Sierra Nelson is a Seattle-based poet and text-based performance and installation artist. For over a decade she has been working as a teaching artist at Seattle Children’s Hospital through Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools (WITS) Program, mentoring critically ill patients and patients undergoing longer term treatment in creative writing, as well as through a more recent Parent Journaling Program through the Pediatric Advanced Care Team at Children's. For the past 10 years she has also been working with letterpress artists at Seattle's School of Visual Concepts (SVC) to create beautiful broadsides of selected poems written by Seattle Children's Hospital WITS students working with Nelson and fellow teaching artist Ann Teplick. These unique letterpress broadsides are given to the patients and their families, as well as displayed to wider audiences at the Children's Hospital, at Seattle Arts & Lectures' literary events, and throughout the city including at Seattle Public Libraries, Jack Straw Cultural Center, and the Seattle Art Museum.

Nelson also teaches in a variety of places outside of the hospital as well, including at Richard Hugo House, Centrum, and the University of Washington in Bothell, Friday Harbor, and Rome, Italy. Nelson’s books include forthcoming poetry collection The Lachrymose Report (Poetry NW Editions), lyrical choose-your-own-adventure I Take Back the Sponge Cake (Rose Metal Press) collaborating with visual artist Loren Erdrich, and multiple-choice poetry and graph workbook made as the collaborating group Vis-a-Vis Society. Her poems have appeared inside Seattle Metro buses and at the Seattle Aquarium, with Nordic runes on lava stones in Iceland (SIM Gallery), in sound boxes on Denny Ave. (All Rise Project), and in literary journals and anthologies including Alive at the Center, Crazyhorse, Tin House, Pleiades, and Poetry Northwest. She earned her M.F.A. in Poetry from University of Washington Seattle (2002). For more info: songsforsquid.tumblr.com