The Poetry at the Rainbow Café welcomes Tim Sherry on Monday, Feb. 3.

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

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

Sherry was a student and athlete. He is a husband and father and has been a public high school teacher and coach. He has been a high school principal, volunteered over the years in church and community activities, and is a grandfather. Always there was poetry kept private because athletes and coaches and principals and Scandinavian Lutherans don’t usually do that sort of thing.

In the last 10 years, with the support and encouragement of so many writers in the Northwest, Sherry has had poems published in Crab Creek Review, The Raven Chronicles, Seminary Ridge Review, Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place, Floating Bridge Review, and others. He has been a Pushcart nominee, and in 2010 was an Artsmith Artist Resident on Orcas Island. Most recently, his poem “Of Fires” was a finalist for the Rash Award in Poetry and published in The Broad River Review. This is his first full-length collection.

Sherry earned a B.A. in English from Pacific Lutheran University and an M.A. in English from the University of Chicago. He has lived in Chicago and for a short time in Europe, but has lived most of his life in Tacoma, where long walks, quiet days, many friends, a close family, many travels, his faith, and his wife, Marcia, are the inspiration for his writing about the common things along the way.

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