For the Reporter

Poetry at the Rainbow Café presents the works of Dennis Caswell and Corey Cowan on Monday, May 7.

The program is from 7 to 9 p.m. at the café, 112 E. Main St.

Coffee and conversation follow readings. It is an open mic opportunity. The public is invited.

About the poets

Cowan is a writer, songwriter, poet, musician, graphics artist, miscreant and pot stirrer from Auburn, who has worked in Web and graphics design.

He grew up in Aberdeen, where he worked as a bridge tender for Union Pacific and for the local Sears store as a receiver and home delivery truck driver. He left Aberdeen in 1984 with a transfer from the Aberdeen Sears to the catalog plant in Seattle. He ended up working at eight different Sears facilities with some closing down permanently before leaving the company after 23 years of service.

Disabled following a bout with the H1N1 flu and pneumonia that landed him in a coma and a two-month stay in the ICU, Cowan spends much of his time writing poetry and essays on current events. His poems vary from funny and whimsical to dark and serious. His late grandfather, Robert E. Cowan, was an influential and accomplished poet in his own right.

Caswell lives outside Woodinville and works as a software engineer in the aviation industry. He holds degrees in computer science from UC Berkeley and UCLA and spent the ’80s and ’90s designing and programming computer games and educational software in northern California, where he grew up. He moved to Washington with his family in 1997.

His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Rattle, Bluestem, Floating Bridge Review, Crab Creek Review, and assorted other journals and anthologies, and he was selected for the Jack Straw Writers Program in 2013. His first full-length collection, “Phlogiston” (FLOW-ji-stahn), was published in 2012 by Floating Bridge Press.

The Rainbow Cafe, Striped Water Poets, the NorthWest Renaissance, Auburn Arts Commission, City of Auburn, and King County 4Culture make the program possible.