Luther Hughes was 12 years old when poetry made its first impact on them.

“I was in church, and the choir director read a poem about birds,” recalls Hughes, whose work has appeared in major publications including American Poetry Review, Paris Review, and Poetry Northwest. “It was likening birds to human behavior, and it blew my mind. It was a whole new way to work with language.”

“I was writing a poem about Seattle, and I noticed there weren’t as many crows in St. Louis as in Seattle,” Hughes says. “I realized that I missed Seattle more than I thought. It launched me into writing specifically about the city.”

A Seattle native, Hughes grew up in Skyway, attending Renton High School before earning a bachelor’s degree in poetry at Columbia College Chicago, then a Master of Fine Arts, also in poetry, from Washington University in St. Louis. “I went there because Phillip B. Williams went there, Carl Phillips was there, and other queer, Black poets I admired had also gone there. I only applied to one program, and if I didn’t get in, I wasn’t going to go anywhere else.”

While at Columbia College Chicago, Hughes started writing about poems they liked, launching the Shade Blog, a creative platform that would evolve into the Shade Journal, then Shade Literary Arts, an organization dedicated to supporting and publishing work by queer writers of color. In St. Louis, Hughes flourished in their MFA program but realized in their last semester that they missed the Northwest.

“I was writing a poem about Seattle, and I noticed there weren’t as many crows in St. Louis as in Seattle,” Hughes says. “I realized that I missed Seattle more than I thought. It launched me into writing specifically about the city.”

In 2018, Hughes returned to Seattle and got a job at the poetry-centric Open Books store, where they met a group of literary-minded peers. Through these friendships, Hughes launched a podcast, The Poet Salon, with fellow writers Gabrielle Bates and Dujie Tahat. Community involvement — and uplifting other writers — are at the core of Hughes’ creative practice. During the pandemic, Hughes raised $55,500 ($10,000 of which was thanks to the Philadelphia Assembly’s Money in the Streets Initiative), to help support 215 queer artists of color around the globe.

Hughes’ first full-length book of poetry, A Shiver in the Leaves (BOA Editions), was listed as one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022. Throughout its pages, they lay bare the struggles and triumphs of a young, queer, Black poet in contemporary, often violent, society. Packed full of dichotomous themes, vivid language, and laid-bare emotion, the work is a touchstone for anyone who has struggled with identity and selfhood and marks Hughes — who is currently working on a second book of poetry and a novel set in Seattle — as part of the vanguard in the city’s next literary wave.