuscript is nearly complete, she said.

The work, which followed several years of living and hardly writing, was prompted by the death of her mother. Leading up to her death, her mother had dementia.

“We didn’t know it was dementia for a long time,” Hughes said. “I was trying to figure out, as her only child, what was happening. So, like, going to a lot of appointments, having a lot of neural tests and exams, trying to understand what was happening because I didn’t know, I was pretty young.”

After her mother died from one of her strokes, Hughes was launched into thinking a lot about her mother and their relationship.

Hughes refers to grief as ongoing lifework.

“I don’t necessarily think I’ve moved through grief to the other side,” she said. “I think grief is now a part of my identity, my personhood.”

Not being able to speak with her mother, hear her mother’s voice or see her is a fact that Hughes acknowledged she will reckon with continuously.

“It’s OK to one day out of nowhere have a spontaneous feeling of hopelessness because my mom is gone,” Hughes said.

The process of living with that grief involves checking in with her body and attuning herself to how she is feeling, and assessing what she needs to get through the moment, if getting through it is the goal, she said.

“I can also have a time where I feel really joyful for the times I had with my mom,” she continued. “I can feel really happy about the time we had dinner together or went to church together, or the times that we laughed together.”

Grief is a presence in the poet’s life more than an absence. She does not expect to ever be OK with the loss of her mother, but she can track the evolving character of her own grief.

Death came in a wave for Hughes.

“It so happened that, when my mother died, my uncle died like three months before that. My childhood friend died a month later. My dog died three months later,” Hughes said.

Dealing with death and grief from all angles may have compelled Hughes to consolidate into herself.

“I couldn’t stop living my life, I couldn’t break down,” she said. “I had to keep moving forward to attend to the next grief and the next grief and the next grief.”

On the other side of all of those griefs, in a more stable season, with the help of therapy, Hughes could ask questions about that period of time and center herself.

“And really think about poetry as an avenue to capture what I think grief has done for me and what it can constantly do for me moving forward,” she said.

The skill that serves her in her grieving is the ability to analyze the depth of the feelings it brings. One of its benefits is a clarity in relating to people with greater sensitivity.

While her current manuscript is about her mother’s death, it is also about the many shapes that grief takes as she moves through the world without a biological mother.

Hughes has prioritized the liveliness of her mother in the pages of her new work, striving to represent her as more than just a body to mourn.

“I want my mother to feel alive,” she said. “I want her to be living and breathing. I don’t want my mom to feel like she’s two-dimensional in this book. I don’t want it to be so ridden with sadness that she just becomes a character of the poems, even though she is. ”

Hughes expressed a desire to see the character of her mother represented for all of her many facets. She writes about scenes where she is angry toward her mother and where she sees her lovingly.

While Hughes said she may continue to write poems about her mother moving forward, she is of the mind that her current manuscript is nearing completion.

“I have a sensation when I think something is done,” Hughes said. “I’m kind of out of poems to write.”

On a recent trip to New Orleans, where her mother and husband are both from, Hughes had an experience that became the foundation of a new poem, unrelated to the concluding manuscript.

“Recently, I’ve had an identity update, which is coming to terms with that I am trans,” she said.

During Mardi Gras several months ago, Hughes decided to move through the world as a woman for the first time, even though she had yet to completely come out socially or to family.

Hughes used the opportunity to be herself.

“Just kind of seeing what I would be perceived as when I move through a place where I don’t live,” Hughes said. “The poem that I wrote talks to that experience in a very positive way.”

It talks about her experiences at a portable bathroom and a bar, where her gender as a woman was assumed as such by other women.

“This experiencing moments of being rightfully gendered without saying anything,” she said. “The poems are kind of celebratory in that way.”

Moving forward, Hughes isn’t sure if this will become a central topic of her work, but that poem, written several months ago, felt like an indication that her work may be progressing onward.

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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@peninsuladailynews.com.