About Me

(Photo credit: Robin Mills)

Dave Seter has been named Sonoma County Poet Laureate 2024-26. He is a civil engineer, essayist, and poet. He is the author of the full-length poetry collection Don’t Sing to Me of Electric Fences (Cherry Grove Collections, 2021) and the chapbooks Night Duty (Main Street Rag, 2010) and Somewhere West of the Miss

(Photo credit: Robin Mills)

Dave Seter has been named Sonoma County Poet Laureate 2024-26. He is a civil engineer, essayist, and poet. He is the author of the full-length poetry collection Don’t Sing to Me of Electric Fences (Cherry Grove Collections, 2021) and the chapbooks Night Duty (Main Street Rag, 2010) and Somewhere West of the Mississippi (forthcoming from Mammoth Publications, 2025). Informed by his career in the field of environmental protection, he writes about social and environmental issues, including the intersection of the built world and natural world. He is also studying Lithuanian and has translated a number of poems by contemporary Lithuanian poets into English and published them in literary journals. His poems have won the KNOCK Ecolit Prize and received third place in the William Matthews competition. He is the recipient of two Pushcart nominations. His poetry book reviews have appeared in Cider Press Review, Poetry Flash, and Tupelo Quarterly. He has been an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and has served on the Board of Directors of Marin Poetry Center. He earned his undergraduate degree in civil engineering from Princeton University and his graduate degree in humanities from Dominican University of California. 

My ecopoetics journey began as a student in the Masters in Humanities program at Dominican University of California. Using Marianne Moore's long poem "An Octopus" (about the ecosystem of Mount Rainer National Park, whose system of glaciers has been called an octopus of ice) my Master's Thesis tackles the idea of how to write a poem about 

My ecopoetics journey began as a student in the Masters in Humanities program at Dominican University of California. Using Marianne Moore's long poem "An Octopus" (about the ecosystem of Mount Rainer National Park, whose system of glaciers has been called an octopus of ice) my Master's Thesis tackles the idea of how to write a poem about the immense  topic of global warming. See link below.

Ecopoetry has many definitions but I'm compelled by the elegant simplicity of poet and scholar Brenda Hillman's description of ecopoetry as worried nature poetry.