Celebrating Twenty Years of SoulFood Poetry Night

“Thank you all for your belief in community and its ability to make the world a better place.”

—Clint McCune and Sara Pelfrey, original owners of SoulFood CoffeeHouse       +

On the twentieth anniversary of SoulFood Poetry Night, I thought I’d share something of its history, and how this monthly poetry reading series extends the theme of community that has always been central to SoulFood CoffeeHouse. The story has up and downs, and at least two of the darker episodes are very sad. But mostly this story is a joyful celebration of our poetic sharing and personal self-expression. SoulFood Poetry Night has built twenty years of incredible community.

The story begins in 2005. I had taught a poetry workshop at SoulFood Books, which isn’t where SoulFood is in Redmond, Washington today. Back then the store was located near Victor’s Celtic Coffee, in the space that later became McDonald’s Books and later still Centro Cultural Mexicano’s Mi Casa facility. Sara Pelfrey ran SoulFood back then, and it was essentially a new age bookstore. I would visit occasionally and one time Sara told me that SoulFood was moving to a bigger location and was adding a coffee shop. She invited me to come by sometime to have a look, while they were still remodeling the space, which I did around May of 2006.

That’s when I first met Sara’s partner, Clint McCune. He was working on building the stage and sound system that we’ve been enjoying ever since. Clint is a fine musician and grew up in a show-biz sort of family. His dad, Don McCune, was better known as Captain Puget on KOMO TV, starring in a children’s show that began in 1957 and ran until 1966. Although this show ended sixty years ago, he had been known as Captain Puget ever since then. He next started the “Exploration Northwest” TV travel show, also on KOMO. It ran until 1981, and in its 21 years of being on the air, it won 26 Emmy awards. The McCune family was musical, which is directly the reason why SoulFood has the stage that’s been there since 2006.

When I first saw Clint building the stage, I immediately thought it would be an ideal location for a monthly poetry reading, and Clint and Sara agreed, enthusiastically. I had been attending poetry readings at various other locations, mostly in Seattle, ever since I had moved to this area from California in 2002, and I thought why not bring more poetry to Redmond rather than me always visiting Seattle. That was an admittedly selfish motive, but I also trust that these years of literary events have benefited Redmond and the surrounding area. I researched when other poetry readings were held in the greater Seattle area (that was harder to do back then before the existence of the Western Washington Poets Network website, where everything is listed today). We settled on the third Thursday of each month, and readings have been held every month ever since, nearly always on the third Thursday, with a couple of cancellations because of snow and at least one power failure, not to mention the great pandemic. Readings were scheduled from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. We often had about thirty-five people in attendance, and I remember an early high of fifty-five when we featured Washington state poet laureate Sam Green. Clint and Sarah offered a free drink to our featured readers, and we routinely went till 10:00 p.m. to accommodate all the open-mic readers. It was a time of great generosity. We were on to something.

As I mentioned, SoulFood’s stage and soundboard is a direct result of Clint’s musical and performance background, and nearly all of SoulFood’s early music and poetry open mics were streamed live to SoulTribe TV. Dozens of those recordings are still available on YouTube. Clint’s first band, formed with his sister in 1999, was called Twirl, and I believe that word used to be part of the store’s decorations. Along the bottom of the stage, you’ll also see the words “Hope, Hum, Stomp, Strum.” That was the title of one of their albums, which they recorded at SoulFood. Hope is my favourite word, and I immediately found affinities with Clint, his conscientious soul-affirming activism, and his music.

Another key event before the reading series even started was that I wanted someone to help me as curator. I thought of Lana Hechtman Ayers, and she immediately agreed. She also proposed a process that we’ve sustained for the majority of readings ever since. That was to ask just one featured reader, and then to ask that reader to propose his or her own coreader. While Lana and I knew many poets, we thought this practice would broaden the scope of who our readers were, and that’s been true in spades, with our featured readers representing a who’s-who of this region’s best poets, with visiting poets as well. It’s been remarkable to have welcomed so many excellent poets over twenty years, and hundreds more (maybe even thousands) in our open-mic reading. This is a place where many people have made their tentative first poetry readings ever, such as teenager Janae Lu, who later became the Seattle Youth Poet Laureate, and I’m proud that this stage offers a community where first-timers feel encouraged and safe to share their self-expression. We’ve seen poets blossom from having no books to many books, from shaky reading skills to refined professionalism. These readings have built a rich community, and through poetry we too have been excited to hope, hum, stomp, and sometimes even strum.

I’m not sure when it was, but at some point SoulFood Books changed its name to SoulFood CoffeeHouse, and books were slowly phased out, but the spirit of curiosity that goes with books is still part of the SoulFood vibe. We had many wonderful readings in those early years (see a complete list of past readings), including a few bonus readings that we held on days other than third Thursdays, and attendance was steady. However, in December of 2011, the bridge toll began on the refurbished Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, and that soon started to deter poets who had been coming from Seattle, and our attendance eventually declined. At the time, the only publicity we had was posters in the store—and word of mouth. To help boost attendance, on June 28, 2015 I started the SoulFood Poetry Night page on Facebook, and created our first Facebook event in November of 2015, but these invitations took a while to start having an effect. More recently, these promotions have felt less effective as people drift away from Facebook or ignore yet another event invitation, but at the time they seemed to help.

It later occurred to me that we might try featuring groups and organizations. That would engage more than just two readers to start with, and if they each brought friends, and publicized the reading to their groups, that would help with attendance—and also help sell food and drinks. I always thought it was a responsibility of SoulFood Poetry Night to help the store make sales, as a small token of our gratitude for being able to use their stage every month. Our first group to be featured at a regular monthly reading was Haiku Northwest on April 17, 2014 (April 17 is International Haiku Poetry Day), but we didn’t start in earnest to feature groups and organizations until 2016, so I guess it took four or five years for us to feel the decreased attendance enough to change reading strategies. At the time readings were typically booked more than a year in advance, so we were planning this change more than a year before it started happening. Consequently, we still had pairs of poets booked for a while, but by 2017 nearly all of our readings featured these larger groups, and it did help with attendance. So, readings featuring groups, organizations, and anthologies was a phase we went through. However, because there are far fewer groups than individual poets, it was also hard to sustain readings just with groups. As a result, we occasionally had pairs of readers again and have now mostly returned to that format.

I also want to share a dark chapter in SoulFood’s history, one that I think of nearly every time I step through the door to the side of the store. I am sharing this because as a community we want to support each other in all our ups and downs. This tragic event took place the day after poetry night, and although, to my knowledge, the people involved were not poetry night regulars, this incident greatly affected the entire SoulFood community, including many regulars. On Friday, July 18, 2014, a person I won’t name was in the breezeway outside the store, reportedly sending text messages to his girlfriend, threatening to kill the first person he saw if she didn’t come to see him. The girlfriend did come and his arguments escalated. Cara Neil had been defending the girlfriend, who was her friend, and the boyfriend ended up stabbing Cara multiple times in the chest. She died on July 23, 2014, after being taken off life support. SoulFood later had an event to celebrate her life, attended by more than a hundred people. A Redmond Reporter newspaper report said that Cara had been described by Alfredo Arnaiz, a friend, and Aaron Brouillette, then a manager at SoulFood, as “someone who put on a tough front but genuinely cared about others—caring was even part of her name.” Another report noted that Neil’s family had her organs donated, adding that “This included her heart, which surgeons were able to repair and harvest for a recipient, despite the fact that it had been damaged from the stabbing.” Alfredo Arnaiz added, “Her heart got to carry on, which is kind of amazing.” On Cara’s memorial page on Facebook, Albert Gallegos wrote that she was “loyal to friends, psychologically strong, and liked. She represented the good that some of us are afraid to show the world.”

In response to this tragedy, I wrote a poem for Cara, which was pinned up behind the SoulFood counter for a month or two. I read it at SoulFood Poetry Night on August 21, 2014, the month after Cara died, and have not read it publicly since that week. But I’d like to share it with you now. On February 19, 2016, the boyfriend was sentenced to twenty-two and a half years in prison. When she died, Cara Neil was 17 years old.

Another dark time for SoulFood was of course the pandemic. Our last reading before all the shutdowns was on February 20, 2020, featuring Once Told Tales Poetry Improv, with improvisational interpretations of poems, something we’d never done before. How innocent we all were then, how little we knew was ahead for us. We ended up having no readings in March, April, May, and June that year. At the time, I remember thinking that I didn’t want to shift to Zoom readings because surely this pandemic thing would be over soon. But that was obviously naïve. We switched to Zoom on July 16, 2020, for SoulFood Poetry Night’s fourteenth anniversary reading. Our first Zoom readers were Jory Mickleson and Dayna Patterson. For the next two years our Zoom readings were able to feature poets from farther afield, including poets from Oregon, California, British Columbia, New Jersey, Ohio, Maine, and even the Czech Republic. Our open-mic readers came from all over North America, and from Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, although time-zone differences didn’t easily allow for Europeans to attend. So, for these readings, our community expanded, yet also shrank, because attendance dwindled—it was no longer the kind of event it used to be.

Although it was sad to say goodbye to our distant Zoom regulars when we stopped our online readings, I was eager to meet in person again during the entire pandemic. Our first in-person reading after the pandemic, which had a surprising healthy attendance (about 35 people), was on September 15, 2022, and featured Katerina Canyon and Kibibi Monié. I had feared that we would have to start from scratch in building a new audience and community, but it turned out that our regulars and many new people were hungry for in-person events again, and hungry for poetry.

With the return to in-person readings and to help meet rising expenses and its accumulating pandemic debt, SoulFood started closing at 8:00 instead of 9:00 p.m., so for that September 15 reading we shifted the start time from 7:00 to 6:00 p.m. We worried that some people would choose dinner over poetry, and that definitely seemed to be the case, at least a little bit, but it was a necessary step to take to keep SoulFood in business. I was grateful that poetry night could still have its thriving place in the greater Redmond and Eastside arts community.

It had taken more than two years for SoulFood Poetry Night to return to being in person again. Other poetry readings had gone back to being in person long before SoulFood, but a sad reason all events at SoulFood were slow to return was because co-owner Kevin Oaks had contracted cancer, and passed away on November 23, 2022, at the age of 59. This was obviously very hard on Makia Oaks, Kevin’s wife and business partner, who managed to keep the store open during these very difficult times. I remember seeing that many small businesses in Redmond were permanently closing their doors during the pandemic, and I was afraid that we’d lose SoulFood, too, and thus lose poetry night.

I tried extra hard to publicize poetry night to boost attendance when readings returned to being in person, and made extra announcements to encourage audiences to buy food and drink or make donations to help sustain the SoulFood business, but it was not enough. In May of 2024, SoulFood started charging a $5 admission fee for poetry night. This was disheartening but I had at least talked them down from a higher amount, and was able to negotiate free attendance for one friend of each featured reader. With this unprecedented fee, our attendance immediately dropped by fifty percent, sometimes more, and at least one reader cancelled his participation when he learned that readers received none of that money. I tried to explain how the fee was necessary for SoulFood’s ongoing financial recovery after the pandemic, but it still felt sad to me that the community we had built for eighteen years had to pay for the privilege of poetry. It became the only open-mic poetry venue in all of Western Washington that required a fee. In June of that year, I remember seeing one of our regulars walk into the store, see the sign asking for the $5 admission fee, and then walk out. It broke my heart, yet what else could we do when SoulFood was still trying to survive? In May of 2025, Lauren Stein and Ellison Barry took over as new owners of SoulFood and, in June of 2025, they generously okayed the ending of this fee, and our attendance increased again. So, the pandemic and Kevin’s death was a dark time for SoulFood. But the community rallied together, and SoulFood is still with us today.

Some of the more notable readers SoulFood has had in twenty years include Jack Foley, Charles Potts, Madeline DeFrees (the very week one of her books was up for the Pulitzer Prize), Oliver de la Paz, Rick Barot, Kelli Russell Agodon, James Bertolino, Sam Green, Karen Finneyfrock, Matt Gano, Nicole Hardy, Carolyne Wright, Joan Swift, Daemond Arrindell, Michael Spence, Jourdan Keith, Sean Bentley, Emily Warn, Natasha Kochicheril Moni, Koon Woon, Tod Marshall, Terry Ann Carter, Claudia Castro Luna, Tara Hardy, Lucien Zell, John Sibley Williams, Timothy Green, Joel Dias-Porter, Gary Copeland Lilley, Dion O’Reilly, Francesca Bell, Kate Gale, Bruce Beasley, and Rae Armantrout—among many others. A few of our featured readers also included poets giving some of their first-ever poetry readings, celebrating equality and encouragement. In addition, Band of Poets has performed on the SoulFood stage seven times, and our readers have included nearly all of Washington state’s poet laureates, and all of Redmond’s poet laureates. I particularly remember Jack McCarthy, who took notes about every reading he attended (not just at SoulFood), recording the names of every poet and the names of the poems they read. No listener was more attentive at poetry readings than Jack McCarthy. We held a memorial reading for him on April 15, 2021.

At each SoulFood Poetry Night, I thank the audience for making the choice to be at SoulFood when they had so many other options. I always say that I honour their choice and hope that our poetry night will be rewarding, whether they read in the open mic or just listen. We’ve had hundreds of rewarding readings over twenty years now, and we look forward to more. I am grateful to the community we’ve built here at SoulFood. Some of our old regulars are gone, but we always seem to have new regulars too. At nearly every reading, someone usually says it’s their first time reading at any open-mic reading, and that garners an extra cheer. And our other readers are now twenty years older than when we started, and they deserve cheers as well. SoulFood Poetry Night is not just about poetry, but about community, and I’m deeply grateful for it. I am deeply grateful to SoulFood CoffeeHouse for making poetry night happen, and to its many baristas, volunteers, and other staff members, and I’m deeply grateful for each poet and attendee who has joined us for twenty years. Thank you.

SoulFood Anniversary Greeting from Lana Hechtman Ayers