Edited by Elizabeth Bradfield, CMarie Fuhrman, and Derek Sheffield; Mountaineers Books, 2023
400 pages,  ISBN: 978-1-68051-622-7
​​Cascadia Field Guide brings together art, poetry, and stories holding scientific, sensory, and cultural knowledge to celebrate and illuminate Cascadia, the diverse ecoregion stretching from Alaska’s Prince William Sound to Northern California and from the Pacific Coast to the Continental Divide.

​This unique book contains 13 communities (from Tidewater Glacier to Shrub-Steppe) and 128 beings (from Geoduck to Cassia Crossbill), offering any reader, local or visitor, a new way of connecting-–with heart and mind and body-–to place.
  • "Have you ever been so filled up with the wonder of a place that it wants to spill out as a song? Well, here is the songbook....A gift in reciprocity for the gifts of the land." – Robin Wall Kimmerer
  • "A deeply informative and wildly exuberant visual and literary romp." – Ray Troll
  • ​"Amazing, a wonder, a gratitude."– Ross Gay
  • ​"An essential compendium... a 'feel guide' to an extraordinary place." 
    ​–J. Drew Lanham 
more praise for Cascadia Field Guide

browse

Experience Cascadia Field Guide​.  Meet some beings of Cascadia through art, poem, and story on our Browse page.

Communities & artists

Cascadia Field Guide reflects and honors relationships through its very structure.  The beings of the book are organized not by Linnean taxonomy, but by communities. A community might be made because one being eats another (Brown Bear eats Salmon) or in more nuanced ways (Spotted Owl's call echoes over Red Huckleberry).  

Each community is illustrated by a different artist from Cascadia; the artists work in form line design, cut paper, pen and ink, and engage with sensibilities from playful to scientific.
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​Meet the communities and their artists:
  • Tidewater Glacier (Chloey Cavanaugh)
  • Muskeg (Cori Dantini)
  • Salish Sea (Carmen Selam)
  • Coastal Urban Woods (Sarah Van Sanden)
  • Temperate Rainforest (Erin Fox)
  • Urban Shore (Rachel Kessler)
  • Pine Forest (Xena Lunsford)
  • Eastern Rivers (Justin Gibbens)
  • Shrub-Steppe (Emily Poole)
  • Montane (Claire Emery)
  • Loowit–Mount St. Helens (Travis London)
  • Willamette Valley (Jillian Barthold)
  • Outer Coast (Raya Friday)

Poets & writers

 In ​Cascadia Field Guide, writers with deep ties to the region–-both established and emerging-–share work alongside art and natural history/TEK-based stories engaging Orca, Mountain Goat, Bitterbrush and other iconic and endemic beings of Cascadia.

Some writers are new arrivals, either from overseas or through cross-continental migration; some have lived in the region for generations; some don't live here any longer, but spent significant portions of their lives in Cascadia. 

The writers (mostly poets) are from urban and rural areas, from all the states and provinces; they are emerging writers and venerable voices.  ​40 poems in ​Cascadia Field Guide​ are newly-written just for this book.
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WRITERS include Sherman Alexie, Betsy Aoki, Rick Barot, Linda Bierds, Allen Braden, Robert Bringhurst, Laura Da', Nora Marks Keixwnéi Dauenhauer, Chris Dombrowski, Kathleen Flenniken, Tess Gallagher, Lyanda Haupt, Kim Heacox, Sean Hill, Garret Hongo, Ever Jones, Robert Lashley, Dorianne Laux, Ursula K. LeGuin, Denise Levertov, Claudia Castro Luna, Colleen J. McElroy, Frances McCue, Kevin Miller, Shankar Naryan, Richard Nelson, Lucia Perillo, Jennifer Perrine, Vivian Faith Prescott, Matt Rader, Lois Red Elk, Paisley Rekdal, Theodore Roethke, Gary Snyder, Kim Stafford, Rob Taylor, Alexandra Teague, Jane Wong, Joe Wilkins, Robert Wrigley, Bill Yake, Isaac Yuen, Maya Jewell Zeller, Jan Zwicky...and more.