The following description comes from the event organizer.

Please join for the Poetry Rainmakers Reading Series where poet friends with ties to the Great Pacific Northwest tour and share their work. Featured poets are Francesca Bell and Dion O’Reilly.

Francesca Bell was born in Spokane Washington and raised in Seattle in a family with deep, hardscrabble roots in the Northwest. Her writing appears in ELLE, Los Angeles Review of Books, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and Rattle. Her first book, Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019), was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. In 2023, Red Hen Press published What Small Sound, her second book of poetry, and Whoever Drowned Here, a collection of poems by Max Sessner that she has translated from German. She is translation editor at the Los Angeles Review and the Marin County Poet Laureate.


Dion O’Reilly's debut collection, Ghost Dogs, was shortlisted for The Catamaran Prize and The Eric Hoffer Award among others. Her second book, Sadness of the Apex Predator, was chosen by University of Wisconsin's Cornerstone Press for its Portage Poetry Series of new and emerging voices. Her work appears in The Sun, Rattle, Cincinnati Review, The Slowdown, Verse Daily and elsewhere. She is a podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, leads poetry workshops, and is a reader for Catamaran Literary Quarterly. She splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and her residence in Bellingham, Washington.

Other venues on the Rainmakers Reading Tour are:
Annie Bloom’s Books in Portland on May 14th​ 7:00 PM​ with Dion O’Reilly, Francesca Bell​, and special guest Portland poet Emily Ransdell.
Margin Shift in Seattle May 17 with Vincent Rendoni, Francesca Bell, and Dion O’Reilly 
Village Books in Bellingham May 18th with Vincent Rendoni, Francesca Bell, and Dion O’Reilly