Meet the 2025 Jury
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Larry Calkins
Visual artist
Bio: Larry is an artist and instructor at Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle. His art draws inspiration from the hearsay stories of the Harlan Valley, a remote logging and farming community where he was raised in central Oregon, and where his family’s history goes back five generations. Today, whether he is creating woodcut prints to raise money for animal rescue, or fashioning his signature Shaker-style dress sculptures, throughout it all run threads of lore and hilarity, darkness and hope.
On symbolism: “I developed my own symbols that mark my narratives: for example, the burning house represents change and disruption. Other houses stand for stability and connectedness, a place to be from or to belong. Rabbits and birds that populate my imagery are interchangeably good and evil, male and female, strong or weak. Appearances can be deceptive.”
On medium: His career started in photography, but soon hopscotched in new directions, such as encaustics, printmaking, bookmaking, and sculpture. He’s often drawn to simple materials and objects with a patina of history: rusted metal, found cloth, and scraps of wood.
On the margins: Larry began exhibiting in 1994 at the MIA Gallery in Seattle, which the Seattle Times wrote “specialized in showing work by self-taught artists, a genre that is related to folk art and so-called ‘outsider’ art.” He is currently represented by the American Primitive Gallery in New York, Rice Polak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Tanner Hill in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
On simplicity: “When you are closer to nature, you are more content. Birds replace radios. Evening sky replaces TV.”
On getting unstuck: “Make a present for someone.”
Hometown: Harlan, Oregon
Ode to home:
“It is dusk always in the hills of Harlan.
Dusk is the color of waking dreams.
Everything happens at evening-tide.”
His favorite place near Issaquah: Tiger Mountain, where Larry and his architect wife, Sabine, constructed their house by themselves in the late 1980s. It took three years to complete. Larry’s art studio was the first structure they built.
Find Larry:
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Saira Khan
Writer
Bio: Saira is the founder of Literary Nights, an open mic in the historic Train Depot that welcomes published authors alongside amateurs, providing a salon experience right in downtown Issaquah. A lawyer by training, Saira also hones her craft as an essayist and fiction writer and she has been published in Pleiades, Witness Magazine, The Guardian, Identity Theory, and elsewhere.
On readalouds: “I grew up on oral storytelling in a Pakistani immigrant family. Hearing stories affects our brains differently… The feedback one gets from reading their writings out loud—did the audience laugh and sigh at the right parts? Did the audience’s breath change? Did we synchronize our heartbeats over the three hours we are together?”
On digital detox: She started Literary Nights in 2022 as an antidote to the digital flatness of our lives in those early months exiting the pandemic. As she explained in an interview with Canvas Rebel: “Enter the literary salon: an analog way to unplug and connect to each other in a more real way.”
On getting unstuck: “I let myself play or walk or eat or cry, whatever’s necessary. I go to a lecture, read, nap, doodle, write emails asking people for money. I sigh and wonder if I’ll ever finish the composition. I scroll and am reminded that reality is what I create with my own mind and thoughts. I continue.”
On open access: “Literary Nights funds itself through public grants and individual donors, and we want to keep it free and accessible, like the salon or library, a true space without transactional motives. A space radically inclusive that promotes radical self-expression.
On fanfare: Saira’s short fiction chapbook, Late Stage, was published by DeRailleur Press in Brooklyn, New York. A 2023 Periplus Fellow, her work was also shortlisted for the 2023 Coppice Prize in short fiction and named a finalist for the Black Lawrence Press 2024 Immigrant Writing Series.
On inspiration: “The writers, artists, teachers that have nurtured me and shared their secrets and methods, ones I have met through writing workshops and retreats and classes and recitations and the artists I have read and seen and worshipped and breathed in. These people exist all over the world and in Issaquah and across time. The women who inspire me and especially those who disturb me.”
Hometown: Somerset, New Jersey
Favorite place near Issaquah: “I walk the Rainier Trail daily, and I also love the patio in the back of Paisley’s Tea Room.”
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Ali Marcus
Songwriter
Bio: Ali is the owner of Happy Time Studio on Front Street and the founder of the Issaquah Open Studio Tour. She came of age as a songwriter during George W. Bush’s administration, and she found her voice writing and performing topical songs, in the spirit of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan–an approach as relevant today as it was nearly 100 years ago. In 2024, she came together with local artists to establish the nonprofit Art Commons to continue producing the tour and create innovative programming to bring the arts community together year-round.
On strangers: “My favorite part of the tour last year is how it created community. Artists who started out as strangers are now collaborators. The Art Commons board largely met and got to know each other as a result of the 2024 studio tour. Just imagine what will happen this year?”
On open doors: “Three hundred people joined us for the tour in our first year, and everybody called out a sense of hospitality. It felt very personal being welcomed into home studios, and artists will spend months preparing again this year.”
On thanks: “None of this would be possible without the City of Issaquah understanding that little things like this matter in big ways. You don’t have to have a big reach to have a big impact. In fact, sometimes the opposite is true.”
On being face to face: “The world does not need more Zoom anything. It matters a lot to look at someone’s face and hear the tone of their voice and respond with inflections and mannerisms and body language. All of that is part of having a real connection with people. Art gives us a common humanity.”
On career: Ali has a double degree in Music and 20th Century Art from the University of Virginia, and a rich understanding of the music industry, from sharing the stage with Tom Paxton and Dar Williams, to various roles working with the Dave Matthews Band, to writing, recording, and engineering eight albums of her original music.
On voice: “I really believe that songwriting can change the world.”
Hometown: Oakton, Virginia
Her favorite place near Issaquah: “Happy Lemon. One Jasmine green tea with boba and no sugar please. Let me also give a shoutout to Bobae. Holy smokes, it’s decadent over there.”
Find Ali:
Media
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Sarah Polster Tribble
Fiber artist
Bio: Sarah is a quilter, mixed media artist, and fiber artist. Across mediums, her driving force is to find beautiful reuses for discarded materials, coming as close to zero waste as possible.
On titles: “I think that many people downplay the creativity in their daily lives. Many creative people pigeonhole themselves by saying ‘I'm not an artist’ or ‘I'm not that good’—myself included! I want to help others find their creative niche.”
On thrift: “When making mixed media, I use recycled magazines in a style that is similar to quilling. When making quilts, I aim to use old, unloved and unused fabrics in unexpected ways. When I am knitting, I try to use up old, unused yarn, including experimenting with dying ugly yarn.”
On getting unstuck: “I try to reconnect—with my materials, with my family, or with nature!”
On community: “I make charity quilts with a group of people at a friend’s church and I am a member of Block Party Quilting Guild based in Sammamish.”
On (geo)patterns: Sarah studied geology and earth science as an undergrad—and has a master’s in applied geosciences. So, she can tell you exactly the type of rock at the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, where she took a trip… that would be hexagonal columnar basalts.
On the water: Sarah is also a rower who coached middle school girls with Lake Sammamish Rowing Association.
Hometown: Littleton, Colorado
Favorite place near Issaquah: “Lake Sammamish, but I am partial!”
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Mark Winters
Illustrator
Bio: Mark’s art career started in comics books, graphic design, and illustration for tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons and Magic the Gathering. He joined the team at Wizards of the Coast as an art director, where he worked with hundreds of artists commissioning thousands of pieces of art. Mark returned to life as a freelance illustrator for a short time before being invited to work at Valve Corporation where he creates a variety of assets, such as illustrations, 3D models, visual effects, and animations for video games.
On community: “I’ve been a long-time believer in strengthening connections between artists by doing outreach, reviewing portfolios, participating in workshops, and mentoring. The illustration community has always been very open, sharing, and supportive. I owe much of what I’ve been able to achieve simply from my peer group.”
On hours in the day: “I have a persistent need to learn new skills, so I find that I don’t have enough time to get to all the things I want to accomplish. The biggest creative block I have is time.”
On what art has given him: “What hasn’t it given me? It’s given me my friends, my family, and my livelihood.”
Hometown: Salina, Kansas
His favorite place near Issaquah: “I'm a bit of a homebody. I enjoy spending time in my workshop, art studio, or with the family, but we tend to take the kids to Confluence Park on sunny afternoons, enjoying tacos from Laz’s food truck nearby and walking along the water.”
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