DAYTON – Washington State Poet Laureate, Tod Marshall will visit Dayton on Jan. 19. Marshall will make presentations at the elementary and high school during the day, with an evening presentation at the Dayton Memorial Library at 6 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Marshall is the fourth Washington State Poet Laureate and is the first from Eastern Washington. He lives in Spokane where he is a professor at Gonzaga University. He has authored three award-winning poetry collections: Dare Say (2002), The Tangled Line (2009), and Bugle (2014).

In 2005, he was awarded a Washington Artists Trust Fellowship and he received the 2015 Humanities Washington Award for Scholarship and Service.

The Washington State Poet Laureate position was established in 2007 when the state legislature passed a bill to recognize the value of poetry to the culture and heritage of the state.