2026-27 Visiting Poets Series. Bainbridge Island Poet Laureate Program is bringing three nationally acclaimed poets to Bainbridge Island between July 1, 2026, and June 30, 2027. All events are free, thanks to grants from the Bainbridge Community Foundation and the Washington States Art Commission (ArtsWA).

Layli Long Soldier is a poet, artist, and citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. She is the author of WHEREAS, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and WE, to be published in October and long-listed for the National Book Award. She was recently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Layli was featured at the Sept. 25–26, 2026 Bainbridge Island Book Festival in conversation with past Washington State Poet Laureate, Rena Priest, a member of the Lummi Nation.

Safia Elhillo. Feb. 28, 2027 - 4 p.m. at the Bainbridge Island Rowing Club Boat House.

Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia is the author of the four books. Her work is widely published in magazines and anthologies. Her fellowships include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. As a bilingual writer, she allows untranslated Arabic to interweave itself naturally into the fabric of her verse. Elhillo references the word "asmarani," a term of praise and adoration for dark-skinned people, to describe her own Black identity in an Arabophone world.

Jenny George.  April 17, 2027 - 4 p.m. at the Bainbridge Island Rowing Club Boat House.

Jenny is the author of “After Image” (Copper Canyon Press, 2024; PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry finalist), an extended elegy for the poet's deceased wife, and “The Dream of Reason” (Copper Canyon Press, 2018), winner of the 2015 Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, FIELD, Gulf Coast, Cimarron Review, The Collagist, Crab Orchard Review, failbetter, Indiana Review, and Shenandoah and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fund, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo Corporation. Jenny lives in Santa Fe, NM, where she runs a foundation for Buddhist-based social justice. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.