Sierra Nelson
Poet, essayist, educator,
performance & installation artist,
avid collaborator, armchair aquanaut.
Books & Collaborative Projects
“Sierra Nelson makes a wondrous strange music of the sorrows of the world and plumbs vulnerable, treacherous depths in such a way that allows the reader to approach them safely and return enlivened.” – Elizabeth Bradfield, Author of Toward Antartica, Once Removed, Approaching Ice
The Lachrymose Report
Sierra Nelson (Poetry NW Editions)
“We arranged the question marks / like a bouquet to catch the light.”
I Take Back the Sponge Cake
Sierra Nelson & Loren Erdrich (Rose Metal Press)
Selected by Anne Carson for NYU’s Washington Square Review Collaboration Prize.
ISOLATION
Sierra Nelson & Loren Erdrich (Publication Studio Hudson)
“to bring into physical contact, to strike as a bell.”
Three Hearts: An Anthology of Cephalopod Poetry
Sierra Nelson, Editor (World Enough Writers)
“All over the world, in liminal spaces between earth, air, and sea—on the shore, by a tidepool, on a dock, on a boat, while swimming, while diving, in an aquarium, in a lab—so many human beings are having a moment with a cephalopod, which gives me some hope for humanity….”
Winner of the Next Generation Indie Book Award for Science/ Nature/ Environment Category.
Cleared: The Art of Science
Sierra Nelson & Adam P. Summers
Poems by Sierra Nelson & photographs of cleared and stained fish specimens by ichthyologist Adam P. Summers.
Exhibition debuted at the Seattle Aquarium.
Featured in the Slovenian Natural History Museum & Piran Aquarium.
Poems and photographs featured in The Guardian, The Smithsonian, and elsewhere.
Vis-à-Vis Society
Founded by Dr. Ink & Dr. Owning (Sierra Nelson & Rachel Kessler)
Poet-scientists dedicated to the poetic analysis of the everyday.
Teaching, Experiments, Poems
Teaching & Mentorship
- Hugo House
- Writers in the Schools: Seattle Children’s Hospital & Seattle Public Schools
- Words of Courage Project: Collaboration with Partners in Print creating broadsides of student poetry from Seattle Children’s
- Centrum
- More!
Social Practice, Experimental Talks, Installations, Poetry-Films, Poems in the Wild…
- Cephalopod Appreciation Society (founded 2003) – Founder, president, & host of all-ages community gatherings celebrating Cephalopods (octopus, squid, chambered nautilus, and cuttlefish) through poetry, art, dance, music, film, science talks, comics, stickers, and more. Over the years CAS gatherings have taken place at NW Film Forum, Friends of the Water Front, and Hugo House. Founded
- “Experimental Embodiments of Shared Soundscapes: Extinction (Grief), Invasiveness (Reckoning), Bombilation (Joy)” – Interactive Presentation (ASLE Conference 2025)
- “How to Remember” & Other poems (Poetry Northwest)
- “Four Imagined Movies” – Poetry-film (Debuted Cadence Video Poetry Festival)
- “Runasafn / Rune Library” – Installation (Debuted Samband Íslenskra Myndlistarmanna (SÍM) Gallery, Iceland)
“Nelson’s poems are flowcharts of feeling, investigations into the ephemeral and the infinite. She documents the biology of being too alive.“
Rebecca Hoogs
Seattle Arts & Lectures, Author of Self-Storage
Watch, Read, Listen… Take a Class… Collaborate…
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