Mountain Writers Series


Mountain Writers Series
home workshops readings readings in Portland & the Oregon Coast special events archive wordstock community links contact	Readings Archive: 2007 - 2018 February 2018 Maggie Anderson & Judith Barrington Poetry Reading 7:30 PM, Monday, February 12, 2018 Ford Food & Drink, 2505 SE 11th Avenue, Portland OR 97202 Suggested Donation $5.00 Maggie Anderson is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Dear All (Four Ways Books, 2017). Earlier titles include Windfall: New and Selected Poems, A Space Filled with Moving, Cold Comfort, and Years That Answer. She has co-edited several thematic anthologies, including A Gathering of Poets, a collection of poems read at the 20^th anniversary commemoration of the shootings at Kent State University in 1970, as well as Learning by Heart: Contemporary American Poetry about School and After the Bell: Contemporary American Prose about School. Her awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, fellowships from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia councils on the arts, and the Ohioana Library Award for contribution to the literary arts in Ohio. The founding director of the Wick Poetry Center and of the Wick Poetry Series of the Kent State University Press, Anderson is professor emerita of English at Kent State University and now lives in Asheville, North Carolina. Judith Barrington’s fifth collection of poetry, Long Love: New & Selected Poems will be launched on June 12th. She is also the author of The Conversation (2015), whose title poem was the winner of the Gregory O’Donoghue International poetry award. In 2001 Lifesaving: A Memoir was the winner of the Lambda Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. Judith is also the author of the best-selling Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art and has been a faculty member of the University of Alaska, Anchorage’s MFA Program. She has taught workshops around the U.S. as well as in Britain and Spain and is one of the founders of Soapstone Inc. Download or view PDF November 2017 Stephanie Adams-Santos & Kate Carroll de Gutes Poetry & Prose Reading 7:30 PM, Wednesday, November 15, 2017 Ford Food & Drink, 2505 SE 11th Avenue, Portland OR 97202 Suggested Donation $5.00 Stephanie Adams-Santos is the author of a full-length poetry collection, Swarm Queen’s Crown, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards, as well as several chapbooks, Total Memory (Finishing Line Press); Little Fugues (Sola Books); and the award-winning The Sundering, selected by Linda Gregg for an Academy of American Poets New York Chapbook Fellowship. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, she was a finalist for the Corporeal Voices “The Voice is a Muscle” Fellowship for writers of color. Her work has appeared in many print and online journals and magazines, including Guernica, The Boston Review, Orion Magazine, Nailed, Noble Gas Quarterly, and others. A recipient of a 2016 Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship, she earned an MFA in Poetry at Columbia University School of the Arts, and a BA in English at Stanford University. She is the founder of Tarot Obscuro and Ojo de la Selva Press. She teaches poetry at the Independent Publishing Resource Center, Literary Arts, and Portland Community College. Kate Carroll de Gutes is the author of two books, most recently The Authenticity Experiment: Lessons From the Best & Worst Year of My Life, based on her critically acclaimed blog and which will be released by Two Sylvias Press in September, 2017. Her first book, Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, won the 2016 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and a 2016 Lambda Literary Award in Memoir. She has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Anderson Center, Artsmith, and Centrum. An authentic and humorous teacher, she has taught at Pacific Lutheran University, University of Idaho, University of Puget Sound, and Willamette University, as well as at the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference and at the Attic Institute in Portland. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Professional Writing from the University of Puget Sound and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. View Flyer This event is made possible by support from the Oregon Arts Commission. October 2017 Zachary Schomburg & Ed Skoog Reading 7:30 PM, Wednesday, October 18, 2017 Ford Food & Drink, 2505 SE 11th Avenue, Portland OR 97202 Suggested Donation $5.00 Poet, novelist, illustrator and translator Zachary Schomburg was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1977, and raised in Iowa. He earned a BA from the College of the Ozarks and a PhD in creative writing-poetry from the University of Nebraska. His books of poetry include The Man Suit (2007), Scary, No Scary (2009), and Fjords vol 1 (2012), and The Book of Joshua (2014), all from Black Ocean Press. His novel, Mammother, was published this fall from Featherproof Books. He is the publisher and editor of Octopus Books, and co-curator of the Bad Blood readings series. He lives and teaches in Portland, Oregon. Poet Ed Skoog was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1971. He graduated from Kansas State University and holds an MFA from the University of Montana. His books of poetry include Mister Skylight, Rough Day (winner of the Washington State Book Award) and Run the Red Lights, all published by Copper Canyon Press. Skoog has taught at the Idyllwild Arts Foundation, the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, and Tulane University, and he has been a visiting writer at George Washington University, Wichita State University, the University of Montana, and the Richard Hugo House. The poetry editor of Okey-Panky, and co-host, with novelist J. Robert Lennon, of the podcast Lunch Box, with Ed and John, Skoog lives and teaches in Portland, Oregon. View Flyer This event is made possible by support from the Oregon Arts Commission. September 2017 Tim Schell & Sandra Scofield Prose Reading 7:30 PM, Wednesday, September 20, 2017 Ford Food & Drink, 2505 SE 11th Avenue, Portland OR 97202 Suggested Donation $5.00 Tim Schell’s novel Road to the Sea was published by Serving House Books in October 2016. He is the winner of the 2004 Mammoth Book Award for Prose for his novel The Drums of Africa which was published in the fall of 2007. In 2010, Tim’s novel The Memoir of Jake Weedsong was The Finalist in the AWP novel competition, and in 2011 it was published by Serving House Books. Tim is the co-author of Mooring Against the Tide: Writing Fiction and Poetry (Prentice Hall, 2nd edition, 2006) and the co-editor of the anthology A Writer’s Country (Prentice Hall, 2001). Currently, he is the Chair of the Writing, Literature and Foreign Language Department at Columbia Gorge Community College in Hood River, Oregon. Sandra Scofield’s most recent book is Swim: Stories of the Sixties (Wellstone Press, 2017). She is also the author of seven novels, including Beyond Deserving, a finalist for the National Book Award, and A Chance to See Egypt, winner of a Best Fiction Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters. She has written a memoir, Occasions of Sin, and a book of essays about her family, Mysteries of Love and Grief: Reflections on a Plainswoman’s Life. She also writes about the craft of writing: The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer, and The Last Draft: A Novelist’s Guide to Revision. Scofield, who divides her time between Portland, Oregon, and Missoula, Montana, is on the faculty of the Solstice MFA Program in Creative Writing at Pine Manor College and has for many years taught in the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival. View Flyer This event is made possible by support from the Oregon Arts Commission. August 2017 Alicia Jo Rabins & Allison Tobey Poetry Reading 7:30 PM, Wednesday, August 16, 2017 Ford Food & Drink, 2505 SE 11th Avenue, Portland OR 97202 Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet, composer, performer and Torah scholar. Her poetry book, Divinity School, was selected by C.D. Wright for the 2015 APR/Honickman First Book Prize and published by American Poetry Review in September. As a musician, Alicia tours internationally with her band, Girls in Trouble, an indie-folk song cycle about the complicated lives of Biblical women, with whom she has released three albums. A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, her one-woman chamber-rock opera about the intersection of spirituality and finance, was named one of Portland's five best theatre performances of 2014 by the Willamette Week. Alicia lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and their two small children. Allison Tobey hails from Cleveland, Ohio, and received her MFA from Antioch University. She now lives in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches college writing. Her work has been featured at Poetry Press Week and published in many literary journals, including Rhino, Cloudbank, Sugar Hill Review, and Paper Nautilus. Allison co-curates the reading series Women Writers Against Trump with her sister poet Chrys Tobey. She is also the former poetry editor of Gertrude Press, the longest consecutively running queer journal, and has recently been gloriously reborn as Gertie’s new creative non-fiction editor. View Flyer This event is made possible by support from the Oregon Arts Commission. July 2017 Carl Adamshick & Chrys Tobey Poetry Reading 7:30 PM, Wednesday, July 19, 2017 Floyds Old Town, 118 NW Couch, Portland OR 97209 Carl Adamshick is the author of Curses and Wishes, which won the Walt Whitman award from the Academy of American Poets and Saint Friend,published with McSweeney’s. Both titles received an Oregon Book Award. He has taught at Catlin Gabel and lectured at Stanford University and the American International School in Vienna, as well as being a writer in-residence at the William Stafford Archive at Lewis and Clark College. He is a founder and editor at Tavern Books, a non-profit press dedicated to poetry and the preservation of books. His third collection, Receipt, recently published with Lost Horse Press, is a collaboration with artist Andy Buck. Chrys Tobey’s first poetry book, A Woman is a Woman is a Woman is a Woman, was published by Steel Toe Books in January 2017. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in numerous literary journals, including Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Rattle, Smartish Pace and the minnesota review. Chrys lives and teaches in Portland, Oregon. This event is made possible by support from the Oregon Arts Commission. June 2017 Christopher Howell & Joseph Millar Book Launch & Reading Wednesday, June 14, 2017 Floyds Old Town, 118 NW Couch, Portland OR 97209 Book-signing Reception at 7:00 PM Poetry Reading at 7:30 PM Christopher Howell is the author of eleven collections of poetry, most recently, Love’s Last Number: Poems (Milkweed Editions, 2017). Among his many other books of poetry are Gaze (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected (University of Washington Press, 2010). He has received three Pushcart Prizes, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as fellowships from the King Country Arts Commission, the Artist Trust, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Council for the Arts. His work has been awarded the Helen Bullis, Vachel Lindsay, and Vi Gale prizes, and has twice received the Washington State Book Award. A military journalist during the Vietnam War, since 1974 he has been the director and principal editor for Lynx House Press and is now also director for Willow Springs Books. He lives in Spokane, where is on the Master of Fine Arts faculty of Eastern Washington University’s Inland NW Center for Writers. Joseph Millar is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Kingdom from Carnegie Mellon University Press (2017). His first collection, Overtime, was a finalist for the 2001 Oregon Book Award. His second collection, Fortune, appeared in 2007, followed by a third, Blue Rust, in 2012. Millar grew up in Pennsylvania and attended Johns Hopkins University before spending 30 years in the San Francisco Bay area working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. It would be two decades before he returned to poetry. His work—stark, clean, unsparing—records the narrative of a life fully lived among fathers, sons, brothers, daughters, weddings and divorce. He has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in such magazines as DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, APR, and Ploughshares. Millar teaches in Pacific University's low-residency MFA Program and in North Carolina State's MFA Program in Creative Writing. This event is made possible by support from the Oregon Arts Commission. May 2017 Judith Barrington & Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo Reading Poetry 7:30 PM Wednesday, May 3, 2017 Floyds Old Town, 118 NW Couch, Portland OR 97209 Judith Barrington is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Conversation (2015), whose title poem was the winner of the Gregory O’Donoghue International poetry award; Horses and the Human Soul; History and Geography; and Trying to Be an Honest Woman. In the spring of 2018, her New and Selected Poems will be published by Salmon Poetry. She is also the author of the best-selling Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art. Her Lifesaving: A Memoir was winner of the 2001 Lambda Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. She has been a faculty member of the University of Alaska, Anchorage’s MFA Program and has taught workshops around the U.S. as well as in Britain and Spain. Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, the author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications 2016), has published work in Acentos Review, American Poetry Review, CALYX, crazyhorse, American Poetry Review, and The James Franco Review, among others. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Award, she was a 2016-2017 Steinbeck Fellow, a former Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner and a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grantee. She has received residencies from Hedgebrook and Ragdale Foundation and is a member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop. A short dramatization of her poem "Our Lady of the Water Gallons," directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño, can be viewed at latinopia.com. A cofounder of Women Who Submit and the curator of HITCHED, she lives in California. May 2017 Paulann Petersen & Allan Peterson Reading Poetry 7:30 PM Wednesday, May 24, 2017 Floyds Old Town, 118 NW Couch, Portland OR 97209 Allan Peterson is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Precarious (42 Miles Press, 2014) and Fragile Acts (McSweeney’s Poetry Series), which was a finalist for both the 2013 National Book Critics Circle and the Oregon Book Award. The recipient of numerous awards and prizes, Peterson is the author of seven chapbooks, most recently, Other Than They Seem, winner of the 2014 Snowbound Chapbook Prize from Tupelo Press. His work appears in many journals and anthologies and was selected for Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry Series (#159). A visual artist as well as a poet, Peterson was for many years chair of the art department and director of the Switzer Center for Visual Arts at Pensacola State College, Florida, and before that, Professor of Art at the State University of New York, Geneseo. His art work has been exhibited widely in national, regional and invitational exhibitions and appears in museum, corporate and private collections. Paulann Petersen is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University whose poems have appeared in many publications including Poetry, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, and Wilderness Magazine. Her full-length collections of poems includeThe Wild Awake (2002); Blood-Silk (2004); A Bride of Narrow Escape (2006); Kindle (2008); The Voluptuary (2010); and Understory (Lost Horse Press, 2013). The recipient of Oregon Literary Arts' 2006 Holbrook Award and Willamette Writers’ 2013 Distinguished Northwest Writer Award, Petersen served from 2010 – 2014 as Oregon's sixth Poet Laureate. She teaches poetry writing workshops for colleges, libraries, and writers' conferences, including Mountain Writers Series and The Attic Institute. The Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds chose a poem from her book The Voluptuary as the lyric for a new choral composition that’s now part of the repertoire of the Choir at Trinity College Cambridge. Link to flyer This event is made possible by support from the Oregon Arts Commission. March 2017 Matthew Minicucci & Darlene Pagán Reading Poetry 7:30 PM Wednesday, March 29, 2017 Floyds Old Town, 118 NW Couch, Portland OR 97209 Suggested donation: $5.00 Matthew Minicucci is the author of two collections of poetry: Translation (Kent State University Press, 2015), chosen by Jane Hirshfield for the 2014 Wick Poetry Prize, and Small Gods, forthcoming from New Issues Press in 2017. He is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Wick Poetry Center, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also received his MFA. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from numerous journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2014, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, and The Southern Review, among others. Read Minicucci's award-winning poem, "A Whale's Heart," selected by Dorianne Laux and editor Jazzy Danziger for the 2014 Best New Poets anthology. The poem is also the first poem in his award-winning collection Translation. Matthew Minicucci will teach his first workshop for Mountain Writers this spring on Tuesday evenings for five weeks -- Lessons in the Echo: Mythology and Craft. Darlene Pagán is the author of a collection of poetry, Setting the Fires (Airlie Press, 2015) and a chapbook, Blue Ghosts (Finishing Line Press 2011). Her poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including Field Magazine, Calyx, Hiram Poetry Review, and Literal Latté, and earned national awards and nominations for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. Born and raised in the Chicago area, Pagán spent brief summers in Europe and Mexico, and moved to Texas before settling in the Pacific Northwest. She teaches writing and literature at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. She is currently working on a memoir, The Safest Place to Fall. Read poems by Darlene Pagán from her volume of poetry, Setting the Fires from Airlie Press (2015). Link to Flyer This event is made possible by support from the Oregon Arts Commission. Holly Karapetkova Sunday, March 12, 2017 Book-signing Reception at 1:30 PM Tribute to Vern Rutsala and Holly Karapetkova Poetry Reading at 2:00 PM George R. White Library & Learning Center, Concordia University, 2900 NE Liberty, Portland OR 97211 Holly Karapetkova’s poems and translations from the Bulgarian have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, North American Review, 32 Poems, Huffington Post, Poetry Northwest, and many other places. Her first book, Words We Might One Day Say (WWPH Press),won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House Prize for Poetry, and her second book, Towline (Cloudbank Books), won the Vern Rutsala Poetry Contest. She has been nominated for six Pushcart Prizes and is the author of over twenty books and graphic stories for children and young adults. She holds an MFA in Poetry and a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature and currently chairs the Department of Literature and Languages at Marymount University in Arlington, VA. Link to Flyer This event is made possible by support from the Oregon Arts Commission, Cloudbank Books, and Concordia University Libraries' Art & Culture Program. A book-signing reception will precede the reading, at 1:30 PM. This reception will also make available copies of The Long Haul, Vern Rutsala's last book of poetry, posthumously published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. October 2016 Elizabeth Woody Poetry Reading and Discussion Wednesday, October 29, at 12:00 PM George R. White Library & Learning Center, Concordia University, 2900 NE Liberty, Portland OR 97211 Elizabeth A. Woody is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Oregon, of Yakama Nation descent, and is “born for” the Tódích’íinii (Bitter Water clan) of the Navajo Nation. Her paternal grandfather’s clan is Ma‘ii deeshgiizhinii (Coyote Pass - Jemez clan). She received the American Book Award in 1990, and the William Stafford Memorial Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards in 1995. Elizabeth has published three books of poetry. She also writes short fiction, essays, and is a visual artist. She earned a Master of Public Administration degree through the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government’s Executive Leadership Institute of Portland State University, a Bachelor of Arts in Humanities from The Evergreen State College and studied Creative Writing and Two-Dimensional Arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She has taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts and at Portland State University. Elizabeth is alumna of the first Kellogg Foundation’s Fellowship through AIO’s Ambassadors program. She leads writing workshops, lectures and has served on multi-disciplinary art fellowship jury panels for several foundations and arts organizations nationally. Elizabeth Woody is presently on the Board of Directors of Soapstone: Celebrating Women Writers, and Willamette University Advisory Council for Native Programs located in Salem, Oregon. “Her poems are like hands and hearts and also like lights: they grip and pulse and illuminate. Like the woman herself, the work is grand and modest and forceful. It will shake you, and move you deeply….”-The Bloomsbury Review “Woody follows in the tradition of peoples who have understood the power of language, and the place of a poet/singer/storyteller at the center of the world.”- Joy Harjo Link to Flyer August 2016 Sallie Tisdale & Ceiridwen Terrill Wednesday, August 17, 2016 at 7:30 PM Vie de Bohème, 1530 SE 7th Avenue, Portland 97214 This event is made possible by support from the Oregon Community Foundation. Sallie Tisdale is the author of eight books, including Talk Dirty to Me, Stepping Westward, and Women of the Way. Her most recent book, a collection of essays, Violation, was published in April 2016 by Hawthorne Books. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, Antioch Review, Conjunctions, Threepenny Review, The New Yorker, and Tricycle, among other journals. Tisdale is the 2013 recipient of the Regional Arts and Culture Council Literary Fellowship. She has received a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Fellowship, the James Phelan Literary Award, and was a Dorothy and Arthur Shoenfeldt Distinguished Writer of the Year. Tisdale is a long-time member of PEN and was a judge for the National Book Award in 2010. Ceiridwen Terrill is a horsewoman, backpacker, and kayaker. She has authored two memoirs/scientific studies: Part Wild (Scribner), which was a finalist for the 2013 Oregon Book Award, and Unnatural Landscapes: Tracking Invasive Species (University of Arizona Press). Terrill's essays have appeared in Slate, High Country News, and Oxford American, among other publications, and her work has been anthologized in the collection What Wildness is This: Women Write about the Southwest (University of Texas Press). She has also performed as a storyteller for The Moth Mainstage. Terrill is currently finishing a book about growing up during the Reagan years of the Cold War and her family's connection to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State. Link to Flyer June 2016 Mountain Writers Series at Vie de Bohème presents a Writers Workshop Showcase Poetry Reading hosted by former Oregon Poet Laureate Peter Sears and featuring Sarah Bokich, John Harn, Helen Puciloski, Robbie Pock & Bob Monson Wednesday, June 15, 2016 at 7:30 PM Vie de Bohème (1530 SE 7th Avenue, Portland 97214) This event is made possible by support from the Oregon Arts Commission and the Oregon Community Foundation. Sarah Bokich is a poet, freelance writer, and marketing consultant. Her work has recently appeared in VoiceCatcher, and is forthcoming in Cloudbank and Timberline Review. She lives with her family in Portland, Oregon. Originally from Michigan, John Harn moved to Oregon in the late 1970s. His poems have appeared in a number of magazines, including Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner and Cloudbank. Last year his manuscript, Less, Probably, was a finalist in two Northwest book competitions. John spent 20 years as an ESL teacher. So if you notice that his poems are 100% grammatically correct, he asks for your understanding. Bob Monson grew up in Silverton, graduated from Willamette, and taught high school English. He is now retired. Robbie Pock teaches writing and humanities at Pacific University, and reading and writing at Portland Community College. She is a graduate of Pacific University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. Her poems have appeared in Cloudbank, Present Tense, Rain, and The Long Islander. Her chapbook manuscript, Vantage from the Tree House, is currently looking for a loving home. Helen Puciloski is a lifelong Oregonian who currently resides in Rainier, Oregon. Her poetry has appeared in Calyx, Cloudbank, Floating Bridge Review, and others. She has an MFA from Pacific University. See flyer with photos of poets Mountain Writers Series at Vie de Bohème presents reading & book launch featuring Lucia Perillo reading from her latest book of poetry Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones:Selected and New Poems Wednesday, May 18, 2016 at 7:30 PM Vie de Bohème (1530 SE 7th Avenue, Portland 97214) Admisssion $10 This event is made possible by support from the Oregon Arts Commission and the Oregon Community Foundation. About Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones "Perillo's poetic persona is funny, tough, bold, smart, and righteous. A spellbinding storyteller and a poet who makes the demands of the form seem as natural as a handshake." —Booklist "For a poet obsessed with the steady degradation of the body and looming of death, Lucia Perillo manages to be highly entertaining.... Humor is actually the key to the power of her poems." —The Los Angeles Times "The poems [are] taut, lucid, lyric, filled with complex emotional reflection while avoiding the usual difficulties of highbrow poetry." —The New York Times Book Review ”Lucia Perillo’s Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones: New and Selected Poems is a significant retrospective that includes work from her six previous books .… Fans will recognize her signature style—accessible, attuned to the small dramas in people’s lives, and at times witheringly funny. They will also find familiar themes: the delights of nature, the frailty of the physical world and the many ways the human body lets people down. The book shows Perillo’s ability to balance the timely and the timeless, and to capture some of the struggles that all humans face, regardless of when or where they live.” —Washington Post “Perillo writes skillfully of urban, suburban, and wild environments, but she’s nearly unparalleled when addressing the ‘meat cage,’ and its pain and mortality. Perillo’s poems move against the backdrop of her own struggle with multiple sclerosis: ‘If I sleep on my belly, pinning it down,/ my breasts start puling like baby pigs/ trapped under their slab of torpid mother.’ Yet these vivacious poems reveal humor, sexuality, and a sharp sense of images and turns of phrase… [a] marvelous collection.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review ”Lucia Perillo writes poignant, smart, very engaging poems.… She has a vast storehouse of sometimes arcane knowledge to call upon, and her palpable knowledge of the mortality of all things gives her work a primal power. [S]he has a fine sense of humor, sometimes deliciously caustic and sometimes delightfully silly…. What a welcome publication!” —Open Books: A Poem Emporium MacArthur Genius Award winner Lucia Perillo is a fearless poet who, with characteristic humor and incisive irony, confronts the failings and wonder of nature, particularly the frail and resilient human body. This generous collection draws upon five previous volumes, including books selected as a New York Times "100 Notable Books of the Year" and as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Lucia Perillo is the author of a book of essays, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing (Trinity University Press, 2005), a book of short stories, Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain (Norton, 2012), and seven collections of poetry, most recently Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones: Selected and New Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2015). Other books of poetry and some of her awards include: Dangerous Life (1989), winner of the Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America; The Body Mutinies (1996), which won the Kate Tufts prize from Claremont University; The Oldest Map with the Name America (1999); Luck is Luck (2005), which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and won the Kingsley Tufts prize from Claremont University; Inseminating the Elephant (2009), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. Perillo has taught Syracuse University, Southern Illinois University, St. Martin’s College, and in the Warren Wilson MFA program. She lives with her husband in Olympia, Washington. April 2016 Mountain Writers Series at Vie de Bohème a book launch featuring Joe Wilkins reading from his latest book of poetry When We Were Birds 2016 Finalist Miller Williams Poetry Prize Wednesday, April 20, 2016 at 7:30 PM Vie de Bohème (1530 SE 7th Avenue, Portland) About When We Were Birds “Joe Wilkins’ poems are located in the tradition of the sacred, but holiness here is found in common experience. When We Were Birds, as the title indicates, is full of imaginative novelty as well as reminders that miraculous secrets are hidden in the fabric of everyday life.” --Billy Collins "This gritty collection from Joe Wilkins showcases how the outdoors can be a classroom for all matters of the heart: it sneaks devastating truths and disjunctions into soil and shattered rivers, into places where 'a vole snouts / through my throat, where a tree frog's scream / fills my heart's dark riffle." When We Were Birds doesn't just contemplate all ruin and hard work, where 'the backs of my hands / had lustered clear to burlap or dry river mud,' but also masterfully showcases a magnificent spill and glide of beautiful language even if the speaker begs, 'O god / of busted wishes / leave me here a long time here / in the stinking dark.'" --Aimee Nezhukumatathil "The most striking component of [Wilkins's work] is its awareness of the whole world. What is ordinary becomes transcendent. In places derelict and seemingly unexceptional, Wilkins compels us to recognize what is worth salvage, worth praise." --Indiana Review Link to Cover Image, Feather at Sand Lake WA 2001, Etching by Frank Boyden Joe Wilkins is the author of the memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers (2012), which was named a 2012 Montana Book Award Honor Book, as well as a 2013 Orion Book Award finalist. He has also published two poetry books: Killing the Murnion Dogs (2011), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the High Plains Book Award, and Notes from the Journey Westward (2012), winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize and the High Plains Book Award. His essays, poems, and stories have appeared in many magazines, journals and anthologies. Wilkins was born and raised in eastern Montana, graduated from Gonzaga University and earned an MFA from the University of Idaho, where he worked with the poet Robert Wrigley and memoirist Kim Barnes. He lives with his wife, son, and daughter in Oregon, where he teaches writing at Linfield College. March 2016 Mountain Writers Series at Concordia University Concordia University Libraries' Arts & Culture Program and Mountain Writers Series present a reading featuring Barbara Drake & Brian Doyle Wednesday, March 16, 2016 at 12:00 PM George R. White Library & Learning Center - GRW 108 Concordia Univeristy, 2900 NE Liberty Street, Portland OR 97211 Free and open to the public. Author bios and photo below. See flyer Mountain Writers Series at Vie de Bohème presents a reading featuring Barbara Drake & Brian Doyle Wednesday, March 16, 2016 at 7:30 PM Vie de Bohème (1530 SE 7th Avenue, Portland 97214 Suggested donation $5 Barbara Drake is the author of both nonfiction and poetry. Her newest book, Morning Light (Oregon State University Press, 2014), is a finalist for this year’s Oregon Book Award in nonfiction. Her earlier memoir, Peace at Heart: an Oregon Country Life, was an OBA finalist in 1999. Drake is also a poet, with numerous collections, most recently Driving One Hundred from Windfall Press (2009). She is the author of Writing Poetry, a widely used college textbook, in print since 1983. Her prose and poetry appears in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. After teaching at Michigan State University, she joined the faculty at Linfield College in 1983, retiring as Professor of English Emerita in 2007. Drake lives with her husband in rural Yamhill County Oregon. Brian Doyle is an Oregon Book Award finalist for two of his books: Children and Other Wild Animals (OSU Press) and Martin Marten (St. Martin’s Press). His published work includes collections of essays, nonfiction books, collections of “proems,” a short story collection, a novella and the novel Mink River. Widely published in newspapers and magazines around the world, he is editor of several anthologies, most recently HO`OLAULE`A. Among various honors for his work is a Catholic Book Award, three Pushcart Prizes, the John Burroughs Award for Nature Essays, Foreword Reviews' Novel of the Year award in 2011, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2008. Doyle edits Portland Magazine at the University of Portland in Oregon. See flyer Mountain Writers Series at Floyd's Old Town presents a Workshop Showcase featuring students from Peter Sears' class Wednesday, March 2, 2016, at 7:30 PM Floyd's Old Town 118 NW Couch Portland OR Sarah Bokich is a writer and marketing consultant in Portland, Oregon. Her work has recently appeared in VoiceCatcher literary journal. [Pictured right] E. Ben Crawford is a third-generation Alaskan who thanks God he did not see a TV until he was 14 years old. He spent 30 years as a mental health clinician and feels fortunate to pursue his dream of writing. He and wife, Ginny, now live in Damascus OR. [Pictured left] Sherri Levine is a poet and short fiction writer, with work recently published in the Timberline Review, Hartskill Review, and Sassafras Literary Magazine. Sherri teaches English as a Second Language at Portland State University and Portland Community College. Helen Puciloski is a lifelong Oregonian, currently living in Rainier, OR. She has a MFA from Pacific University, and her poetry has appeared in various journals, including Calyx, Cloudbank, Floating Bridge Review, Windfall and others. Patricia McConnell is an Oregon poet who has been published in Pudding Magazine, Enhance Magazine and Avalon Literary Review. Suggested donation $5 February 2016 Mountain Writers Series at Concordia University Concordia University Libraries' Arts & Culture Program and Mountain Writers Series present a reading featuring Henry Hughes Wednesday, February 17 , 2016 at 12:00 PM George R. White Library & Learning Center - GRW 108 Concordia Univeristy, 2800 NE Liberty Street, Portland OR 97211 Free and open to the public. Henry Hughes is the author of an angling memoir, Back Seat with Fish (Skyhorse, 2016) and four collections of poetry, including the Oregon Book Award-winning Men Holding Eggs, and most recently Bunch of Animals (Cloudbank Books, 2016). Hughes is the editor of the anthologies, The Art of Angling: Poems about Fishing (Knopf, 2011) and Fishing Stories (Knopf, 2013), and his reviews and essays appear regularly in Harvard Review. Hughes, who grew up on Long Island, New York, has lived in Oregon since 2002 and now teaches at Western Oregon University. See flyer. Mountain Writers Series at Vie de Bohème presents reading & book launch featuring Henry Hughes reading from his latest book of poetry A Bunch of Animals (Cloudbank Books, 2016) Wednesday, February 17, 2016 at 7:30 PM Vie de Bohème SE 7th & Clay on Portland's Distillery Row 1530 SE 7th Avenue, Portland 97214 Suggested donation $5 About A Bunch of Animals Henry Hughes is that rare and wonderful animal: a poet with a sense of humor, a spine, feathers for flying, a seething intellect, a deep reverence for the craft he's chosen, as well as for the human and animal condition, and a very keen ear for the music of our humble language. Hughes brings insight and awe to the smallest things, and levels the large stuff with his wit. Everything here is both casual conversation and High Mass--which is the true magic of all the best poetry. This is the book you'll read out loud to whomever is within earshot, full of poems you'll memorize without trying. Hughes marries the comic with the sorrowful, and breaks our hearts while we laugh. Bunch of Animals is the collection you've been waiting for, the one that will revive your love of poetry, and one you won't forget. —Laura Kasischke Terrific! A poetic bestiary of strange and wondrous creatures. —Carlos Reyes With great agility and knowing, the poems in Bunch of Animals surprise their reader in the illusion-lands between animal bodies and the human body, between the lives and desires of American fauna and the loves and duties of the people, including the poet, who share the land and water. Writing in an erotic, witty, restrained style, Hughes offers an expansive vision of life's richness. —Ed Skoog Henry Hughes—what a rare creature, indeed! These poems remark the territories between nature and the human, the tame and untamed, as they coax out the “little wild” from within the day-to-day. —Emily Rosko Like a fishermen casting into the unseen, the speaker of these spells carries us past the reflective surfaces of our days into realms of wonder, sorrow, humor, intrigue, and illumination. —Kim Stafford Link to Book Cover February 2016 Mountain Writers Series at Floyd's Old Town presents a Writers Showcase Reading featuring poets from Peter Sears' Fall Poetry Workshop Carol Ellis, Jane Greenbaum, Dan Hannon, Martha Ragland, Caitlin Scott & Michael Selker Wednesday, February 3, at 7:30 PM Floyd's Old Town (118 NW Couch, Portland OR) Jane Greenbaum has been writing poetry for over 50 years. The first poet who helped her was the late Donald Justice when he was Poet in Residence at Reed College, and the second was Peter Sears, who was at Reed as well. Over the years, Peter has been her mentor in workshops and privately. He has also been a big support and influence in her writing. With his help, she is currently readying a chapbook for publication. A few of the other poets she has worked with are the late William Stafford, Marvin Bell, Matthew Dickman, and Henry Hughes. Her poems are reflections on life on the rural Oregon Coast and of the lost and found department of life in general. Her poems have appeared in Cloudbank Magazine as well and in Just Now: 20 New Portland Poets. Carol Ellis was born in Detroit, Michigan, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. She’s been around the academic block with her Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. Her poems and essays are published in anthologies and journals including ZYZZYVA, Comstock Review, VoiceCatcher, and Cider Press Review. Her poetry chapbook, I Want A Job, has been published by Finishing Line Press. She has spent time in Cuba writing a book and giving readings. Dan Hannon holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon. For 31 years, he taught writing and international studies at Mt. Hood Community College where he also coordinated their study abroad programs, as well as those of a consortium of five Oregon community colleges. From 2011–13, he wrote a blog for older athletes, “Older Athletes Rock.” He continues to teach writing part time at MHCC, coaches a youth Nordic ski team, sea kayaks, backpacks, and writes. He has participated in Peter Sears’ poetry workshops for several years and has published poems inJust Now: 20 New Portland Poets. He lives in Portland with his wife, Cathie, and enjoys following the lives of an eclectic tribe of offspring. Martha Ragland lives with her husband and a Welsh corgi in a quiet Southeast Portland home cheerfully cluttered with books and unopened mail. She has enrolled in a Mountain Writers poetry workshop with Peter Sears every autumn since 2010. She holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst andhas published poems in Cloudbank and essays in Bark and Brave on the Page. In 2012, Mystery Writers of America awarded her one of two Helen McCloy Scholarships for Mystery Writing. Michael Selker is a painter, poet and photographer, whose chapbook, Crazies’ Bus Stop, was published by Pudding House Press in 2007. Since moving to Oregon thirty years ago, his focus has been poetry and photography, both of which were combined in broadsides that were selected for a recent Multnomah Arts Center Gallery Juried Group Show of broadsides and mixed media (2012). His poems have appeared in Hubbub, Cloudbank, Windfall, and elsewhere. He has participated in Peter Sears’ poetry workshops for several years and has published poems in Just Now: 20 New Portland Poets He makes his home in Portland. Caitlin Scott studied poetry writing with David Young and Stuart Friebert at Oberlin College and with Donald Justice at the University of Florida graduate writing program. She won an Ohio Arts grant in 2000. Her poems have appeared in magazines such as Field, Threepenny Review, and Cloud Bank. She currently works as an education researcher. See workshop flyer January 2016 Mountain Writers Series at Concordia University Concordia University Libraries' Arts & Culture Program and Mountain Writers Series present a reading featuring Kim Knutsen & Evan Morgan Williams Tuesday, January 19, 2016 at 12:00 PM George R. White Library & Learning Center - GRW 108 Concordia University, 2800 NE Liberty Street, Portland OR 97211 Free and open to the public. Author bios and photo below. See flyer. Mountain Writers Series at Vie de Bohème presents a reading featuring Kim Knutsen & Evan Morgan Williams Wednesday, January 20, 2016 at 7:30 PM Vie de Bohème SE 7th & Clay on Portland's Distillery Row 1530 SE 7th Avenue, Portland 97214 Suggested donation $5 Kimberly Knutsen is the author of The Lost Journals of Sylvia Plath (Switchgrass Books, an imprint of Northern Illinois University Press, 2016). Her short stories have appeared in Cimarron Review and Hawai?i Review. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she holds a PhD in English from Western Michigan University and an MA from New Mexico State University. She is a professor of English at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon. Evan Morgan Williams' collection of stories, Thorn, won the BkMk Press Chandra Prize (University of Missouri- Kansas City) judged by Al Young. Williams has published over forty stories in such magazines as Witness, Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, and ZYZZYVA. He has an MFA from the University of Montana, and has taught in a public school for over twenty years. Most recently, he has held a Writers in the Schools residency and an AWP Writer to Writer mentorship. He has stories current in Phantom Drift, The Timberline Review, and Weber: the Contemporary West. He currently lives in Portland. December 2015 Mountain Writers Series at Vie de Bohème presents a reading featuring Verlena Orr & Lex Runciman Wednesday, December 16, 2015 at 7:30 PM Vie de Bohème - 1530 SE 7th Avenue, Portland 97214 Suggested donation $5 Verlena Orr, twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, hails from north-central Idaho. She was raised on a ranch and attended elementary and high school at Kamiah, Idaho, on the Nez Perce Reservation, and settled in Portland in 1963. Her poems have been published in journals throughout the country and in the United Kingdom. She has published three chapbooks, I Dance September Naked in a Dream, Woman Who Hears Voices, andOne More Time from the Beginning, and three full-length collections: Break in the Cloud Cover (Howlett Press), Taking it to the Limit (Dancing Moon Press), and most recently The Lyric Unveiled (Dancing Moon Press, 2015). She holds two BA degrees and an MFA from University of Montana. She lives in northwest Portland where she’s been since 1980. Lex Runciman was born and raised in Portland, and has lived most of his life in Oregon's Willamette Valley. He holds graduate degrees from the writing programs at the University of Montana and the University of Utah. Runciman taught for eleven years at Oregon State University and is now Professor of English at Linfield College, where twice he received the Edith Green Award in teaching—once in the last century and once in this. 1997. His newest collection of poems is One Hour that Morning (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 2014). He is also the author of three earlier books of poems: Luck (1981); The Admirations (1989), which won the Oregon Book Award; Out of Town (2004); and Starting from Anywhere (2009). He and Deborah Jane Berry Runciman have been married more than forty years and are the parents of two grown daughters. See flyer. November 2015 Mountain Writers Series at Concordia University Concordia University Libraries' Arts & Culture Program and Mountain Writers Series present a reading featuring Joe Wilkins Wednesday, November 18, 2015 at 12:00 PM Concordia Univeristy, 2800 NE Liberty Street, Portland OR 97211 Free and open to the public. Author bio and photo below. See flyer. Mountain Writers Series at Vie de Bohème presents a reading featuring Joe Wilkins Wednesday, November 18, 2015 at 7:30 PM Vie de Bohème (1530 SE 7th Avenue, Portland) Joe Wilkins is the author of the memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers (2012), which was named a 2012 Montana Book Award Honor Book, as well as a 2013 Orion Book Award finalist. He has also published two poetry books: Killing the Murnion Dogs (2011), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the High Plains Book Award, and Notes from the Journey Westward (2012), winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize and the High Plains Book Award. His essays, poems, and stories have appeared in many magazines, journals and anthologies. Wilkins was born and raised in eastern Montana, graduated from Gonzaga University and earned an MFA from the University of Idaho, where he worked with the poet Robert Wrigley and memoirist Kim Barnes. He lives with his wife, son, and daughter in Oregon, where he teaches writing at Linfield College. See flyer. October 2015 Mountain Writers Series at Floyd's Old Town presents a reading featuring Tom Bremer, Dan Hannon, Karen Reyes, Cindy Stewart-Rinier & Michael Selker Wednesday, October 21, 2015 at 7:30 PM Floyd's Old Town (118 NW Couch, Portland OR) Tom Bremer was born in Cincinatti and grew up in California. He has a B.A. from St. Mary’s College and an M.A. in Creative Writing from Colorado State University. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he was co-founder of the Portland Poetry Festival in 1973 and a charter member of the board of the Oregon Writers’ Workshop. Now retired from many years of teaching English, he is the author of three collections of poetry, Par Amour (1986); A Bird That Changes Trees, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in 1988; and Just Once (2001). Dan Hannon holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon. For 31 years, he taught writing and international studies at Mt. Hood Community College where he also coordinated their study abroad programs, as well as those of a consortium of five Oregon community colleges. From 2011–13, he wrote a blog for older athletes, “Older Athletes Rock.” He continues to teach writing part time at MHCC, coaches a youth Nordic ski team, sea kayaks, backpacks, and writes. He has participated in Peter Sears’ poetry workshops for several years and has published poems in Just Now: 20 New Portland Poets. He lives in Portland with his wife, Cathie, and enjoys following the lives of an eclectic tribe of offspring. Karen Reyes has a Master’s Degree with a specialization in Architectural History and has worked as a real estate professional since 1981. She has also been involved for over 30 years with Portland’s literary community, working on the boards for the Portland Poetry Festival, Oregon Writer’s Workshop and Mountain Writers Series. She was instrumental in development of the first Oregon Book under the aegis of the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts. She was also one of the founding editors of Hubbub Magazine. She now participates in Peter Sears’ on-going poetry workshops and has published poems in Just Now: 20 New Portland Poets. Karen divides her time between her homes in Portland, Oregon and in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Michael Selker is a painter, poet and photographer, whose chapbook, Crazies’ Bus Stop, was published by Pudding House Press in 2007. Since moving to Oregon thirty years ago, his focus has been poetry and photography, both of which were combined in broadsides that were selected for a recent Multnomah Arts Center Gallery Juried Group Show of broadsides and mixed media (2012). His poems have appeared in Hubbub, Cloudbank, Windfall, and elsewhere. He has participated in Peter Sears’ poetry workshops for several years and has published poems inJust Now: 20 New Portland Poets. He makes his home in Portland. Cindy Stewart-Rinier holds an MFA in Creative Writing from PLU's Rainier Writing Workshop, has served as guest poetry editor for three editions of VoiceCatcher, and is an active board member of Mountain Writers Series. Her work has appeared in Calyx, The Smoking Poet, Crab Creek Review, Ascent, Nagatuck River Review, Women's Voices for Change, New American Vocies, and VoiceCatcher, as well as the anthologies, Siblings: Our First Macrocos (Wising Up Press), and the forthcoming VoiceCatcher 10th Anniversary Anthology. Four poems have also been nominated for Pushcarts. She is part of the regular faculty teaching poetry workshops for Mountain Writers Series each year. Vault Voices at O'Connors Pub (In The Vault) presents a reading featuring Oregon Poetry Association writers and Mountain Writers Workshops Faculty Judith Barrington, John Brehm, Kathleen Halme and Annie Lighthart Tuesday, October 27, 2015 at 7:00 PM O'Connors Pub (In the Vault) Multnomah Village (7850 SW Capitol Hwy, Portland) Open to the public. The Vault is "Family Friendly" Judith Barrington is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently The Conversation (2015), whose title poem was the winner of the Gregory O’Donoghue International poetry award. Her Lifesaving: A Memoir was the winner of the 2001 Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. She is also the author of the best-selling Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art. She has been a faculty member of the University of Alaska, Anchorage’s MFA Program and has taught workshops around the U.S. as well as in Britain and Spain. She currently lives in Portland. John Brehm is the author of two books of poetry, Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize, and Help Is on the Way, which won the 2012 Four Lakes Prize, both from the University of Wisconsin Press, and the chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press (2002). From 1996-2008 he lived in Brooklyn, he was the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). He has taught at Cornell University, Emerson College, and Portland State. In addition to serving as regular faculty for Mountain Writers, Brehm teaches for Literary Arts in Portland and The Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. He has received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon. Kathleen Halme’s fourth book of poetry, My Multiverse, was named winner of the 2014 Green Rose Prize at New Issues Press at Western Michigan University. Her first book of poetry, Every Substance Clothed, was winner of the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series competition and the Balcones Poetry Prize. Her second collection, Equipoise, was published by Sarabande Books, and her third, Drift and Pulse, by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Halme is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowship in Anthropology, and an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship. She is a native of Michigan's upper peninsula and lives in Portland. Annie Lighthart is the author of Iron String, published by Airlie Press in 2013. She earned an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has taught at Boston College, as a poet in the schools, and with community groups of all ages. Annie’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in Hunger Mountain, Cimarron Review, The Greensboro Review and other journals. She writes and teaches in and around Portland, Oregon. September 2015 Molly Gloss Wednesday, September 16, 2015 at 12:00 PM George R. White Library & Learning Center - GRW 108 Concordia Univeristy, 2800 NE Liberty Street, Portland OR 97211 Free and open to the public. Bio & photo below. Mountain Writers Series at Vie de Bohème presents a reading featuring Molly Gloss Wednesday, September 16, 2015 at 7:30 PM Vie de Bohème SE 7th & Clay on Portland's Distillery Row 1530 SE 7th Avenue, Portland 97214 Molly Gloss is a fourth-generation Oregonian who now lives in Portland on the west side of the Tualatin Hills. She is the author of five novels: The Jump-Off Creek, The Dazzle of Day, Wild Life, The Hearts of Horses, and Falling From Horses. Her awards include the Oregon Book Award, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the PEN West Fiction Prize, the James Tiptree Jr. Award; and a Whiting Writers Award. Her work often concerns the landscape, literature, mythology and life of the American West. View PDF August 2015 Educating for Peace: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age 70 Years After Hiroshima & Nagasaki a poetry reading featuring Former Washington State Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken and Oregon's Poet Laureate Peter Sears with poets Allison Cobb, Leah Stenson and Chelsea Lin Saturday, August 1, 2015 Book-signing reception at 3:00 PM Reading 3:30 - 5:00 PM George R. White Library & Learning Center Lobby Concordia Univeristy, 2800 NE Liberty Street, Portland OR 97211 Cosponsored by Concordia University's Art & Culture Program, Mountain Writers, and Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility. Free and open to the public. Kathleen Flenniken is the author of two poetry collections: Famous (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), which won the Prairie Schooner Book prize and was named an ALA Notable Book; and most recently, Plume (University of Washington Press, 2012), a meditation on the Hanford Nuclear Site, which won the Washington State Book Award and was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her other awards include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust. Flenniken works with Writers in the Schools and other arts agencies bringing poetry to youth and served as Washington State’s Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014. Peter Sears is the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently Small Talk: New and Selected Poems (Lynx House Press, 2014). Previous books of poetry include The Brink, which received the Gibbs-Smith poetry prize and the Western States Book Award for Poetry; Tour; and Green Diver; as well as a number of poetry chapbooks. Sears has taught at Reed College, Pacific's low-residency MFA program, and in numerous community-based programs, including Mountain Writers Series year-round writing workshops. The co-founder of the Oregon Literary Coalition, Friends of William Stafford, and Cloudbank Books, he is on the board of advisors for Fishtrap and currently serves as Oregon’s Poet Laureate. Leah Stenson has published two chapbooks, Heavenly Body (2011) and The Turquoise Bee and Other Love Poems (2013), both from Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has appeared Oregon Literary Review, Cloudbank, Verseweavers, VoiceCatcher and Colere. She served as a regional editor for Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest (Ooligan Press, 2013) and as co-editor of Reverberations from Fukushima: 50 Japanese Poets Speak Out (Inkwater Press, 2014). An active member of the Interfaith Council of Greater Portland, she also serves on the boards of Friends of William Stafford and Tavern Books and hosts the Studio Series, a monthly poetry and open mic reading in SW Portland. Allison Cobb is the author of Born2 (Chax Press) about her hometown of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Green-Wood (Factory School) about a nineteenth-century cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. The New York Times called Green-Wood “a gorgeous, subtle, idiosyncratic gem.” Cobb’s work combines history, nonfiction narrative and poetry to address issues of landscape, politics, and ecology. She is a 2015 Djerassi Resident Artist and a 2014 Playa Resident Artist. She has also received fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She works for the Environmental Defense Fund. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she co-curates The Switch reading series. Chelsea Lin is a senior at West Linn High School in Oregon. Although she is interested in the STEM-based areas of study, her true passion is writing – specifically prose fiction and poetry. A native Oregonian, Chelsea is devoted to the preservation of the environment and the preservation of peace. July 2015 Carlos Reyes & Joseph Green Reading Wednesday, July 15, 2015 at 7:30 PM Vie de Bohème (1530 SE 7th Avenue, Portland) Carlos Reyes is a Portland poet, translator, and world traveler. He has been a frequent visitor to Ireland since 1972, and this spring gave readings at the Eamon de Valera and Patrick J. Hilery libraries in County Clare, Ireland, and The Over the Edge Series in the Galway City Library. His first prose book, The Keys to the Cottage: Stories from the West of Ireland (2015), reflects his long interest in Ireland. His recent books of poetry are Pomegranate, Sister of the Heart (2013); The Book of Shadows: New and Selected Poems (2009), and A Suitcase Full of Crows (1995), winner of the Bluestem Prize. A recent book of translations is Poemas de amor y locura / Poems of Love and Madness: Selected Translations (2013). He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, most recently serving as poet-in-residence at Devils Tower National Monument (2013). Joseph Green’s new full length book is What Water Does at a Time Like This (MoonPath Press, 2015). Among his other books are That Thread Still Connecting Us (MoonPath Press, 2012); Greatest Hits: 1975 -2000 (2001); and The End of Forgiveness (2001). His poems have appeared in The Bellingham Review, Crab Creek Review, Hubbub, Pearl, The Threepenny Review, WillowSprings, and ZYZZYVA, among others. Joseph Green lives in Longview, Washington, where he taught English at Lower Columbia for nearly twenty-five years. Together with his wife, Marquita, he produces limited-edition, letterpress-printed poetry broadsides through The Peasandcues Press. View PDF June 2015 Pete Fromm & Michael McGregor Reading Wednesday, June 17, 2015 at 7:30 PM Vie de Bohème (1530 SE 7th Avenue, Portland) Pete Fromm is a five-time winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Literary Award for the novels If Not For This, As Cool As I Am and How All This Started; for his memoir, Indian Creek Chronicles; and for a story collection, Dry Rain. He is the author of four other short story collections and has published over two hundred stories in magazines. A core faculty member at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program, he has a degree in wildlife biology from the University of Montana and worked for years as a river ranger in Grand Teton National Park. He lives with his family in Montana. Michael McGregor is the author of Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax, (forthcoming September, 2015). His essays, stories and poems have appeared inThe Seattle Review, Story Quarterly, The Crab Orchard Review, The South Dakota Review, Image, Weber: The Contemporary West, Poets & Writers, and Poetry. The recipient of writing awards from Oregon Literary Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and Image literary journal, he teaches nonfiction writing in the MFA program at Portland State University, where he has received the John Eliot Allen Award for Outstanding Teaching four times. A former editor and journalist, he serves on the Advisory Committee for the Oregon Book Awards and Fellowships. View PDF May 2015 Lucia Perillo & Glen Moore Reading & Musical Performance Wednesday, May 20, 2015 at 7:30 PM Vie de Bohème (1530 SE 7th Avenue, Portland) Suggested admission $10 general, $5 student & senior Lucia Perillo is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). Other books of poetry include Dangerous Life (1989), winner of the Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America; The Body Mutinies (1996), which won the Kate Tufts prize from Claremont University; The Oldest Map with the Name America (1999); Luck is Luck (2005), which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and won the Kingsley Tufts prize from Claremont University; and Inseminating the Elephant (2009), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. She has published a book of essays, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing (Trinity University Press, 2005), and a book of short stories, Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain (Norton, 2012). She has taught at institutions such as Syracuse University, Southern Illinois University, and St. Martin’s College, and in the Warren Wilson MFA program. A former MacArthur fellow, Perillo lives in Olympia, Washington. Glen Moore is a jazz bassist, co-founder of the group Oregon. For the past 30 years, Moore has played a Klotz bass fiddle crafted in the Tyrol circa 1715. He has played with hundreds of great jazz artists and performed in concerts with the Kronos Quartet, the Winter Consort, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Stuttgart Opera Orchestra, and the Stavanger, Norway Orchestra. Since 1988, Moore has worked with Mountain Writers Series, featured with such poets as Marvin Bell, Billy Collins, Linda Gregg, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Anne Waldman and Al Young. View PDF Judith Barrington Book Launch & Reading Saturday, May 2, 2015 Book-signing reception at 3:00 PM Reading at 4:00 PM Concordia University Library (2800 NE Liberty, Portland 97211) Cosponsored by Concordia Unversity's Art & Culture Program Free & open to the public. All donations will benefit Mountain Writers Series - programs & writers. Judith Barrington is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently The Conversation (2015), whose title poem was the winner of the Gregory O’Donoghue International poetry award. Her Lifesaving: A Memoir was the winner of the 2001 Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. She is also the author of the best-selling Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art. She has been a faculty member of the University of Alaska, Anchorage’s MFA Program and has taught workshops around the U.S. as well as in Britain and Spain. She lives in Portland, Oregon. View PDF April 2015 Daniel Wolff & Alicia Jo Rabins Reading & Musical Performance Wednesday, April 29, 2015 at 7:00 PM Copeland Commons (TaborSpace, 5441 SE Belmont, Portland) Suggested admission $5 to benefit Mountain Writers programs & writers Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet, composer, performer, and Torah scholar. Her manuscript, Divinity School, won the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and is forthcoming from APR/Copper Canyon in September 2015. Her poems appear in the Boston Review, 6×6, and Ploughshares. As a musician, Alicia tours internationally with her band, Girls in Trouble, with whom she has released three albums. A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, her one-woman chamber-rock opera about the intersection of spirituality and finance, was named one of Portland’s five best theater performances of 2014 by the Willamette Week. She has played bluegrass fiddle across Central America and Kuwait as a cultural ambassador for the US State Department and toured for eight years as the violinist in Brooklyn-based klezmer-punk band, Golem. Alicia lives in Portland with her husband and their two small children. Daniel Wolff is an accomplished author, poet and filmmaker whose collection of poetry, The Names of Birds, was just published by Four Ways Books (2015). His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Partisan Review, and Threepenny Review; and his prose has appeared in diverse publications, ranging from Vogue to Education Weekly. Winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Award for the best music book in 1985, Wolff is the author of You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke and 4th of July, Asbury Park, among others. He's also received credits on such documentaries as The Agronomist, about slain Haitian civil rights leader Jean Dominique, and several projects on post-Katrina New Orleans, including I'm Carolyn Parker—the catalyst for his look at the lives of everyday American heroes in his text, The Fight For Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back (Bloomsbury, 2012). View PDF Kathleen Halme Book launch and reading Wednesday, April 15, 2015 at 7:30 PM Vie de Bohème SE 7th & Clay on Portland's Distillery Row 1530 SE 7th Avenue, Portland 97214 Kathleen Halme’s fourth book of poetry, My Multiverse, was named winner of the 2014 Green Rose Prize at New Issues Press at Western Michigan University. Her first book of poetry, Every Substance Clothed, was winner of the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series competition and the Balcones Poetry Prize. Her second collection, Equipoise, was published by Sarabande Books, and her third, Drift and Pulse, by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her poems have appeared widely in journals, including Ploughshares, Poetry, TriQuarterly, Boston Review, and Anthropological Quarterly. Halme is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowship in Anthropology, and an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship. She is a native of Michigan's upper peninsula and lives in Portland. View PDF My Multiverse February 2015 Dan Berne & Mark Pomeroy Reading Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 9:00 - 10:15 AM Concordia University Library (2800 NE Liberty, Portland 97211) Free and open to the public. Dan Berne grew up in a working-class family in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he worked in his way through college, with jobs in drugstores, warehouses, U-bolt factories, and cement plants. He moved to the west coast in 1979, settling in the Portland area in 1990. An active member of a select writing workgroup led by author Karen Karbo for ten years, he has published poems and short fiction in various literary magazines. His debut novel, The Gods of Second Chances, was published by Forest Avenue Press 2014. The owner of a market strategy consultancy, he is currently writing a book on market transformation. He lives with his wife Aliza in Portland, Oregon. Mark Pomeroy lives with his family in Portland, Oregon, where he was born in 1969. He has received an Oregon Literary Fellowship for fiction and a residency at Caldera Arts. His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Open Spaces, The Wordstock 10, Portland Magazine, The Oregonian, the Waco Tribune-Herald, and What Teaching Means: Stories from America’s Classrooms. A former classroom teacher, he holds an MA in English Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, where he was a Fellow in Teaching. The Brightwood Stillness (Oregon State University Press, 2014) is his first novel. View PDF Ursula K. LeGuin Saturday, February 7, 2015, Book-signing at 3:00 PM Reading at 4:00 PM Concordia University Library (2800 NE Liberty, Portland 97211) Suggested donation $10 to benefit Mountain Writers. Ursula K. Le Guin was born in 1929 in Berkeley, and lives in Portland, Oregon. As of 2013, she had published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many honors and awards including Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud. Her most recent publications are The Unreal and The Real: Collected Stories 1 and 2 (Small Beer Press), which won the 2014 Ken Kesey Award from Oregon’s Literary Arts, and Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems, 1960 – 2010 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). Photo by Eileen Gunn January 2015 Clem Starck and Fisher Poet Musicians Jon Broderick and Jay Speakman Reading & Musical Performance Wednesday, January 21, 2015, at 7:00 PM 804 NW Couch, Portland OR 97209 Suggested admission $5 Clem Starck is an award-winning poet who has published five books of poetry and two CD recordings. He is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and the Stafford Memorial Poetry Award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. His poems have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. He lives on forty-some acres in the country outside of Dallas, Oregon, in the mid-Willamette Valley. Starck will be joined by noted Fisher Poet Musicians Jon Broderick and Jay Speakman, founders of the annual Fisher Poets Gathering in Astoria, Oregon. Together they will perform their unique blend of spare musical accompaniment alongside Starck's engaging poetry that draws on his life as a Merchant Seaman and journeyman carpenter. Mountain Writers January 2015 Harold Johnson & Clem Starck Reading Wednesday, January 21, 2015, at 12:00 PM Concordia University Library (2800 NE Liberty Street, Portland 97211) Free and open to the public Harold Johnson is the author of Citizenship, a book of poems published in 2014 by Many Voices Press (Kalispell, MT). He is a lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest, graduating with degrees in English and art from the University of Portland and Portland State. For many years, he taught English in high schools, grade schools and colleges. A former editor of Fireweed, his work is featured in many journals and anthologies, most recently New Poets of the American West. Now retired, he has recently completed his first novel. He lives in Portland with his wife, artist-professor Anne Johnson. Clem Starck bio and photo above. Johnson & Starck at Concordia December 2014 Kate Gray & Marilyn Stablein Poetry Reading Wednesday, December 17, 2014, at 7:00 PM 804 NW Couch, Portland OR 97209 Suggested admission $5 Marilyn Stablein is the author of twelve books including Splitting Hard Ground: Poems which won the New Mexico Book Award and the National Federation of Press Women's Book Award. Other books include a Himalayan memoir, Sleeping in Caves and a collection of eco-essays, Climate of Extremes: Landscapes and Imagination. A former book critic for The Seattle Times and founding board member of Seattle Arts and Lectures, she received Creative Writing degrees from the University of Washington and The University of Houston. She teaches memoir, poetry and short fiction. As a visual artist working in collage, assemblage and artist books she has exhibited her work internationally and in books and journals including Gargoyle, Otoliths, Rattle, Raven Chronicles, Lark’s1000 & 500 Artist Booksseries and on the walls of Anthology Booksellers, a used bookstore she co-owns with her husband in Portland. Kate Gray’s first novel, Carry the Sky, was released in September, 2014, and it attempts to stare at bullying without blinking. Her first full-length book of poems, Another Sunset We Survive (2007) was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and followed chapbooks, Bone-Knowing (2006), winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Prize and Where She Goes (2000), winner of the Blue Light Chapbook Prize. Over the years she’s been awarded residencies at Hedgbrook, Norcroft, and Soapstone, and a fellowship from the Oregon Literary Arts. For more than 20 years teaching at a community college in Oregon, she has tended her students’ stories. She and her partner live in a purple house in Portland, Oregon with their sidekick, Rafi, a very patient dog. November 2014 Barbara Drake & Jim Heynen Reading Wednesday, November 19, 2014, at 7:00 PM 804 NW Couch, Portland OR 97209 Suggested admission $5 Barbara Drake’s newest book is Morning Light (Oregon State University Press, 2014), her latest memoir describing life in western Oregon’s Yamhill Valley and the lessons she’s learned from her long stint of country living. Her earlier memoir, Peace at Heart: an Oregon Country Life, was an Oregon Book Award finalist in 1999. Drake’s books of poetry include Driving One Hundred (Windfall Press, 2009), Love at the Egyptian Theatre, What We Say to Strangers, Life in a Gothic Novel, Bees in Wet Weather, and Small Favors. She is also the author of Writing Poetry, a widely used college textbook, in print since 1983. Her writing appears in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. Drake taught creative writing, environmental literature, and book arts at Michigan State University and Linfield College. Jim Heynen is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, most recently Ordinary Sins (Milkweed Editions, 2014). Modeled after the work of Theophrastus – the Greek philosopher who originated the character sketch as a literary form – the short shorts in Ordinary Sins deftly capture the oddest of individuals to discover the most universal themes. Heynen is perhaps best known for his collections of short prose featuring young farm boys: The One-Room Schoolhouse: Stories about the Boys (Vintage), Boys House: New & Selected Stories (Minnesota Historical Society Press), Fishing for Chickens: Short Stories about Rural Youth (Persea), and The Man Who Kept Cigars in his Hat (Graywolf). He is also the author of poetry and young adult fiction. Heynen lives in St. Paul, MN with his wife, Sarah T. Williams, formerly the Books Editor for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Concordia University's Art & Culture Program and Mountain Writers Series presents a reading by Barbara Drake & Jim Heynen Thursday, November 20 2014, at 12:00 PM George R. White Library and Learning Center, Concordia University • 2800 NE Liberty Street • Portland OR 97211 Free and open to the public Heynen and Drake at Concordia October 2014 Dennis Schmitz & Carl Adamshick Poetry Reading Wednesday, October 15, 2014, at 7:00 PM 804 NW Couch, Portland OR 97209 Suggested admission $5 Dennis Schmitz is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Animism (Field Editions/Oberlin College Press, 2014). Earlier collections include We Weep for Our Strangeness (Big Table/Follett, 1969. Reissued by Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2008); Double Exposures (Triskelion Press, 1971), Goodwill, Inc. (Ecco Press, 1976); String (Ecco, 1980); Eden (U. of Illinois Press, 1989); About Night: New and Selected Poems (Field Editions, Oberlin College Press, 1993); and The Truth Squad (Copper Canyon Press, 2002). Born and raised in Dubuque, Iowa, he attended Loras College and the University of Chicago. He has taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and California State University, Sacramento. His work has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, The Nation, Paris Review, the Chicago Review, and Zyzzyva, to name just a few. Schmitz is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, among them the Discovery Award (Poetry Center, New York), the di Castagnola Award (Poetry Society of America) for best book-in-progress, the Shelley Memorial Award (Poetry Society of America) for distinguished achievement, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in 1976, 1985, and 1992. He and his wife Loretta live in Oakland, CA. Carl Adamshick is the author of two books of poetry, most recently Saint Friend, published with McSweeney's. He is a founder and editor at Tavern Books, a nonprofit publisher of poetry. Adamshick’s debut collection, Curses and Wishes (Louisiana State University Press, 2011), was selected by Marvin Bell for the 2010 Walt Whitman Award. In 2012, the collection won the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry from Literary Arts. Adamshick is also the recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship from Literary Arts and has been featured in Poetry in Motion. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including the American Poetry Review, the Harvard Review, and American Poet. He lives and works in Portland OR. Concordia University Libraries' Art & Culture Program and Mountain Writers Series present a reading by Carl Adamshick & Dennis Schmitz Thursday, October 16, 2014, at 12:30 PM George R. White Library and Learning Center, Concordia University • 2800 NE Liberty Street • Portland OR 97211 Free and open to the public Adamshick and Schmitz at Concordia September 2014 Andrea Hollander & Allan Peterson Reading Wednesday, September 17, 2014, at 7:00 PM 804 NW Couch, Portland OR 97209 Suggested admission $5 Allan Peterson is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Precarious (42 Miles Press, 2014) and Fragile Acts (McSweeney’s Poetry Series), which was a finalist for both the 2013 National Book Critics Circle and the Oregon Book Award. The recipient of numerous awards and prizes, Peterson is the author of seven chapbooks, most recently, Other Than They Seem, winner of the 2014 Snowbound Chapbook Prize from Tupelo Press. His work appears in many journals and anthologies and was selected for Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry Series (#159). A visual artist as well as a poet, Peterson was for many years chair of the art department and director of the Switzer Center for Visual Arts at Pensacola State College, Florida, and before that, Professor of Art at the State University of New York, Geneseo. His art work has been exhibited widely in national, regional and invitational exhibitions and appears in museum, corporate and private collections. Peterson divides his time between Florida and Ashland, Oregon. Andrea Hollander, an award-winning poet and essayist, is author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently, Landscape with Female Figure: New and Selected Poems, 1982 – 2012, a finalist for the 2014 Oregon Book Award. She is winner of a Pushcart Prize for prose memoir, the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, the Runes Poetry Award, an Oregon Literary Fellowship, and two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies, college textbooks, and literary journals, and she has been featured at writers' conferences and festivals throughout the United States, as well as in England and France. For twenty-two years Hollander was the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Hollander now makes her home in Portland, Oregon. John Brehm & Allan Peterson Reading Wednesday, September 17, 2014, at 12:20 PM George R. White Library & Learning Center at Concordia University 2800 NE Liberty, Portland, OR 97211 Free and open to the public. Allan Peterson's photo and bio is above. John Brehm is the author of two books of poetry: Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize, and Help Is on the Way, which won the 2012 Four Lakes Prize, both from the University of Wisconsin Press. Brehm has published a chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press (2002) and was the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, The Best American Poetry 1999. He has taught at Cornell, Emerson College, and Portland State University and received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. From 1996-2008 he lived in Brooklyn, working as a freelance writer and as a senior copywriter at Oxford University Press. He currently lives in Portland. Mountain Writers Series at Concordia August 2014 Mountain Writers Series presents a VoiceCatcher Reading featuring Maggie Chula, Jennifer Weinberg, Cindy Stewart-Rinier, Shawn Aveningo, Burky Achilles & Thea Constantine Wednesday, August 20, 2014, at 7:00 PM 804 NW Couch • North Park Blocks • Portland OR 97209 Suggested admission $5 Join a group of talented poets and prose writers reading original work from the Summer 2014 edition of VoiceCatcher: a journal of women's voices & visions. VoiceCatcher is a nonprofit community that connects, inspires and empowers women writers and artists in greater Portland/Vancouver. Its first online literary/art journal appeared in October 2012 and its first four editions have attracted more than 17,000 first-time visitors. The following are the August readers at this upcoming event at Glyph Cafe & Arts Space. TOP: Maggie Chula, Jennifer Weinberg, Cindy Stewart-Rinier BOTTOM ROW: Shawn Aveningo, Burky Achilles, Thea Constantine Burky Achilles is on sabbatical from her fitness coaching business. She began a spontaneous eruption of poetry in January 2014 following the deaths of her mother and mother-in-law in 2013. Burky was raised on the south shore of Kauai and received her Masters in Writing in Fiction from Portland State University in 2002. In 2000 she was awarded a Literary Arts Fellowship and honored to be a Summer Fishtrap Fellow. Her non-fiction has appeared in the Chocolate for a Woman’s Soul Series. Shawn Aveningo is a globally published, award-winning poet who can’t stand the taste of coconut, eats pistachios daily and loves shoes … especially red ones! She believes poetry, especially when read aloud, is the perfect literary art form for today’s fast-paced world due to its power to stir emotion in less than two minutes. Shawn carries a band-aide and a safety pin in her wallet. She’s given birth on two continents and her three children make her an extremely proud “mama bear.” She shares the creative life – and business, The Poetry Box – with her best friend and soul-mate. They have recently made Portland, Oregon their home. Margaret (Maggie) Chula lived in Japan for twelve years where she taught creative writing at Kyoto universities. Her seven collections of poetry include Just This, published by Mountain and Rivers Press in 2013. She has been a featured speaker and workshop leader at writers’ conferences and festivals throughout the United States, as well as in Poland, Canada and Japan. In 2010, Maggie was appointed poet laureate for Friends of Chamber Music, composing poems while listening to concerts. She currently serves as president of the Tanka Society of America. Thea Constantine grew up in Hollywood, CA, and has worked as an award-winning performer, filmmaker and playwright. She is a certified facilitator in the Amherst Writers and Artists method and does workshops with PDX Writers here in Portland. Her short stories have most recently appeared in the Watercress Journal, In Focus, Stellazine and Roving Writers.She has also written “On the Yellow Line,” a column for Street Roots, and a serial for the on-line magazine The Black Boot. She shares writing VoiceCatcher's monthly website prompt column with friend and writer, Carrie Conner. She is currently editing her first novel,Stumptown. Cindy Stewart-Rinier holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her poetry has appeared in Calyx, The Smoking Poet,Crab Creek Review, Ascent, VoiceCatcher, and [forthcoming] the Naugatuck River Review. A Pre-Kindergarten teacher by day, she also teaches evening poetry writing workshops for Mountain Writers Series and serves on their board of directors. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her younger son, a bandy-legged Pitbull, and her husband of 31 years. Jennifer Liberts Weinberg's poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Tuesday: An Art Project, and Subtropics. She received her MFA from Columbia University. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and three children. Mountain Writers Series at TaborSpace presents a poetry reading featuring Spencer Reece & Michael Achterman Sunday, August 10, 2014, at 3:00 PM Copeland Commons • TaborSpace • 5441 SE Belmont • Portland Spencer Reece is a poet and priest; his first collection, The Clerk’s Tale, won the Bakeless Prize in 2003. He has received an NEA grant, a Guggenheim grant, the Witter Bynner Prize from the Library Congress, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship. His poems have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Scholar, and The New Republic. Last year, he served as the chaplain to the Bishop of Spain for the Reformed Episcopal Church, Iglesia Español Reformada Episcopal. Currently he is completing a book of prose, The Little Entrance, about his decision to become a priest in middle age. Michael Achterman is a fourth-generation Oregonian who attended Whitworth College for his undergraduate degree in English. He earned his MFA degree from Portland State University’s Creative Writing program. His work has appeared in Portland Review’s 20 Minutes in Portland and the Oregon Literary Review. He produced his first chapbook Dismantling in 2010. He lives in NE Portland with his wife Amy and their son Owen and works for The Oregon Community Foundation. Mountain Writers at TaborSpace in August Peter Sears at Concordia University presented by Concordia University Libraries’ Art & Culture Program and co-sponsored by Mountain Writers Series Saturday, August 2, 2014, at 7:00 PM George R. White Library & Learning Center, 2800 NE Liberty, Portland, OR 97211 A catered reception & signing to follow, celebrating the launch of the latest volume of poetry by Peter Sears Small Talk: New & Selected Poems (Lynx House Press, 2014). Peter Sears is the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently Small Talk: New and Selected Poems (Lynx House Press, 2014). Previous books of poetry include Tour; The Brink, which received the Gibbs-Smith poetry prize and the Western States Book Award for Poetry; and Green Diver; as well as a number of poetry chapbooks. He also has two books on teaching writing, Secret Writing, and I'm Gonna Bake Me a Rainbow Poem. A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Sears has taught at Reed College, Pacific's low-residency MFA program, and in numerous community-based programs, including Mountain Writers Series year-round writing workshops. He has served as Dean of Students at Bard College and the community services coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission. Sears is the founder of the Oregon Literary Coalition and co-founder of Friends of William Stafford and Cloudbank Books. He serves on the board of advisors for Fishtrap, and splits his time between Corvallis and Portland. On April 25, 2014, Governor Kitzhaber appointed Peter Sears Oregon’s seventh Poet Laureate. July 2014 Mountain Writers Series at TaborSpace and Just Now - An Anthology of Poets present a reading featuring Caitlin Scott, Michael Selker, Allison Tobey & Leah Stenson hosted by Oregon Poet Laureate Peter Sears Sunday, July 27 , 2014, at 3:00 PM Copeland Commons, TaborSpace, 5441 SE Belmont, Portland Every year Mountain Writers Series is pleased to introduce new, as well as experienced, writers who participate in some of our annual writing workshops. This reading will feature members of poetry workshops taught by Peter Sears. Join host Peter Sears and these four featured poets reading their work, including some poems from the 2012 publication, Just Now: An Anthology of Portland Poets from Cloudbank Books. Copies of Just Now - An Anthology of Poets will be available for purchase at the event as will copies of the newly released volume of poetry by Peter Sears, Small Talk: New & Selected Poems (Lynx House Press, 2014). Readers and host will happily sign copies before and after the reading. Caitlin Scott is a graduate of Oberlin College and the University of Florida writing program. Her poems have appeared in Threepenny Review, Field Magazine, and Onset. She is interested in connections between writing and the world of dreams. Michael Selker is a painter, photographer and poet. His photographs have been shown on the Oregon Coast and in diverse Portland locations, including a one-man show at the Mountain Writers Center. His work has been published in Hubbub, Cloudbank, Windfall and others. His chapbook, Crazies’ Bus Stop, was published by Pudding House Press. Leah Stenson is a Friends of William Stafford board member and host of Portland's Studio Series poetry reading and open mic. She is regional co-editor of the anthology Alive at the Center, author of the chapbook Heavenly Body and co-editor of Reverbertions from Fukushima: 50 Japanese Poets Speak Out (2014) Another chapbook, The Turquoise Bee and Other Love Poems, is forthcoming (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Allison Tobey holds an MFA from University of Antioch, Los Angeles and currently teaches writing at Chemeketa Community College. She is also the poetry editor at Gertrude Press. Recently, her work can be found in Sugar House Review and Cloudbank. Wednesday, July 16, 2014, 7:30 PM Martha Gies The Press Club (2621 SE Clinton Street, Portland OR 97202) Martha Gies is a fourth-generation Oregonian whose stories appear many quarterlies, including Orion, Zyzzyva, and Notre Dame Review, along with various anthologies. Gies traipsed about North America for 15 years, working in tech theater, independent bookstores, backstage at the opera, and programming computers. Back in the Pacific Northwest, she began publishing profiles of artists and musicians in the mid-70s, short stories in the mid-80s, and since then has added literary essays, book reviews and political rants. Her teachers were Raymond Carver, María Irene Fornés and public libraries around the continent. She is the author of Up All Night (Oregon State University Press, 2004), a portrait of Portland told through the stories of 23 people who work graveyard shift. In addition to reading her own work, Gies will showcase her friend and sometime student, Rebecca Koffman, a talented writer who has published stories in The McGuffin, Colere and other quarterlies. June 2014 Wednesday, June 18, 2014, 7:30 PM Kate Gale & Ursula K. Le Guin The Press Club (2621 SE Clinton Street, Portland OR 97202) Kate Gale, Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, Editor of the Los Angeles Review and President of the American Composers Forum, LA teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska in Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction. She serves on the boards of A Room of Her Own Foundation and Poetry Society of America. She is author of five books of poetry and six librettos including Rio de Sangre. Her newest books are The Goldilocks Zone from the University of Nebraska Press in January 2014 and Echo Light from Red Mountain Press fall of 2014. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and children. Ursula K. Le Guin was born in 1929 in Berkeley, and lives in Portland, Oregon. As of 2013, she had published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many honors and awards including Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud. Her most recent publications are The Unreal and The Real: Collected Stories 1 and 2 (Small Beer Press), which won the 2014 Ken Kesey Award from Oregon’s Literary Arts, and Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems, 1960 – 2010 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). Photo by Eileen Gunn View PDF May 2014 Wednesday, May 21, 2014, 7:30 PM Kelli Russell Agodon & Susan Rich Reading The Press Club (2621 SE Clinton Street, Portland OR 97202) Susan Rich is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently, Cloud Pharmacy andThe Alchemist’s Kitchen, which was a Finalist for the Foreword Prize and the Washington State Book Award. Her other books include Cures Include Travel and The Cartographer’s Tongue Poems of the World, which won the PEN USA Award for Poetry and the Peace Corps Writers Award. She is the recipient of awards from Artist’s Trust, The Times Literary Supplement of London, Peace Corps Writers and the Fulbright Foundation. Individual poems appear in the Antioch Review, Harvard Review, and Prairie Schooner. She teaches at Highline Community College and lives in West Seattle, WA. Kelli Russell Agodon is the author of Letters from the Emily Dickinsn Room (2010), winner of the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Prize in Poetry and a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She is also the author of Small Knots (2004) and the chapbook, Geography (2003). She co-edited the first eBook anthology of contemporary women’s poetry, Fire On Her Tongue and recently published The Daily Poet, a book of poetry writing exercises she coauthored with Martha Silano. Her third collection of poems, Hourglass Museum, will be published in February 2014. Kelli is the co-founder of Two Sylvias Press and was the editor of Seattle’s literary journal, Crab Creek Review for the last five years. View PDF April 2014 Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 7:30 PM Annie Lighthart & Gary Thompson Reading The Press Club (2621 SE Clinton Street, Portland OR) Annie Lighthart began writing poetry after her first visit to an Oregon old-growth forest. Iron String, her first book of poetry, was published in 2013 by Airlie Press. Her poems have appeared in The Greensboro Review, Hunger Mountain, Cimarron Review, and other journals. A longtime teacher, she has taught at Boston College, as a poet in the schools, and for community groups of all ages. She holds an MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts and now writes from a small green corner of Portland, Oregon. In June Annie Lighthart will teach a workshop for Mountain Writers Series -- Small and Beguiling: A Short Poem Workshop, Saturday, June 28, from 10 AM - 1:00 PM. Workshop Information Gary Thompson’s latest book of poems, One Thing After Another, published by Turning Point, is a collection of six widely different lyrical sequences. It joins four previous collections: To the Archaeologist Who Finds Us, On John Muir’s Trail, As for Living, and Hold Fast. He studied with Dick Hugo, Madeline DeFrees, and Bill Kittredge at the University of Montana and was a founding editor of CutBank, which just celebrated its 40th anniversary. For more than twenty-five years, he taught in the Creative Writing Program at CSU, Chico, all the while playing second-base for The Pests, Chico’s storied softball team. He and his wife, Linda, have lived in the Northwest for fifteen years; six years ago they moved to San Juan Island, bringing their old trawler, Keats, home to the waters they love. View PDF March 2014 Kathleen Flenniken & Ceiridwen Terrill Reading at The Press Club Wednesday, March 19, 2014, 7:30 PM The Press Club ( 2621 SE Clinton Street, Portland OR) Kathleen Flenniken & Ceiridwen Terrill at Concordia University presented by Concordia University Libraries’ Art & Culture Program and co-sponsored by Mountain Writers Series George R. White Library & Learning Center, 2800 NE Liberty, Portland, OR 97211 Thursday, March 20, 2014, 11:00 - 12:00 pm Class & Discussion Session Science Writing Social Change Room GRW 201, Second Floor Thursday, March 20, 2014, 12:30 - 1:30 pm Poetry & Prose Reading Room GRW 108, First Floor Kathleen Flenniken is the author of two poetry collections. Plume (University of Washington Press, 2012), a meditation on the Hanford Nuclear Site, won the Washington State Book Award and was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Famous (University of Nebraska Press, 2006) won the Prairie Schooner Book prize and was named an ALA Notable Book. Her other awards include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust. Flenniken works with Writers in the Schools and other arts agencies bringing poetry to youth and serves as Washington State’s Poet Laureate until February 2014. Ceiridwen Terrill is the author of two books of nonfiction: Unnatural Landscapes: Tracking Invasive Species (University of Arizona Press, 2007), and Part Wild: Caught Between the Worlds of Wolves and Dogs (Scribner, 2011), a finalist for the 2013 Oregon Book Award. She is at work on a new memoir, tentatively titled Go Fish, about coming of age at the end of the Cold War and her family’s connection to the Hanford Nuclear Site. Her articles have appeared in Slate and High Country News, among other publications. Terrill teaches environmental journalism and science writing at Concordia University in Portland. She is a passionate equestrian and backpacker. View PDF February 2014 Wednesday, February 19, 2014, 7:30 PM Arthur Ginsberg & Lisa Steinman Reading The Press Club ( 2621 SE Clinton Street, Portland OR) Arthur Ginsberg is a neurologist and poet based in Seattle. He has studied poetry at the University of Washington and at Squaw Valley with Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds and Lucille Clifton. Recent work appears in the anthologies, Blood and Bone, and Primary Care, from University of Iowa Press. He was awarded the William Stafford prize in 2003. His full-length collection of poetry, The Anatomist, was published in 2013, and his chapbook, Faith is the Next Breath, is just out from Puddinghouse Press in Ohio. He was awarded an MFA degree in creative writing in 2010 from Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. Lisa M. Steinman was born and raised in rural Connecticut and attended college in upstate New York before moving to the Pacific Northwest to teach at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Since 1983, she and her husband, Jim Shugrue, have edited the poetry magazine Hubbub. Absence & Presence is her ninth book. Earlier poetry books include Lost Poems (Ithaca House),All That Comes to Light and A Book of Other Days (both from Arrowood Books), and Carslaw’s Sequences(University of Tampa Press). She has three books about poetry, as well: Made in America (Yale University Press), Masters of Repetition (Palgrave Macmillan), and, most recently, Invitation to Poetry (Wiley-Blackwell). She is Kenan Professor of English and Humanities at Reed. View PDF Wednesday, February 12, 2014, 1:30 - 2:45 pm Clem Starck Reading Poetry at Concordia University Room 108, First Floor, Concordia University George R. White Library & Learning Center 2800 NE Liberty, Portland, OR 97211 presented by Concordia University Libraries’ Art & Culture Program co-sponsored by Mountain Writers Series Clemens Starck is a Princeton dropout, a former merchant seaman and reporter on Wall Street. He has worked at many jobs, but mostly as a union carpenter and construction foreman on the West Coast—San Francisco, British Columbia, and Oregon. His first book of poems, Journeyman’s Wages, received the 1996 Oregon Book Award as well as the William Stafford Memorial Poetry Award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. His next two books – Studying Russian on Company Time (1999) and China Basin (2002) – were also finalists for the Oregon Book Award. Traveling Incognito, a letterpress chapbook from Wood Works in Seattle, appeared in 2004. A new book of poems, Rembrandt, Chainsaw, was published in the fall of 2011. He lives on forty-some acres in the country outside of Dallas, Oregon, in the mid-Willamette Valley. Free and open to the public. Flyer for Reading January 2014 Wednesday, January 15, 2014, 7:30 PM Stevan Allred & Robin Cody Reading The Press Club ( 2621 SE Clinton Street, Portland OR) Stevan Allred has survived circumcision, a tonsillectomy, a religious upbringing, the 60's, the War on Poverty, the break-up of The Beatles, any number of bad haircuts, years of psychotherapy, the Reagan Revolution, the War on Drugs, the Roaring 90's, plantar fasciitus, the Lewinsky Affair, the internet bubble, the Florida recount of 2000, the Bush oughts, the War on Terror, teen-aged children, a divorce, hay fever, the real estate bubble, male pattern baldness, and heartburn. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals and websites, and he has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His debut novel, A Simplified Map of the Real World, a collection of fifteen linked stories, was published by Forest Avenue Press in 2013. Robin Cody was born at St. Helens and grew up in Estacada, Oregon. A graduate of Yale, he taught at the American School of Paris for a decade and was Dean of Admissions at Reed College in Portland before taking up freelance writing in 1984. While writing, he has been a baseball umpire, a basketball referee, and special ed school bus driver. Cody is the author of Ricochet River, a novel, and Voyage of a Summer Sun, about the Columbia River. With Voyage, Cody won the 1995 Oregon Book Award for literary nonfiction. Both of those books are in the Oregon State Library’s “150 Books for the Oregon Sesquicentennial,” February 2009. His most recent book, Another Way the River Has, is a collection of short true stories. View PDF December 2013 Wednesday, December 18, 2013, 7:30 PM Paul Hunter & Clemens Starck Reading The Press Club (2621 SE Clinton Street, Portland OR) Paul Hunter is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry and three chapbooks. His first volume of farming poems, Breaking Ground (2004) was reviewed in the New York Times and received the 2004 Washington State Book Award. Subsequent volumes include Ripening (2007), Come the Harvest (2008), and Stubble Field (2012). He was recently a featured poet on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. He is also the author of a prose book on small-scale, sustainable farming, One Seed to Another: The New Small Farming. He has taught at the University of Washington, the Overlake School, the Skagit River Poetry Festival, and the Oregon Poetry Society. Hunter has published fine letterpress poetry under the imprint of Wood Works for the past 19 years, currently including 26 books and over 60 broadsides. Clemens Starck is a Princeton dropout, a former merchant seaman and reporter on Wall Street. He has worked at many jobs, but mostly as a union carpenter and construction foreman on the West Coast—San Francisco, British Columbia, and Oregon. His first book of poems, Journeyman’s Wages, received the 1996 Oregon Book Award as well as the William Stafford Memorial Poetry Award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. His next two books – Studying Russian on Company Time (1999) and China Basin (2002) – were also finalists for the Oregon Book Award. Traveling Incognito, a letterpress chapbook from Wood Works in Seattle, appeared in 2004. A new book of poems, Rembrandt, Chainsaw, was published in the fall of 2011. He lives on forty-some acres in the country outside of Dallas, Oregon, in the mid-Willamette Valley. View PDF Sunday, December 1, 2013, 3:00 PM Just Now - an anthology Reading The Press Club (2621 SE Clinton Street, Portland OR) Every year Mountain Writers Series is pleased to introduce new, as well as experienced, writers who participate in its annual workshops. This month the members of poetry workshops taught by Peter Sears will bring their poems to the Press Club for an afternoon reading. This reading is particularly special because the event will launch the publication of the anthology, Just Now, from Oregon's fine Cloudbank Books. Join host Peter Sears and Mountain Writers Series for a reading featuring some of the very fine poets whose work appears in Just Now. Copies of the anthology will be available for purchase at the event. Contributors to Just Now, an anthology of poetry, include Ken Arnold, Ann Frances Dudley, Carol Ellis, Beth Ford, Jane Greenbaum, Stella Jeng Guillory, Dan Hannon, Ron Jeidy, Oz Hopkins Koglin, Lois Leveen, Shelley Peters, Martha Ragland, Tiah Lindner Raphael, Karen Reyes, Caitlin Scott, Michael Selker, Leah Stenson, Barbara Surovell, Allison Tobey, and Lisa Wible. November 2013 Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 7:30 PM Nance Van Winckel Reading The Press Club (2621 SE Clinton Street, Portland OR) Nance Van Winckel’s sixth collection of poems, Pacific Walkers, is just out from U. of Washington Press. The recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships, the Washington Sate Governor's Award for Poetry, and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner, she has new poems in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Crazyhorse, Field, and Gettysburg Review. Her fourth collection of linked stories and flash fiction, Boneland (U. of Oklahoma Press, July 2013), won a Christopher Isherwood Fiction Fellowship. Her flash fictions, short-shorts, and full-length stories have been published in AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, The Sun, Kenyon Review, and other journals. Her hybrid mash-ups of poetry and photography have been in several gallery shows and literary journals. She is Professor Emerita in Eastern Washington University's graduate creative writing program, as well as a faculty member of Vermont College of Fine Arts' low-residency MFA program. She has taught at Bucknell U., Randolph College, U. of Montana, Centrum, and other schools. She lives near Spokane, Washington with her husband, the artist Rik Nelson. Nance Van Winckel, A Workshop: Prose Poems & Flash Fictions, Saturday, November 23. View PDF October 2013 Wednesday, October 16, 2013, 7:30 PM Tom Crawford & Ellen Waterston Reading The Press Club (2621 SE Clinton Street, Portland OR) Tom Crawford is a teacher and poet whose work explores the natural world and our complex connection to it. Born in Michigan and educated in California, he’s lived much of his life in the Northwest. Years of teaching in China and South Korea have infused his work with a quality of Eastern sensibility. His poems are both contemplative and activist. They’re not just about beauty but how to save it. Crawford is the author of seven books of poetry. Lauds won the Oregon Book Award. The Temple On Monday was winner of the ForeWord Book of the Year Award. His most recent collection, The Names of Birds, was “Star-reviewed” in BookList. He’s the recipient of the Pushcart Prize and two poetry fellowships from the National Endowments for the Arts. He currently makes his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but will be in the Northwest this fall as Writer in Residence at Sitka Center for Arts and Ecology on the Oregon Coast. Ellen Waterston’s most recent collection of poetry is, Via Lactea, A Verse Novel, forthcoming Nov. 1, 2013 from Atelier 6000. Poetry awards include the 2009 and 2005 WILLA Award in Poetry for her collections Between Desert Seasons and I Am Madagascar, respectively. Cold Snap, a collection of assorted writings, was published in 2011 by Fishtrap, Inc. Where The Crooked River Rises, a collection of Waterston’s award-winning personal and nature essays about Central Oregon’s High Desert, was published by OSU Press fall 2010. Her memoir, Then There Was No Mountain, was rated one of the top ten books by the Oregonian in 2003 and earned her an appearance on Good Morning America. Waterston is the founder and director of the Writing Ranch, dedicated to supporting the craft and careers of emerging writers through workshops and retreats. Waterston is also the founder and former director of The Nature of Words, a Bend-based literary organization. View PDF Saturday, October 5, 2013 11:00 AM - 12:00 Noon Mountain Writers Series Showcase on the Wordstock Poetry Stage presents a poetry reading by Henry Carlile & Vern Rutsala Oregon Convention Center 777 NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd Portland, OR 97232 Portland OR Vern Rutsala taught at Lewis & Clark College for over forty years. He is the author of twelve collections of poetry, including The Window, Laments, The Journey Begins, and Little-Known Sports. Among the awards for his work are a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, the Juniper Prize, an Oregon Book Award, two Carolyn Kizer Poetry Prizes, the Duncan Lawrie Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Akron Poetry Prize, the Northwest Poetry Prize, and a Masters Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission. His book of poems, The Moment's Equation (Ashland Poetry Press 2005), was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry. [Photo by Dorianne Laux] Henry Carlile was born in San Francisco and grew up in California and Washington State. He is a lifelong outdoorsman and conservationist whose poems reflect the natural world. His latest book,Oregon, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2013. Carlile earned an M.A. with emphasis in creative writing from the University of Washington, where he studied with Theodore Roethke, Henry Reed, Elizabeth Bishop and David Wagoner. He taught creative writing and American literature at Portland State University and was a visiting lecturer in the Iowa Writers Workshop. Carlile has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Oregon Arts Commission and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His work has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, the New Yorker, Shenandoah and many other publications. He lives with his wife and family in Portland, Oregon. [Photo by Kevin Costello] September 2013 Wednesday, September 18, 2013, 7:00 PM Richard Tillinghast Reading Copeland Commons at TaborSpace (5441 S.E. Belmont, Portland OR) Richard Tillinghast is a native of Memphis, Tennessee, a graduate of Sewanee (BA, 1962) and Harvard (MA, 1963; PhD, 1970). He has taught at Harvard as a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer, at the University of California at Berkeley, in the college program at San Quentin Prison, at Sewanee, The Poets' House in Ireland, The University of Michigan, and the low-residency MFA program at Converse College. Tillinghast has published eleven books of poetry and a book of translations from Turkish, as well as four non-fiction books: Damaged Grandeur, a critical memoir of Robert Lowell, with whom he studied at Harvard University; Poetry and What Is Real (2004), a selection of his critical writings about poetry; and Finding Ireland: a Poet's Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture (2008), an introduction to the country through its literature, architecture, history, and art. In 2012 he published a travel book, An Armchair Traveller's History of Istanbul, which takes a similar approach to the Turkish and Byzantine city where Tillinghast has spent considerable time for over fifty years His most recent poetry collections are The New Life (2008), Selected Poems (2009), Sewanee Poems (2009), and Wayfaring Stranger (2012). Three other recent books of poetry are Six Mile Mountain (2000), The Stonecutter's Hand (1995), and Today in the Cafe Trieste (1997), new and selected poems issued by Salmon Publishing in Ireland. In 1997 he edited A Visit to the Gallery, a collection of poems written in response to paintings at the Museum of Art at the University of Michigan. Tillinghast’s poems are informed by his travels, which have been supported by grants from the Creative Arts Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation, and the Michigan Council for the Arts, as well as fellowships from the American Research Institute in Turkey, the British Council, and the Irish Arts Council. He was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Harvard, and was also awarded a Sinclair-Kennedy Travel Grant as a graduate student. He has received the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship. The winner of the Ann Stanford Prize for Poetry, the Cleanth Brooks Award for creative non-fiction, and the James Dickey Poetry Prize, Tillinghast was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing. In 2010, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He and his daughter Julia ClareTillinghast have collaborated on a book of translations from the poetry of Edip Cansever (1928–1986), Dirty August, published in 2009 by Talisman House. The father-daughter team was awarded a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to assist with their work. Richard is currently engaged in writing a non-fiction travel book tentatively called Breakfast at the Airport, miscellaneous travel pieces about Ireland, England, and the United States. Tillinghast has moved back to the US after living for five years in County Tipperary, Ireland, and now divides his time between Tennessee and the Big Island of Hawaii. He is a fly-fisherman, gardener, cook, and traveler. He also plays the guitar and sings. View PDF Wednesday, September 25, 2013 7:30 PM Brittney Corrigan & Bill Siverly Reading The Press Club (2621 SE Clinton Street, Portland OR) Brittney Corrigan was raised in Colorado but has called Oregon her home since 1990. She holds a degree from Reed College, where she is also employed. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and she is the author of the collection, Navigation (The Habit of Rainy Nights Press, 2012), and a chapbook, 40 Weeks, (Finishing Line Press, 2012). She is the poetry editor for the online journal Hyperlexia – poetry and prose about the autism spectrum – and lives in Portland with her husband and two children. Bill Siverly was born and grew up in Lewiston, Idaho, and he has lived in Portland since 1972. He holds a Master of Arts degree from San Francisco State University, and he taught literature, composition, and creative writing at Portland Community College for twenty-five years. Bill has published five books of poems: Parzival (1981), Phoenix Fire (1987), The Turn (2000), Clearwater Way (Traprock Books, 2009), and Steptoe Butte (20130. Since 2002 he has been co-editor with Michael McDowell of Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place, which features poetry of the Pacific Northwest and appears twice yearly on the equinoxes. August 2013 Wednesday, August 21, 2013 7:30 PM Dan Hannon, Kathryn (Terrill) St. Thomas, Rick Kotulski & Sandra Williams Reading The Press Club (2621 SE Clinton Street, Portland OR) This reading features four writers who were faculty at Mt. Hood Community College in the ’70s when Mountain Writers Series began. Started in 1973 as weekly noon-hour campus readings, Friday at 12-Poetry, the program soon evolved to include other genres, evening events, multi-arts performances, and weekend writer’s conferences. Join these former Mt. Hood faculty who wrote, romped and taught through the first decade of Mountain Writers Series events that boasted such noted guests as Robert Hass, Richard Hugo, Lawson Inada, Carolyn Kizer, W. S. Merwin, Vern Rutsala, Peter Sears, William Stafford, Mark Strand and David Wagoner. Dan Hannon, Rick Kotulski, Kathryn St. Thomas, and Sandra Williams will read old work and new, and perhaps dare to share anecdotes about the early days of Mountain Writers Series, a program they and other faculty launched 40 years ago on a small college campus in Gresham. -- Kathryn, Rick & Sandra circa 1974 Dan Hannon taught English and Humanities full time at Mt. Hood Community College from 1971 through 2002. He continues to teach writing classes there part time on occasion. He enjoys most outdoor sports, especially sea kayaking, Nordic skiing, backpacking, and bicycling. In the winter, he helps coach a youth Nordic ski team. He is married, and has grown children who live in Oregon. Kathryn (Terrill) St. Thomas taught writing at Mt. Hood Community College from 1969 to 1999. After retiring she worked on her own poems and short stories, and then left off writing to work on the piano. She stays close to the word, though, by editing her daughter Ceiridwen Terrill’s book drafts and articles. Her present pleasures include mixing a new cocktail and sitting outdoors to think in good strong light. Rick Kotulski taught writing at Mt. Hood Community College, was active in politics -- both on campus and in the State of Oregon. He is married, has three grown children, and spends half of the year living off the grid in Baja California, Mexico. Sandra Williams began work with Mountain Writers Series in 1973 at Mt. Hood Community College in Gresham, Oregon, where she taught until her retirement in 2001. As director of Mountain Writers Series, she has coordinated events that brought hundreds of authors to the region. In 1990, the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts presented her with the Stewart H. Holbrook Award for contribution toward the advancement of literary life in Oregon. Also a published poet, she was awarded an Oregon Institute of Literary Arts Poetry Fellowship in 1991. Her collection of poems, Detours, published in 1995, was nominated for an Oregon Book Award in Poetry. View PDF July 2013 Wednesday, July 17, 2013 Paulann Petersen Reading Poetry The Press Club (2621 SE Clinton Street, Portland OR) Paulann Petersen, Oregon's Poet Laureate, returns to Mountain Writers Series to read from her new 180-page book of poetry, Understory. "As with a forest’s understory—the level of vegetation growing under its canopy—these poems bear the shadows of a darker realm. Informed by myth and archetype, Paulann Petersen’s work grows close to the earth, frequently delving into the chthonic. Occasioned by a wide geography and characterized by a large embrace, Petersen’s work celebrates both the singular and the quotidian, both the sidereal and the earth-bound—including poems for her furrier grandfather, for a revered poet’s first spoken word, for Hinduism’s sensuality, for a star-map painted on deer hide. Here a reader encounters a voice steeped in the music of the English language, a voice intent on the musical possibilities of poetry’s open and nonce forms. In these pages, a reader finds a voice indebted to the power of metaphor—the capacity of metaphor to transform both language itself and the way we humans see this world. Understory is the sixth full-length collection of poems from Petersen, who is Oregon’s sixth Poet Laureate." Paulann Petersen, a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, has published her poems in numerous publications including Poetry, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner and Wilderness Magazine. She is the author of five other full-length collections of poems, The Wild Awake (2002); Blood Silk(2004); A Bride of Narrow Escape (2004); Kindle (2008) and The Voluptuary (Lost Horse Press, 2010). The recipient of Oregon Literary Arts' 2006 Holbrook Award, she has taught a number of poetry workshops for colleges, libraries, and writers' conferences, including Fishtrap, Oregon Writers' Workshop, Mountain Writers Series, Oregon State Poetry Association, The Creative Arts Community at Menucha, Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College and the Lifelong Learning Institute at Chemeketa Community College. She makes her home in Portland. June 2013 Wednesday, June 19, 7:30 PM A Reading at The Press Club Every year Mountain Writers Series is pleased to introduce new, as well as experienced, writers who participate in its annual workshops. This month the members of the spring 2013 poetry workshop taught by Peter Sears will bring their poems to the Press Club for an evening reading. Join Peter Sears and Mountain Writers Series for a reading featuring a group of very fine poets. Beth Campbell Ford Ann Dudley John Morrison reading for Caitlin Scott Leah Stenson Don Colburn reading for Oz Koglin Stella Jeng Guillory Tiah Lindner Carol Ellis Ken Arnold Introduction by Peter Sears May 2013 Tuesday, May 28, 7:00 PM Robert Wrigley Reading Poetry with opening music by Glen Moore on bass Copeland Commons at TaborSpace (5441 S.E. Belmont, Portland OR) —Robert Wrigley returns to Mountain Writers Series to read from his 9th collection of poems, Anatomy of Melancholy & Other Poems, released this year from Penguin (2013). Winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Poets’ Prize, and the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award, Wrigley’s awards are many, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Other books include Moon In a Mason Jar (1986); What My Father Believed (1991); In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (1995); Reign of Snakes (1999); Lives of the Animals (2003); Earthly Meditations (2006); Beautiful Country (2010); and, just released, The Church of Omnivorous Light (Bloodaxe Book, UK). Wrigley teaches in the MFA program at the University of Idaho and lives on Moscow Mountain with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes. —Glen Moore is a jazz bassist, co-founder of the group Oregon. For the past 30 years, Moore has played a Klotz bass fiddle crafted in the Tyrol circa 1715. He has performed with hundreds of great jazz artists and in concerts with the Kronos Quartet, the Winter Consort, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Stuttgart Opera Orchestra, and the Stavanger, Norway Orchestra. Since 1988, Moore has worked with Mountain Writers Series, featured with such acclaimed poets as Marvin Bell, Billy Collins, Linda Gregg, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Anne Waldman, Al Young and, of course, Robert Wrigley. View PDF Wednesday, May 15, 7:30 PM James Fleming Lifetime Achievement Award and Tribute—a Celebration The Press Club (2621 SE Clinton Street, Portland OR) Lake Oswego poet, James Fleming, has been selected by Mountain Writers Series, one of the oldest literary reading series in the Pacific Northwest, to receive its “Lifetime Achievement” award in recognition for his many years of service to the Oregon literary community and his enduring work as a widely published poet. Fleming, a retired Portland police officer, and long-time editor of The Rap Sheet, the official newspaper for the police union, has been a lifelong resident of Oregon, except for his time as a merchant seaman, and as a combat veteran of WW II serving in Europe. A former president of the Oregon State Poetry Association and one of the organizers of the Portland Poetry Festival, he has been active in the literary life of the Oregon community for well over fifty years. He has published three books of poems and has been published in numerous anthologies and literary magazines, most recently in Rattle, a quarterly out of Southern California, in which his work was especially featured. Fleming will receive his award at this special Mountain Writers Series event at the Press Club in Portland on Wednesday, the 15th of May, beginning at 7:30 P.M. at which time he will read and be acknowledged by a gathering of his peers. Fleming will turn 90 years of age on the 13th of May. Thursday, May 9, 2013, 7:00 PM Kirsten Rian & Kim Stafford Copeland Commons at TaborSpace (5441 S.E. Belmont, Portland OR) Doors open at 6:45 PM View PDF Kirsten Rian is widely published as an essayist and poet. She is the author of a book of poetry, Chord (forthcoming, 2013) and an anthology of Sierra Leonean poetry, Kalashnikov in the Sun (Pika Press, 2010); and co-author of the anthology, Walking Bridges Using Poetry as a Compass (Urban Adventure Press). She is the author of the weekly column “The Alphabet of Light” for Daylight Magazine, and is the poetry editor at The Oregonian. She is the recipient of a 2013 Artist Fellowship in Nonfiction from the Oregon Arts Commission. She has been awarded writing residencies through Literary Arts, Multnomah County Library, and Soapstone, among others. She teaches throughout the region. Also an independent curator and writer, Rian has coordinated more than 375 exhibitions and served as picture editor or writer for 80 books and catalogues. Kim Stafford teaches at Lewis & Clark College, where he is founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute and co-director of the documentary studies program. He serves as literary executor for the estate of William Stafford and has worked as an oral historian, letterpress printer, editor, photographer, teacher and visiting writer across the country, and in Italy, Scotland and Bhutan. Stafford has published a dozen books of poetry and prose, most recently 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do (Trinity University Press, 2012); The Muses among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft; Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford; and Having Everything Right: Essays of Place. He has received two N.E.A. fellowships, the Oregon Governor’s Arts Award, and a Western States Book Award. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and children. Presented by Mountain Writers Series and Lewis & Clark College with support from Broadway Books April 2013 Wednesday, April 17, 7:30 PM Judith Barrington & Cecelia Hagen Reading The Press Club (2621 SE Clinton Street, Portland OR) Judith Barrington’s Lifesaving: A Memoir won the 2000 Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. She has also published three books of poetry, most recently Horses and the Human Soul. Recent work includes two chapbooks: Postcard from the Bottom of the Sea and Lost Lands (winner of the Robin Becker Chapbook Award). Her best-selling text, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, is widely used by universities and writing groups in the U.S., Germany, and Australia. She is a faculty member of the Univ. of Alaska, Anchorage’s MFA Program, where she teaches memoir. Judith Barrington will teach a workshop, Writing the Body, as part of the 2013 Mountain Writers Series spring schedule of classes. For information or to register for Judith Barrington's spring workshop Cecelia Hagen is the author of Entering (Airlie Press, 2011) and of two chapbooks, Among Others (Traprock Books) and Fringe Living (26 Books Press). Her poetry, reviews, and nonfiction have been published by Rolling Stone, Prairie Schooner, Poet & Critic, Northwest Review, Caffeine Destiny, Blood Orange Review, Cream City Review, and many other publications. Her work also is or will be included in public art projects at the Kaiser Medical Center in Hillsboro, Oregon, the nursing center at Lane Community College, and a parking garage in downtown Eugene. Cecelia and her husband, the visual artist Craig Spilman, live – and dance the tango, mostly in Eugene. View PDF March 2013 Saturday, March 30, 2013, 4:00 PM Spencer Reece Reading Poetry followed by a screening of a short film by actor/director James Franco Clinton Street Theater 2522 SE Clinton Street, Portland OR Tickets: $10/$5 Student & Seniors Spencer Reece has published work in The New Yorker, The American Scholar, and The New Republic. His first collection of poetry, The Clerk’s Tale (2004), was chosen for the Bakeless Poetry Prize by Louise Glück and adapted into a short film by actor/director James Franco. A second collection of poetry, The Road to Emmaus, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, and raised in Minneapolis, Reece earned a BA at Wesleyan University, an MA at the University of York, an MTS at Harvard Divinity School, and an MDiv at Yale Divinity School. He was ordained in the Episcopal Church in 2011. He is currently completing a book of prose, The Little Entrance, about his decision to become a priest in middle age. Reece has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Wytter Bynner Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, and the Amy Lowell Traveling Grant. He was awarded a Fulbright grant to work on a collaborative writing project with children at the orphanage of Our Little Roses in Honduras in 2012-2013. The project will involve a book, co-edited by Richard Blanco, and a feature documentary directed by Brad Coley, with James Franco and Cassidy Freidman as executive producers, and Dar Williams composing the soundtrack. View PDF Wednesday, March 20, 7:30 PM Brian Doyle & Charles K. Johnson Reading at The Press Club Brian Doyle edits Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, in Oregon – “the best spiritual magazine in the country,” according to author Annie Dillard, and who would argue with Annie? Doyle is the author of thirteen books of essays, poems, nonfiction (The Grail, about a year in an Oregon vineyard, and The Wet Engine, about the “muddles & musics of the heart”), and fiction, notably the sprawling Oregon novel Mink River. Recent work includes two books selected as finalists for 2013 Oregon Book Awards in two categories: Bin Laden’s Bald Spot [Fiction] and Cat’s Foot [Young Adult Literature]. Doyle’s work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Orion, The American Scholar, The New York Times, The Times of London, and many other journals. His essays have also been reprinted in the annual Best American Essays, Best American Science & Nature Writing, and Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies. Charles K. Johnson is a Portland writer, fundraiser, and activist. A native Oregonian, he has been active in environmental politics since childhood. After a decade in national politics working with Physicians for Social Responsibility and as Executive Director of Nuclear Free America, Johnson returned to Oregon, where he was instrumental in making a home for the Robert W. Straub Archives at Western Oregon University’s Hamersly Library. Johnson’s book,Standing at the Water's Edge: Bob Straub's Battle for the Soul of Oregon (Oregon State University Press, 2012), chronicles the life of former Governor Robert W. Straub. Johnson’s insights into Straub’s significant legacy, his leading role in the state’s financial and environmental issues and his influence on Tom McCall, make this book an essential addition to the literature about Oregon’s political leaders for historians, political scientists, and general readers interested in Oregon history. View PDF February 2013 Sunday, February 24, 2013, 7:00 PM Matthew Dickman & Joseph Millar Reading at Copeland Commons at TaborSpace Matthew Dickman is the author of All-American Poem (American Poetry Review/ Copper Canyon Press, 2008), 50 American Plays (co-written with his twin brother Michael Dickman, Copper Canyon Press, 2012), and Mayakovsky’s Revolver (W.W. Norton & Co, 2012). He is the recipient of The Honickman First Book Prize, The May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Kate Tufts Award from Claremont College, and the 2009 Oregon Book Award from Literary Arts of Oregon. His poems have appeared in McSweeny’s, Ploughshares, The Believer, The London Review of Books, Esquire Magazine and The New Yorker among others. Matthew Dickman, the Poetry Editor of Tin House Magazine. He lives in Portland, Oregon. Joseph Millar is the author of three books of poetry: Blue Rust (Carnegie Mellon, 2012); Overtime (2001), a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; and Fortune (2007). Millar grew up in Pennsylvania and attended Johns Hopkins University. He spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay area working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. It would be two decades before he returned to poetry. His work has won fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a 2008 Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in DoubleTAke, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, APR, and Ploughshares. Millar teaches in Pacific University’s MFA program and lives in North Carolina with his wife, the poet Dorianne Laux. Wednesday, February 20, 7:30 PM Susan Denning & Jodi Varon Reading at The Press Club and award of The Silcox Prize from Mountain Writers Series to David Axelrod for his poem in Cloudbank 5 Susan Denning’s work has appeared in New York Quarterly, The Nervous Breakdown, Quick Fiction and elsewhere. She edited the online magazine Caffeine Destiny for thirteen years and is one of the editors of the anthology, Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest. Her chapbook, She Preferred to Read the Knives, was published by Dancing Girl Press in September 2012. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches writing and works at Literary Arts. Jodi Varon is the author of the non-fiction Drawing to an Inside Straight: The Legacy of an Absent Father (U of Missouri Press), a WILLA Award finalist from Women Writing the West. Recipient of the William Stafford Fellowship in Non-Fiction from Literary Arts as well as two awards to publishers from Literary Arts forbasalt and Calapooya, her prose appears in anthologies and magazines including New Letters, WomenArts Quarterly, Zone 3, the Northwest Review, Phantom Drift, and New Millennium Writing, among others. Also a translator from the Chinese, her translations of the Tang Dynasty poet Li He are collected in The Rock’s Cold Breath: Selected Poems of Li He (Ice River Press). A long-standing interpreter of the contributions of Chinese entrepreneurs, herbal doctors and laborers to the establishment of communities in Oregon, her articles and translations appear in the Oregon Encyclopediaand Talking on Paper: Oregon Letters and Diaries (Oregon State University Press). She lives in La Grande, Oregon, where she co-directs the new low residency MFA at Eastern Oregon University and edits basalt magazine. View PDF David Axelrod will read his poem "On Ebenalp," published in Cloudbank 5 and selected by Mountain Writers Series for The Silcox Prize. The name of the prize honors the tiny hut at the tree line, just above Timberline Lodge, where clouds meet the mountain on Mt. Hood, Oregon. Cloudbank journal of contemporary writing January 2013 Wednesday, January 16, 7:30 PM Nancy Flynn & Jodie Marion Reading at The Press Club Nancy Flynn grew up on the Susquehanna River in northeastern Pennsylvania, spent many years on a creek in Ithaca, New York, and now lives near the mighty Columbia in Portland, Oregon. Her writing’s received an Oregon Literary Fellowship and the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. Recent poems have appeared in Blood Orange Review, PANK, qarrtsiluni, and Sugar Mule among others; her second chapbook, Eternity a Coal’s Throw, was published by Burning River in November 2012. Jodie Marion has had recent work published in Best New Poets 2011, Narrative Magazine, The New Guard Literary Review, and VoiceCatcher. Her chapbook, Another Exile on the 45th Parallel, was published from Floating Bridge Press in October 2012. She teaches at Mt. Hood Community College and lives in Vancouver, WA. with her husband and four children. View PDF December 2012 Wednesday, December 19, 7:30 PM John Brehm & Suzanne Sigafoos Reading at The Press Club John Brehm is the author of two books of poetry: Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize, and Help Is on the Way, which won the 2012 Four Lakes Prize, both from the University of Wisconsin Press. Brehm has published a chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press (2002) and was the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, The Best American Poetry 1999. He has taught at Cornell, Emerson College, and Portland State University and received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. From 1996-2008 he lived in Brooklyn, working as a freelance writer and as a senior copywriter at Oxford University Press. He currently lives in Portland. Suzanne Sigafoos, born and educated in the mid-west, migrated to New York, then to San Francisco where she attended her first poetry workshop. She continues her study of the craft of poetry in Portland, her current home. Her first collection of poems, Held in the Weave, was published in 2011 by Finishing Line Press. Currently, her poetry appears in the Fall 2012 edition of Windfall, A Journal of Poetry of Place, and her work will be part of a new anthology The Knotted Bond: Oregon Poets Speak of Their Sisters (Uttered Chaos Press, forthcoming in 2013). View Flyer November 2012 Wednesday, November 21, 7:30 PM A Reading at The Press Club Workshop members from two sessions taught by Peter Sears for Mountain Writers Series will bring their poems to the Press Club for an evening reading. Join Peter Sears and Mountain Writers for a poetry reading featuring Jane Greenbaum, Dan Hannon, Ron Jeidy, Shelley Peters, Martha Ragland, Karen Reyes, Michael Selker, Barbara Surovell, Allison Tobey and Lisa Wible. Introduction by Peter Sears Michael Selker is a painter, poet and photographer, whose chapbook, Crazies’ Bus Stop, was published by Pudding House Press in 2007. Since moving to Oregon thirty years ago, his focus has been poetry and photography, both of which were combined in broadsides selected for a recent Multnomah Arts Center Gallery Juried Group Show of broadsides and mixed media (2012). His poems have appeared in Hubbub, Cloudbank, Windfall, and elsewhere. He makes his home in Portland. Ron Jeidy has been observing the character of his world for 50-plus years and writing poetry for the past 20. Ron's external achievements include an MBA from the University of Wisconsin, an NCAA wrestling championship, businesses managed, properties renovated, paths carved and rock walls built. He balances his poetry with metal sculpture. Ron once lived in a 40-acre wood, but now resides on a 50 x 100 lot in NE Portland with his wife, Gail, and daughters, Mattie and Ally. Karen Reyes has been privileged to be a part of Oregon's literary community for over 40 years, acting as an editor (Hubbub Magazine), publisher (Trask House Books), and organizer (Portland Poetry Festival). She was the first Director of the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts, and as such designed and implemented the Oregon Book Awards for its Board. She is currently on the Board of Mountain Writers. This is her first public reading. Lisa Wible was born in New Delhi, India and raised in Washington, D.C. Her creative life has revolved around the twin interests of poetry and film. Poetry has been the more private expression, and film the more public, with documentary, short film and television work appearing across the U.S., Canada, and Europe. She served as the editor of the Bay Area Poet’s Coalition publication Poetalk and has been included as a featured poet in a variety of anthologies and readings around the region. She is currently directing a short film based on Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem “Populist Manifesto #1.” Martha Ragland is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. She has published poems in Cloudbank and essays in Bark and Seasoned with Words. In 2012, Mystery Writers of America awarded her one of two Helen McCloy Scholarships for Mystery Writing. Barb Surovell taught in Eugene, Portland and Tokyo. After retiring, she expected to write fiction and become fluent in Spanish. Instead, she found herself writing poetry and traveling. She will never use "tsunami" as a metaphor. Shelley Peters works in Vancouver, Washington, as a case manager for seniors and disabled adults. She enjoys hiking, biking, cooking, dancing and travel, as well as experimenting with poetry. She lives with her woodworker/ musician husband in NE Portland. Allison Tobey is a survivor of Cleveland, Ohio, and has received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. She now teaches writing at Chemeketa Community College in Portland, Oregon. Currently, she enjoys allowing Peter Sears to sprinkle his special brand of “This Crap’s for Hallmark” criticism on her poetry. Her recent work can be found in Cloudbank, Sugar Hill Review, and Paper Nautilus. Dan Hannon taught writing and international studies at Mt. Hood Community College for thirty-one years. He retired in 2002, but continued to teach and coordinate study abroad programs for a consortium of five Oregon community colleges until 2009. He still teaches the occasional writing class. He loves most outdoor activities, including sea kayaking, back packing, mountaineering, Nordic ski racing, and bicycling. He also maintains a blog called "olderathletesrock.com" which includes interviews with world-class older athletes and fit older people who do not consider themselves athletes, as well as information about nutrition and fitness for healthy living. He is a third generation Oregonian. Jane Greenbaum has been writing poetry for 50 years. The first poet who helped her was the late Donald Justice when he was Poet in Residence at Reed College, and the second was Peter Sears, who was at Reed as well. Over the years, Peter has been her mentor in workshops and privately. He has also been a big support and influence in her writing. With his help, she is currently readying a chapbook for publication. A few of the other poets she has worked with are the late William Stafford, Marvin Bell, Matthew Dickman, and Henry Hughes. Her poems are reflections on life on the rural Oregon Coast and of the lost and found department of life in general. October 2012 Lucia Perillo Poetry Reading Friday, October 19, at 7:30 PM Copeland Commons at TaborSpace 5441 S.E. Belmont Street Portland OR 97215 Tickets: $10 Doors open at 7 PM View PDF Opening music by bassist Glen Moore Lucia Perillo is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). Other books of poetry include Dangerous Life (1989), winner of the Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America; The Body Mutinies (1996), which won the Kate Tufts prize from Claremont University; The Oldest Map with the Name America (1999); Luck is Luck (2005), which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and won the Kingsley Tufts prize from Claremont University; and Inseminating the Elephant (2009), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. She has published a book of essays, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing (Trinity University Press, 2005), and a book of short stories, Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain (Norton, 2012). She has taught at Syracuse University, Southern Illinois University, and St. Martin’s College, and in the Warren Wilson MFA program. A former MacArthur fellow, Perillo lives in Olympia, Washington. http://www.luciaperillo.com/ Glen Moore is a jazz bassist, co-founder of the group Oregon. For the past 30 years, Moore has played a Klotz bass fiddle crafted in the Tyrol circa 1715. He has played with hundreds of great jazz artists and performed in concerts with the Kronos Quartet, the Winter Consort, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Stuttgart Opera Orchestra, and the Stavanger, Norway Orchestra. Since 1988, Moore has worked with Mountain Writers Series, featured with such poets as Marvin Bell, Billy Collins, Linda Gregg, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Anne Waldman and Al Young. Wednesday, October 17, 7:30 PM Bette Lynch Husted & David Filer Reading at The Press Club Bette Lynch Husted, who lives and writes in Pendleton, drives to Portland monthly to participate in a poetry workshop group. Her personal essays have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Fourth Genre, Northwest Review and other journals; her first collection of memoir essays, Above the Clearwater: Living on Stolen Land (OSU Press, 2004) was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and WILLA Award in Creative Nonfiction. Other works include After Fire (Pudding House, 2002) and At This Distance: Poems (Wordcraft, 2010) and most recently Lessons from the Borderlands (Plain View Press, 2012), personal essays inspired by her life as a teacher of stories in the rural West—and by the stories of class, gender, and racial history that followed her and her students into the classroom. She has been a Fishtrap Fellow and received a 2007 Oregon Arts Commission Award. David Filer was born in 1942 in the low California desert. He took degrees from the University of California, Santa Barbara in the 1960s, taught English and reading in the public schools in San Diego, California and Eugene, Oregon, went to law school at the University of Oregon in Eugene, then practiced law in various forms and places in Oregon until he retired in 2010. David Filer has published poems in numerous journals throughout the United States, including The Cafe' Review, The Oregonian, Rattle, Zyzzyva, Legal Studies Forum, and Free Lunch. He has published Night Verse (Finishing Line Press, 2005) and The Landscape There (Stone City Press, 2009), Weather Patterns (Dancing Moon Press, 2011), The Fear of Love (Plainview Press, 2012) and, most recently, Housekeeping - Sonnets of the Pacific Northwest (Finishing Line Press, 2012). David Filer and his wife Marlene Anderson live in Portland, Oregon. View PDF September 2012 Tess Gallagher & Alice Derry: A Dialogue Thursday, September 27, 3:30 PM Council Chambers, Templeton Center Lewis & Clark College 0615 SW Palatine Hill Road, Portland, OR Free and open to the public Tess Gallagher & Alice Derry: Poetry Reading Friday, September 28, 7:30 PM The Old Church 1422 SW 11th Avenue, Portland, OR Tickets: $12 No-host book-signing, Cassidy's, 1331 SW Washington, at 9 PM View PDF Tess Gallagher’s ninth volume of poetry, Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems, is available October from Graywolf Press and is forthcoming from Bloodaxe Press in England. Other poetry includes Dear Ghosts, Moon Crossing Bridge, and Amplitude. Her A Path to the Sea, translations of Liliana Ursu’s by Adam Sorkin, Ms. Gallagher and Ms. Ursu came out September 2011. Gallagher’s The Man from Kenvara: Selected Stories was published in fall 2009. In 2008 Blackstaff Press in Belfast published Barnacle Soup—Stories from the West of Ireland, a collaboration with the Sligo storyteller Josie Gray, available in the US from Carnegie Mellon. Distant Rain, a conversation with the highly respected Buddhist nun, Jacucho Setouchi, of Kyoto, is both an art book and a cross-cultural moment. Gallagher is also the author of Amplitude, Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray, A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry, and two collections of short fiction: At the Owl Woman Saloon and The Lover of Horses and Other Stories. She wrote the preface for Beyond Forgetting, an anthology of poems about Alzheimer’s. She has also spearheaded the publication of Raymond Carver’s Beginners in Library of America’s complete collection of his stories published Fall 2009. Jonathan Cape published Carver’s Beginners as a single volume in the UK in fall 2009. She spends time in a cottage on Lough Arrow in Co. Sligo in the West of Ireland where many of her new poems are set, and also lives and writes in her hometown of Port Angeles, Washington. Alice Derry’s fourth full collection of poems, Tremolo, will be released by Red Hen Press in the fall of 2012. Her third collection, Strangers to Their Courage (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), was a finalist for the 2002 Washington Book Award. Stages of Twilight (Breitenbush, 1986), Derry’s first collection, won the King County Publication Award, chosen by Raymond Carver; Clearwater appeared from Blue Begonia Press in 1997. Derry also has three chapbooks: Getting Used to the Body (Sagittarius Press, 1989), Not As You Once Imagined (Trask House, 1993), and translations from the German poet Rainer Rilke (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2002). Derry has won a number of prizes, and her poems have been widely published in anthologies. Derry was born in Oregon and raised in Washington and Montana. Her M.F.A. is from Goddard College (now Warren Wilson). She recently retired from Peninsula College in Port Angeles on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where she co-directed the Foothills Writers’ Series since 1980. Wednesday, September 19, 7:30 PM Roger Porter & Ceiridwen Terrill Reading at The Press Club Roger Porter is Professor of English at Reed College. He's the author of three books on the subject of autobiography: "The Voice Within" (Knopf), "Self-Same Songs: Autobiographical Performances and Reflections" (Nebraska), and "Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers" (Cornell). At Reed he teaches Shakespeare, Film, and Modern Fiction, as well as Life-Writing. He is also a food writer and a restaurant critic, having written for Willamette Week and The Oregonian for many years. He was nominated by the James Beard Foundation for Best Restaurant Criticism in America. He directed plays in Portland, and was on the Board of Artists Repertory Theatre. Ceiridwen Terrill is an associate professor at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon, where she specializes in literary nonfiction, including environmental journalism, science writing, and memoir. Her areas of scholarly inquiry include urban ecology, urban/wild conflicts, and the intersections of gender, culture, and science. Terrill’s essays have appeared in Oxford American and Isoltope, as well as in the anthology, What Wildness Is This: Women Writer About the Southwest. She is the author of Unnatural Landscapes: Tracking Invasive Species (2007) and, most recently, Part Wild: One Woman’s Journey with a Creature Caught Between the Worlds of Wolves and Dogs (Scribner, 2011). Terrill teaches field courses in botanical medicine and urban ecology, and she is a horsewoman, backpacker, kayaker, and sailor. View PDF August 2012 Wednesday, August 15, 7:30 PM Lynnell Edwards & Joseph Green Reading at The Press Club Lynnell Major Edwards is the author of three collections of poetry, The Farmer’s Daughter (2003), The Highwayman’s Wife (2007), and most recently Covet (2011), all from Red Hen Press. Her short fiction and book reviews have appeared most recently in Connecticut Review, American Book Review, Pleiades, New Madrid, and others. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky where she is on the Board of Directors for Louisville Literary Arts, a non-profit organization that sponsors the monthly InKY reading series and The Writer’s Block Festival. She is also Associate Professor of English at Spalding University. Prior to that she was Professor of English at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon. She also teaches creative writing at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and is available for readings and workshops in a variety of settings. Joseph Green’s books of poems include Deluxe Motel (The Signpost Press, 1991) and four chapbooks: His Inadequate Vocabulary (The Signpost Press, 1986), Greatest Hits: 1975-2000 (Pudding House Press, 2001), The End of Forgiveness (Floating Bridge Press, 2001), and That Thread Still Connecting Us (Moon Path Press, 2012). He was PEN Northwest’s Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writer for 2000, and in 2002 he held a residency at Fundación Valparaiso, in Mojacar, Spain. Through his own printing operation, The Peasandcues Press, he and his wife, Marquita produce limited-edition, letterpress-printed poetry broadsides, using hand-set metal type; and at the C.C. Stern Type Foundry, in Portland, he is part of a team working to preserve the craft of casting the type itself. He lives in Longview, Washington, where he retired from teaching at Lower Columbia College. View PDF July 2012 Wednesday, July 18, 7:30 PM Andrea Hollander Budy & Penelope Scambly Schott Reading at The Press Club Andrea Hollander Budy is the editor of When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women (Autumn House Press, 2009) and the author of three full-length poetry collections: Woman in the Painting ((Autumn House Press, 2006), The Other Life (Story Line Press, 2001), and House Without a Dreamer (Story Line Press, 1993), which won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Among other honors are the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize for memoir, the Runes Poetry Award, the Ellipsis Poetry Prize, two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two from the Arkansas Arts Council. Her poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies, college textbooks and literary journals, and she has been featured at writers' conferences and festivals throughout the United States, as well as in England and France. A relatively new resident of Portland, she has worked for the past twenty-one years as the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Penelope Scambly Schott is the author of five chapbooks and eight full-length books of poetry. Her verse biography A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth received the 2008 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her most recent book, Crow Mercies (2010) was awarded the Sarah Lantz Memorial Award from Calyx Press. Penelope lives in Portland and teaches an annual poetry workshop in Dufur, Oregon View PDF June 2012 Sunday, June 3, 2:45 PM Kim Barnes & Robert Wrigley Prose Reading/Poetry Reading Copeland Commons at TaborSpace 5441 S.E. Belmont Street, Portland OR 97215 Tickets: $12View PDF Opening music by bassist Glen Moore Kim Barnes will read from her newly released novel, In the Kingdom of Men, (Knopf, June 2012). She is also the author of two memoirs: the first, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, received a PEN/Jerard Fund Award, and was awarded a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award; the second memoir, Hungry for the World, was a Borders Books New Voices Selection. Two earlier novels include Finding Caruso and A Country Called Home, winner of the 2009 PEN Center USA Literary Award in Fiction and named a Best Book of 2008 by The Washington Post, Kansas City Star, and The Oregonian (Northwest). Barnes has co-edited two anthologies, Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers (with Mary Clearman Blew), and Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty (with Claire Davis). Widely published in magazines and anthologies, including The New York Times, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Good Housekeeping, O! Magazine, MORE Magazine, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, she is a former Idaho-Writer-in-Residence. Barnes teaches in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Idaho; has three grown children, one dog, one cat; and lives with her husband, the poet Robert Wrigley, on Moscow Mountain. http://www.kimbarnes.com/ Robert Wrigley teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Idaho. His books include Moon In a Mason Jar (University of Illinois, 1986); What My Father Believed (Illinois, 1991); In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (Penguin, 1995) winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award; Reign of Snakes (Penguin, 1999), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award; Lives of the Animals (Penguin, 2003), winner of the Poets’ Prize; Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006); and most recently, Beautiful Country (Penguin, 2010). Forthcoming in March 2013 is The Church of Omnivorous Light: Poems New and Selected (Bloodaxe Book, UK); and in April 2013, Anatomy of Melancholy & Other Poems (Penguin). He is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Among his other awards are the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize; and six Pushcart Prizes. He lives with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes, near Moscow, Idaho. Wednesday, June 20, 7:30 PM Jonah Bornstein & Steve Dieffenbacher Reading at The Press Club Jonah Bornstein received an MFA in Poetry from New York University and moved to Oregon in 1989, where he co-founded the Ashland Writers Conference and the Ashland Writing Center. He is the author or co-author of several collections of poetry, most recently Treatise on Emptiness (2009). He is winner of a Coulter Poetry Prize and has had work nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His other collections include A Path Through Stone and We are Built of Light and the coauthored Voices from the Siskiyous. His poems have been anthologized in September 11, 2001, American Writers Respond (2002), Walking Bridges (2008), and Deer Drink the Moon (2007), among other collections. He and his wife, painter Rebecca Gabriel, live in Ashland, Oregon, where he teaches and edits poetry privately. Steve Dieffenbacher is the author of The Sky is a Bird of Sorrow (Wordcraft of Oregon, 2012) and several chapbooks: Universe of the Unsaid (2009), Voices of the Siskiyous (2006), and At the Boundary (2001). His work has also been included in a number of anthologies: What the River Brings: Oregon River Poems (2012); Deer Drink the Moon (2007); Intricate Homeland: Collected Writings from the Klamath Siskiyou (2000); and in A Path Through Stone, a 1995 cycle of poems that includes work by Bruce Barton, Jonah Bornstein and John Reid. His poem, "Emptiness" won the 2010 Cloudbank magazine poetry prize , and he has been published in numerous regional journals. Dieffenbacher has lived in Oregon's Rogue Valley since 1989, and he is now an editor at the Mail Tribune in Medford.and writes a weekly column for the Sunday travel section. He has won various awards for writing, photography, and page design in his more than 35 years as a journalist. View PDF May 2012 Tuesday, May 15, 7:30 PM Barbara Ras & Christopher Howell Poetry Reading at The Old Church 1422 SW 11th Avenue, Portland, OR Tickets: $12 No-host book-signing, Cassidy's, 1331 SW Washington, at 9 PM View PDF Barbara Ras is the author of the poetry collections Bite Every Sorrow (LSU Press, 1998), chosen by C. K. Williams to receive the 1997 Walt Whitman Award and also awarded the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, One Hidden Stuff (Penguin 2006), and The Last Skin (Penguin 2010), which won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Poetry. Ras has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Artist Foundation of San Antonio, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, TriQuarterly, American Scholar, Massachusetts Review, Orion, as well as many other magazines and anthologies. She is the editor of a collection of short fiction in translation, Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (Whereabouts Press, 1994). She has taught at writers’ conferences across the country and has been on the faculty of the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Ras lives in San Antonio, where she directs Trinity University Press. Christopher Howell has published ten collections of poems, most recently Gaze (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected (University of Washington Press, 2010). Additionally, his poems, translations, and essays have been frequently and widely published in anthologies and journals, including Antioch Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, The Denver Quarterly, Field, Gettysburg Review, Harper’s, Iowa Review and The Southern Review. He has received three Pushcart Prizes, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from the King Country Arts Commission, the Artist Trust, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Council for the Arts. His work has also been awarded the Helen Bullis, Vachel Lindsay, and Vi Gale prizes, and has twice received the Washington State Book Award. He teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland NW Center for Writers, in Spokane, where he is also director and principal editor for Lynx House Press. Wednesday, May 16, 7:30 PM Catherine Brady, Gina Ochsner & Marjorie Sandor Prose Reading at The Press Club Suggested donation $10 Catherine Brady is the author of three short story collections, including Curled in the Bed of Love, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and The Mechanics of Falling, winner of the Northern California Book Award for Fiction. Her stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories. She's also the author of a book on writing craft, Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction, and a biography of a Nobel laureate, Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres: Deciphering the Ends of DNA. She is the academic director of the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco and is currently at work on a novel. Gina Ochsner has received awards from the John L. Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment of Arts. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Glimmertrain and the Kenyon Review. She won the Oregon Book Award for her short story collection, The Necessary Grace to Fall, which also received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and the story collection, People I Wanted to Be. Her latest work, a novel, is entitled The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight. She lives in Keizer, Oregon, and divides her time between writing and teaching with the Seattle Pacific Low-Residency MFA program. Marjorie Sandor is the author of four books, including The Late Interiors: A Life Under Construction, and the 2004 Winner of the National Jewish Book Award in Fiction, Portrait of my Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime: Stories. The Night Gardener: A Search for Home won the 2000 Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in such magazines as the Georgia Review, AGNI, and TriQuarterly, as well as in Best American Short Stories 1985 and 1988, The Pushcart Prize XIII, Twenty Under Thirty, The Best American Spiritual Writing 2000, and other anthologies. She teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Oregon State University in Corvallis. View PDF April 2012 Two Poetry Readings to Celebrate National Poetry Month with Oregon's Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen Tuesday, April 17, 12:30 -2:00 PM Concordia University 2900 Northeast Liberty Street, Portland Free & open to the public Presented by Concordia University Library Art & Culture Program and Mountain Writers Series with support from RACC Wednesday, April 18, 7:30 PM at The Press Club Suggested donation $5 View PDF Paulann Petersen, a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, has published her poems in numerous publications including Poetry, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner and Wilderness Magazine. She is the author of four full-length collections of poems, The Wild Awake (2002); Blood Silk (2004); A Bride of Narrow Escape (2004); and The Voluptuary(Lost Horse Press, 2010), as well as four chapbooks: Under the Sign of a Neon Wolf, The Animal Bride, Fabrication, and The Hermaphrodite Flower. Her work has been selected for the web site Poetry Daily and For Poetry in Motion. The recipient of Oregon Literary Arts' 2006 Holbrook Award, she has taught a number of poetry workshops for colleges, libraries, and writers' conferences, including Fishtrap, Oregon Writers' Workshop in Portland (Northwest College of Art, Portland Art Museum), Mountain Writers Series, Oregon State Poetry Association, The Creative Arts Community at Menucha, Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College and the Lifelong Learning Institute at Chemeketa Community College. She serves on the board for Friends of William Stafford, organizing the annual January William Stafford Birthday Events. She makes her home in Portland. See The Press Club and the Mountain Writers Series Workshops listings for other events featuring Paulann Petersen in April and June 2012. March 2012 David Axelrod & Carlos Reyes Poetry Reading at The Press Club Wednesday, March 21, 7:30 PM David Axelrod has published five collections of poems, The Jerusalem of Grass (Ahsahta), two limited-editions of long poems, The Kingdom at Hand and The Chronicles of the Withering State (Ice River), Departing by a Broken Gate (Wordcraft of Oregon), and The Cartographer’s Melancholy (Eastern Washington University Press), which won the Spokane Prize and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. He also has published a collection of cultural and environmental essays about the rural Northwest, Troubled Intimacies (Oregon State University Press). His poems and essays appear regularly in literary magazines, including New Letters, Boulevard, Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Quarterly West, River Styx, Tampa Review, Hubbub, Willow Springs, Mississippi Review, Malahat Review, The Prose Poem, among others. Along with his wife, Jodi Varon, he edits basalt: a journal of fine & literary arts. He has lived in La Grande, Oregon since 1988, where he teaches literature and creative writing at Eastern Oregon University. Carlos Reyes, a poet and translator, lives and works in Portland, Oregon when not traveling. He travels a lot and was recently in Bangalore, India for month writing and connecting with India poets. In October he read his poetry at the Bangalore International Centre there. Whether he journeys to India, Ecuador, Panama, Spain, Ireland, or Alaska, those experiences inform his poetry. In 2007 he was honored with a Heinrich Boll Fellowship, which gave him time to write on Achill Island, Ireland. He has had fellowships to Yaddo, and the Fundacion Valparaiso (Mojacar, Spain).In 2009 he was poet-in-residence at the Joshua Tree National Park, and in April, 2011 he was writer-in-residence at The Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska. The Book of Shadows: New and Selected Poems was published in 2009. A book of translations The Sign of the Crow by Mexican poet, Ignacio Ruiz-Perez came out in 2011. Just out from Lost Horse Press is a book of new poems called Pomegranate, Sister of the Heart. View PDF February 2012 Wednesday, February 15, 7:30 PM Larry Colton & Leanne Grabel reading at The Press Club Larry Colton is the only person to have pitched in the Major Leagues and been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Since baseball he has taught high school, worked for Nike, and published hundreds of magazine articles for publications such as Esquire, New York Times Magazine, Sports Illustrated and Ladies Home Journal. His book Goat Brothers was a main selection for the Book of the Month Club. His next book, Counting Coup, was the winner of the Frankfurt e-book of the year award and a Pulitzer nominee. He recently published No Ordinary Joe about four submariners from WWII, and is currently working on a book about Birmingham, Alabama in 1964. Additionally, he is the founder and former executive director of two non-profit programs: Community of Writers, a non-profit program to improve writing instruction and student achievement in Oregon schools; and Wordstock, the acclaimed Portland Book Festival. Leanne Grabel is a poet, a language arts teacher, and co-founder of Cafe Lena, site of Portland's longest running poetry open mike. Known for her poetry-based theatrical performances and illustrated poetry chapbooks, including Anne Sexton Was A Sexpot and The Last Weekend of Sylvia Plath, as well as her poetry collections Lonesome & Very Quarrelsome Heroes and Short Poems by a Short Person, as well as her musical collaborations, Grabel is currently teaching fulltime in a treatment center for incarcerated teenage girls. "badgirls," a multi-media performance based on her teaching debuted in late 2011. The chapbook of prose poems, badgirls, from which the show was based, was published in collaboration with the performance. Grabel's memoir Brontosaurus was published in November 2011. View PDF January 2012 Wednesday, January 18, 7:30 PM David Biespiel & Wendy Willis reading at The Press Club David Biespiel is the author of four books of poetry, most recently The Book of Men and Women, named one of the "Best Books of the Year" by the Poetry Foundation and the recipient of the Oregon Book Award. Biespiel’s latest title is Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces, a book about the creative process. He is the president of the Attic Institute, the unique literary think tank and haven for writers in Portland. Wendy Willis is a poet, mother, and democracy builder who lives and works in Portland. She has published poems in a variety of journals including The Bellingham Review, Phantom Kangaroo, Poetry Northwest, and Windfall. An Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute, she is completing graduate work in the low-residency creative writing program at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma. She lives in Portland, Oregon. View PDF December 2011 Wednesday, December 21, 7:30 PM An Evening Reading featuring poets published in Cloudbank --a journal of contemporary writing reading at The Press Club Join Mountain Writers Series and Cloudbank for a reading by ten authors featured in the first four issues of Cloudbank, a journal of contemporary writing, published by Cloudbank Books in Corvallis, Oregon. Mountain Writers Series now offers a cash award — The Silcox Prize — for the best poem published in an issue of Cloudbank. The name of the prize honors the tiny hut at the tree line, just above Timberline Lodge, where clouds meet the mountain on Mt. Hood, Oregon. The featured readers will be announced on our website in the month of November 2011. November 2011 Sunday, November 20 Vern Rutsala & Jim Shugrue 3:30 PM reading at The Old Church 1422 SW 11th Avenue, Portland with 5 PM book-signing reception at Cassidy's Restaurant & Bar View PDF Vern Rutsala is recognized as one of the most notable poets of the Pacific Northwest. Beginning with The Window in 1964, he has written and published at least fifteen books of poetry. How We Spent Our Time won the 2004 Akron Poetry Prize, and The Moment’s Equation was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2005. Among his many awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. He taught at Lewis & Clark College from 1961 – 2005 and throughout those decades, as an imposing and significant figure on the local and national poetry scene, he has been a mentor and an inspiration to poets everywhere. Jim Shugrue is the author of three chapbooks: Floating Verses, just published by Barebone Books, Small Things Screaming from 26 Books (a finalist for the Oregon Book Award) and Icewater from Trask House Books. He has received a fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission and an Open Voice Award. His work is widely published and anthologized. He co-edits, with his wife, Lisa Steinman, the poetry magazine Hubbub. Wednesday, November 16, 7:30 PM Michael McDowell & Toni Thomas reading at The Press Club Michael McDowell is the author of a new book of poetry, The Hundred-Year House (Windfall Press, 2011). His poetry appears regularly in Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place, which he has co-edited with Bill Siverly for the past nine years. His prose about nature and landscape writing has appeared in the anthologies The Ecocriticism Reader (University of Georgia Press), Reading the Earth (University of Idaho Press), and Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment (Routledge). A graduate of Stanford University with a PhD from the University of Oregon, he teaches literature and writing at Portland Community College. Toni Thomas has published two chapbooks, Walking on Water (Finishing Line Press, 2011) and Fast as Lightning, winner of the 2010 Gribble Press Poetry Competition. Her full-length collection of poems, Chosen (2011), was a finalist in the 2010 Brick Road Poetry Press. Her work has appeared in over fifty literary magazines, including Prairie Schooner, North Dakota Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Minnesota Review, Weber-The Contemporary West, Rhino, Notre Dame Review, and Poetry East. Her awards include the Atlanta Review’s International Merit Award and an Ann Stanford Poetry Prize from the Southern California Review, and her poems have twice been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She lives in Oregon with her family. View PDF Friday, November 4, 7:30 PM William O'Daly & Glen Moore: A Performance An Evening of Neruda in a performance featuring translations of Neruda's work by the poet William O'Daly with music by bassist Glen Moore at The First Unitarian Church View PDF William O’Daly is a poet, translator and fiction writer. His published works include eight books of the late and posthumous poetry of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day, The Separate Rose, Winter Garden, The Sea and the Bells, The Yellow Heart, The Book of Questions, The Hands of Day, and World’s End), and a chapbook of his own poems, The Whale in the Web. O’Daly was a finalist for the 2006 Quill Award in Poetry for Still Another Day and was profiled on NBC’s The Today Show. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, he has worked as a literary and technical editor, a college professor, and an instructional designer; his poems, translations, essays, and reviews have been published in a wide range of magazines and anthologies. He is a board member of Poets Against War and co-founder of Copper Canyon Press. With co-author Han-ping Chin, he recently completed a historical novel, This Earthly Life, based on the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which was a finalist in Narrative magazine’s 2009 Fall Story Contest. William O’Daly is now a resident of the Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California. Glen Moore is a jazz bassist with early classical training in piano. His performing career began at age 14 with the Young Oregonians in Portland, Oregon, where he met and played with American Indian saxophonist, Jim Pepper. He graduated with a degree in History and Literature from the University of Oregon where he also studied the cello. His formal bass instruction started after college with Jerome Magil in Portland, James Harnett in Seattle, Gary Karr in New York, Plough Christenson in Copenhagen, Ludwig Streicher in Vienna and Francois Rabbath in Hawaii. For the past 30 years, Moore has played a Klotz bass fiddle crafted in the Tyrol circa 1715 on which he has made extensive use of a unique tuning with both a low and high C string. Moore co-founded the group Oregon in 1970 with Ralph Towner, Paul McCandless and Collin Walcott. In 1999, he completed work on the group’s twenty-third album called, Oregon In Moscow, which features his bass playing and compositions with the Moscow Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra. He has worked with hundreds of great jazz artists as well as with performers and singers in other styles of music, and he has performed in concerts with the Kronos Quartet, the Winter Consort, the Philadelphis Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Stuttgart Opera Orchestra, and the Stavanger, Norway Orchestra. Since 1988, Moore has worked with Mountain Writers Series, featured with such renowned authors as Sherman Alexie, Billy Collins, David James Duncan, Linda Gregg, Galway Kinnell, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Joseph Stroud, Anne Waldman and Al Young – to name only a few. Glen Moore lives with his wife in Portland, Oregon where he maintains a studio and gives private lessons to musicians from many stylistic backgrounds. Pablo Neruda was born Neftalí Eliecer Ricardo Reyes Basoalto in Parral, Chile, in 1904. He served as consul in Burma (now Myanmar) and held diplomatic posts in various East Asian and European countries. In 1945, with his poetry having gained a wide international following, Neruda was elected to the Chilean Senate. Shortly thereafter, when Chile’s political climate took a sudden turn to the right, Neruda fled on horseback over the Andes and lived as an exile for many years. Beloved by the Chilean people and looked upon wearily by the Chilean aristocracy and the right wing (though nearly all Chileans can recite at least two of his love poems), his poetry garnered prizes the world over. His collected works would eventually span five large volumes. In 1970 he was appointed Chile’s ambassador to France, and in 1971 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in 1973, twelve days after the military coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power and ended Chilean democracy for almost two decades. Please see Workshops for information about a writing workshop with William O'Daly on Saturday, Nov. 5, 2011, from 1:00 - 4:00 PM. October 2011 Diane Wakoski & Matthew Dickman: A Dialogue Thursday, October 27, 3:30 PM Diane Gregg Pavilion Lewis & Clark College 0615 SW Palatine Hill Road Portland OR This event is free and open to the public. Friday, October 28, 7:30 PM Reading at The Old Church Book-signing reception to follow at Cassidy's Restaurant & Bar, View PDF Diane Wakoski was born in Whittier, California and studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where she participated in Thom Gunn's poetry workshops. Her early work was part of the "deep image" movement that also included Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly, among others. She also cites William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg as influences and her later work is more personal and conversational in the Williams mode. She has published over forty books of poetry, including The Butcher’s Apron: New & Selected Poems including “Greed: Part 14” (2000), Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987 (1988) and the four volumes of her The Archaeology of Movies and Books sequence, Argonaut Rose (1998), The Emerald City of Las Vegas (1995), Jason the Sailor (1993), and Medea the Sorceress (1991). A book of essays, Towards a New Poetry was published in 1980. She is best known for a series of poems collectively known as "The Leather Jacket Diaries." She won the prestigious William Carlos Williams award for her book Emerald Ice. Her honors include a Fulbright fellowship, a Michigan Arts Foundation award, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Michigan Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Diane Wakoski lives in East Lansing, Michigan, where, since 1976, she has taught at Michigan State University. Matthew Dickman won the APR/Honnickman First Book Prize for All-American Poem (2008), chosen by Tony Hoagland and published by Copper Canyon Press, and the 2009 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in a wide range of publications, including The New Yorker and Tin House. He has received fellowships for his work from the Michener Center for Writers, the Vermont Studio Centers, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. With his twin brother, poet Michael Dickman, Matthew Dickman has been profiled in Poets & Writers and The New Yorker. He lives in Portland, Oregon. Wednesday, October 19, 7:30 PM Timothy Schell & Ronald Talney reading at The Press Club Timothy Schell is the winner of the Mammoth Book Award for Prose for his novel The Drums of Africa (2007), the co-author of Mooring Against the Tide: Writing Fiction and Poetry (2007), and co-editor of the anthology A Writer’s Country (2001). His fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Award and won the Martindale Award for Long Fiction. He teaches literature and writing at Columbia Gorge Community College in Hood River, Oregon. The Memoir of Jake Weedsong, the 2010 Finalist for the AWP Award for the Novel, was published by Serving House Books in August, 2011. Ronald Talney was born in British Columbia but has lived in Oregon most of his life. He is an attorney retired from a private, non-profit legal aid program. He has recently published a novel, Nockers Up!, a satiric thriller from Inkwater Press and a memoir, The Archives of Silence, from West Virginia University. In addition he has published a juvenile mystery novel, The Ghost of Deadman’s Hollow, from University Editions, and five books of poems, most recently, A Secret Weeping of Stones, New and Selected Poems, from Plain View Press (2010) as well as numerous articles, personal essays, and individual poems in a variety of journals, literary magazines, newspapers and quarterlies. He lives in Lake Oswego, Oregon with his wife, Linnette. View PDF Wednesday, October 5, 7:30 PM Judith Barrington Reading at 23 Sandy Gallery View PDF Judith Barrington’s Lifesaving: A Memoir won the 2000 Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. She has also published three collections of poetry, most recently Horses and the Human Soul. Recent work includes two chapbooks: Postcard from the Bottom of the Sea and Lost Lands (winner of the Robin Becker Chapbook Award). Her best-selling text, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, is widely used by universities and writing groups in the U.S., Germany, and Australia. She is a faculty member of the University of Alaska, Anchorage’s MFA Program, where she teaches memoir. September 2011 Wednesday, September 21, 7:30 PM Scott Nadelson & Lidia Yuknavitch reading at The Press Club Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the memoir The Chronology of Water and a forthcoming novel, The Small Backs of Children, both from Hawthorne Books. She has three previous collections of short stories, Her Other Mouths, Liberty's Excess, and Real to Reel. Her stories and creative nonfiction appear widely in literary journals and anthologies. She is the recipient of awards from Literary Arts, Poets and Writers, and the Oregon Arts Council. She teaches writing, literature and women's studies at Mt. Hood Community College; she lives in Portland with her writer/filmmaker husband Andy Mingo and their renaissance man son, Miles. Her other love, is water. Scott Nadelson is author of three story collections: Aftermath (Hawthorne Books, 2011); The Cantor’s Daughter, winner of the Samuel Goldberg & Sons Fiction Prize for Emerging Jewish Writers and the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize; and Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories, winner of the Oregon Book Award for short fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. Nadelson teaches creative writing at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. View PDF August 2011 Wednesday, August 17, 2011 Kevin Clark reading at The Press Club Kevin Clark is the author of two volumes of poetry, Self-Portrait with Expletives, which won the Pleiades Press contest, and In the Evening of No Warning, which earned a grant from the Academy of American Poets. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and collections, including The Georgia Review (and Keener Sounds, The Georgia Review's fortieth anniversary retrospective), The Antioch Review, College English,Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, and The New York Quarterly. He teaches American literature and creative writing at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, and during the summers serves as faculty for the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program, in Tacoma, Washington. View PDF July 2011 Friday, July 8, 7:30 PM Dorianne Laux & Carl Adamshick reading at The Old Church Dorianne Laux is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently The Book of Men (W.W. Norton, 2011). Other books include Facts About the Moon, which won the Oregon Book Award; Awake; What We Carry, finalist for the National Book Critic's Circle Award; and Smoke, as well as two small press editions, Superman: The Chapbook and Dark Charms, both from Red Dragonfly Press. She lives in Raleigh, N.C., where she teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University. Carl Adamshick was selected as the winner of the 2010 Walt Whitman Award, one of the most prestigious first book prizes in the country, for his collection of poems Curses and Wishes (Louisiana State University Press, 2011). The Award includes a $5,000 cash prize and one-month residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Adamschick, who lives in Portland, is co-founder with poet Michael McGriff of Tavern Books. View PDF Wednesday, July 20, 8 PM Patty Wixon & Vince Wixon reading at The Press Club Patty Wixon earned her MA at Reed College and pursued a career in public education, both as a teacher and administrator, serving as the first director of the Oregon Writing Project. She was also the first president of Friends of William Stafford and since retiring has been a part-time researcher in the William Stafford Archives. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Hubbub, Rendezvous, Moving Mountain, The Cresset, and in the anthology Deer Drink the Moon. She and her husband VinceWixon are longtime poetry editors for Jefferson Monthly, the Jefferson Public Radio program guide in Ashland, Oregon, where for thirty years she’s helped bring writers of national reputation to the Rogue Valley. Her chapbook, Airing the Sheets, was published by Finishing Line Press in the spring of 2011. Vince Wixon is the author of two books of poetry, The Square Grove (2006) and Seed (1993), as well as a recent chapbook, Blue Moon, 29 poems developed from lines from the Chinese masters (Wordcraft of Oregon, 2010). He has poems in three anthologies, including From Here We Speak: An Anthology of Oregon Poetry. With Paul Merchant, Wixon co-edited William Stafford’s Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer’s Vocation (Michigan, 1998) and The Answers Are Inside the Mountains (Michigan, 2003) and helped edit Stafford’s The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf, 1998). Wixon is also co-producer of two videos on William Stafford, What the River Says and The Life of the Poem, and one on Lawson Inada, What It Means to be Free. He lives in Ashland, Oregon. View PDF June 2011 Wednesday, June 22, 7:30 PM Lou Lipsitz & B.T. Shaw reading at 23 Sandy Gallery —B.T. Shaw was born and raised in central Ohio near her great-grandparents' homestead. Her early career was spent covering politics and the environment for a daily paper in Jacksonville, N.C., home to Camp Lejeune. These days, she reviews books and edits the Poetry column for The Oregonian, and teaches writing at Portland State and the Independent Publishing Resource Center. Her first book, This Dirty Little Heart, won the 2007 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry and was published by Eastern Washington University Press. She is now working on a group of poems about love and war, drawn in part from her experience as a journalist in a Marine Corps community. —Lou Lipsitz is the author of four full-length books of poems, most recently, If This World Falls Apart, which won the 2010 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry from Lynx House Press. Other books include Cold Water (Wesleyan University Press, 1967) and Seeking the Hook (1997), about which George Hitchcock wrote: “These are poems of clarity, wit and passion. The best of them are the equal of anything now being written in America.” The focus of Lipsitz’s work has shifted somewhat during his career. His new book combines the bold imagery of the earlier poems with quiet and deep reflection upon our inner struggles: loss, psychological change, the vagaries of fate, the ways in which we are unknown to ourselves, and issues faced particularly by men in our society. For many years a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina, since 1995 Mr. Lipsitz has been a practicing psychotherapist. View PDF Wednesday, June 15, 8 PM Maxine Scates & Martha Silano reading at The Press Club Maxine Scates is the author of three books of poetry, Undone (New Issues, 2011), Toluca Street and Black Loam. She is coeditor, with David Trinidad, of Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford. Her poems have been widely published in such journals as AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Ironwood, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares and The Virginia Quarterly Review. Her work has received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Oregon Book Award for Poetry, the Lyre Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. She has taught at Lane Community College, Lewis and Clark College and most recently Reed College. She lives in Eugene, Oregon. Martha Silano’s books are The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, chosen by Campbell McGrath as the winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, Blue Positive, and What the Truth Tastes Like. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, AGNI, The Best American Poetry 2009, and elsewhere. Martha has been awarded grants and fellowships from Washington State Artist Trust, Seattle 4-Culture, the Arizona Poetry Center, and the Millay Colony for the Arts, among others. She teaches at Bellevue College. [Silano is pictured above on the right.] View PDF May 2011 Wednesday, May 18, 7:30 PM Jennifer Lauck & Cindy Stewart-Rinier reading at The Press Club Jennifer Lauck is an award-winning journalist and the author of the New York Times Bestseller, Blackbird. She has written four memoirs about her life experiences which include the early deaths of her mother, father and brother as well as the fallout of her adoption as a baby. Her most recent is Found (Seal Press, March 2011), which details her journey to find her biological roots and reunite with her original mother. Cindy Stewart-Rinier is currently a student at Pacific Lutheran University, where she is working toward an MFA in Creative Writing, and a member of the Mountain Writers Series Board of Directors in Portland. She has taught creative writing to elementary and middle school students, as well as adult workshops at the Molalla Book Faire. Her poems have appeared in Calyx, The Smoking Poet and Animals as Teachers and Healers. In 1997 she was awarded the first place prize in the Portland Pen Women Poetry Contest. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, Todd, son, Simon and bandy-legged dog, Keela. View PDF April 2011 Wednesday, April 20, 7:30 PM Paulann Petersen reading at The Press Club Paulann Petersen, Oregon’s current Poet Laureate, is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her poems have appeared in many publications including Poetry, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, and Wilderness Magazine. She is the author of four full-length collections of poems, The Wild Awake (Confluence Press, 2002); Blood Silk (Quiet Lion Press, 2004); A Bride of Narrow Escape (Cloudbank Books, 2004); and most recently The Voluptuary (Lost Horse Press, 2010), as well as four chapbooks: Under the Sign of a Neon Wolf, The Animal Bride, Fabrication, and The Hermaphrodite Flower. Her work has been selected for the web site Poetry Daily and For Poetry in Motion, which puts poems on buses and light rail cars in the Portland metropolitan area. The recipient of Oregon Literary Arts' 2006 Holbrook Award, Paulann has taught a number of poetry workshops for colleges, libraries, and writers' conferences, including Fishtrap, Oregon Writers' Workshop in Portland (Northwest College of Art, Portland Art Museum), Mountain Writers Series, Oregon State Poetry Association, The Creative Arts Community at Menucha, Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, and the Lifelong Learning Institute at Chemeketa Community College. She serves on the board for Friends of William Stafford, organizing the annual January William Stafford Birthday Events. View PDF March 2011 Wednesday, March 16, 7:30 PM Karen Holmberg & Jennifer Richter reading at The Press Club Karen Holmberg’s first book, The Perseids, won the Vassar Miller Prize and was published by the University of North Texas Press in 2001. A Discovery/The Nation Award winner, her poems have appeared in such magazines as The Paris Review, The Nation, Quarterly West, Slate, West Branch, Southern Poetry Review, Subtropics, and Hotel Amerika. She lives in Corvallis, Oregon, where she teaches literature and poetry writing at Oregon State University. [Karen Holmberg is on the left.] Jennifer Richter's book Threshold won the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition and was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2010. Richter's work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughsares, The Missouri Review, Cloudbank, and in the anthology, A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-five Years of Women's Poetry. She was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship in Poetry by Stanford University, where she taught in the Creative Writing Program for four years. She lives in Corvallis with her children and husband, the novelist Keith Scribner. In the spring of 2011, Richter will be a Visiting Writer at Oregon State University, where she will teach the M.F.A. poetry workshop. [Jennifer Richter is pictured above on the right.] February 2011 Wednesday, February 16 @ 7:30 PM Lee Montgomery & Pauls Toutonghi reading at The Press Club Lee Montgomery is the author of The Things Between Us, A Memoir (Free Press), Whose World Is This? Stories (University of Iowa Press), and Searching for Emily: Illustrated (Nothing Moments Press). The Things Between Us received the 2007 Oregon Book Award in creative nonfiction and Whose World Is This? the 2007 John Simmons Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist in fiction for the Ken Kesey Book Award. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications including Story, Antioch Review, Iowa Review, the New York Times magazine, among others, and is forthcoming in Glimmer Train as the winner of the 2010 Family Matters Story Award. She is currently the editorial director of Tin House Books and the executive editor for Tin House magazine. She lives in Portland with her husband and daughter. Pauls Toutonghi is Assistant Professor of English at Lewis & Clark College where he teaches fiction writing and American Lit. His fiction has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, One Story Magazine, Glimmer Train, Terminus, Book Magazine and other small periodicals. He received a Pushcart Prize for his short story, Regeneration, which appeared in The Boston Review in 2000, when Pauls was twenty-three. His first novel, Red Weather, was published by Random House in 2006. His other writing has appeared in Sports Illustrated, The Crab Creek Review, and The Yemen Observer. He received his MFA in poetry and his Ph.D. in English literature from Cornell University. January 2011 Wednesday, January 19 @ 7:30 PM Noel Hanlon & Greg Chaimov reading at The Press Club Noël Hanlon is a native Oregonian who lives on thirty acres in the Willamette Valley where she and her husband Peter raised their two children and learned – from the ground up – how to be shepherds and gardeners, running a small CSA of organic vegetables. Her first book of poems, Blue Abundance, was published and launched last April in the West of Ireland where she has had the pleasure and privilege of spending time and making friends since 1994. Greg Chaimov is a lawyer and lobbyist; he writes to salve his soul. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in journals throughout the United States and Canada. A limited edition chapbook, The Other World, was published by the William Stafford Center at Lewis and Clark College. His first full-length collection of poetry, Everything is Water, is forthcoming from Press 22. He lives in Milwaukie, Oregon, a town founded by orchardists on the Willamette River, where he serves on the town council. All readings below from 2007 to 2010 were held at The Press Club December 2010 Wednesday, December 15 @ 7:30 PM David Cooke & Scott Siegel David Cooke was raised Catholic in Oakland, California, and writes and runs The Lawn Guy from his home in Lake Oswego, Oregon. Winner of the 2009 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize and nominated for a 2010 Pushcart Prize, his work most recently appeared in Hunger Mountain, Flatmancrooked and A River & Sound Review. [David Cooke is on the left.] Scot Siegel is author of three volumes of poetry, Skeleton Says (Finishing Line Press, 2010), Untitled Country (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and Some Weather (Plain View Press, 2008). Siegel's second full-length collection is due out from Salmon Poetry in 2012. Scot Siegel lives with his family in Lake Oswego, Oregon. In addition to working as a planning consultant, and writing prose and poetry, Siegel serves on the Board of Trustees of the Friends of William Stafford and edits the online poetry journal Untitled Country Review. [Scot Siegel is pictured above on the right.] November 2010 Tuesday, November 30 @ 7:30 PM Michel Glazer with Kirsten Rian, Shaun McGillis and Michael Achterman Michele Glazer is the author of three books of poetry: It Is Hard to Look at What We Came to Think We'd Come to See, which received the 1996 AWP Award in poetry and was published in 1997 by the University of Pittsburgh Press; Aggregate of Disturbances (Iowa, 2004); and On Tact, & the Made Up World (Iowa, 2010). She has published widely in periodicals including American Letters & Commentary, Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, Field, Harvard Review, Iowa Review and Ploughshares, and her work has been included in numerous anthologies. Among her awards are the Richard Hugo Chair in Poetry, University of Montana, Spring 2006, and fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, Regional Arts & Culture Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Glazer lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches at Portland State University, where she directs the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing. The evening will include brief readings by Glazer's 2nd-year MFA students Michael Achterman, Shaun McGillis and Kirsten Rian. Wednesday, November 17 @ 7:30 PM Floyd Skloot Floyd Skloot is a creative nonfiction writer, poet, and fiction writer whose work has received three Pushcart Prizes, a Pen USA Literary Award, two Pacific NW Book Awards, an Independent Publishers Book Award, and two Oregon Book Awards. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Poetry, American Scholar, Georgia Review, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, Hudson Review, Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, and Creative Nonfiction. His seventeen books include three memoirs, In the Shadow of Memory (2003) A World of Light (2005) and The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life (2008); four poetry collections, Approximately Paradise (2005), The End of Dreams (2006), Selected Poems: 1970-2005 (2008) and The Snow's Music (2008); and the novels Summer Blue (1994) and Patient 002 (2007). In 2011, Tupelo Press will publish his first collection of short stories, Cream of Kohlrabi, and his newest collection of poems, Close Reading. He contributes book reviews to the New York Times Book Review, Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Harvard Review, Sewanee Review, Notre Dame Review and other publications, and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Skloot has taught at the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Summer Writers Conference at Goucher College, the Paris Writers Workshop, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Beverly Hallberg, a master gardener and landscape painter. Tuesday, November 2 @ 7:30 PM Madeline DeFrees Madeline DeFrees was born in Ontario, Oregon, in 1919. At age 17, she entered the convent of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, assuming the name of Sister Mary Gilbert for the next 38 years. She has taught at universities and colleges throughout the U.S., including the University of Massachusetts where she directed its MFA program, and most recently for the Mountain Writers Pacific Low-Residency MFA program in Forest Grove, OR. . She has published eight volumes of poetry, two chapbooks and two memoirs on her life as a nun. Blue Dusk (Copper Canyon Press, 2001), a volume of new and collected poems, won a Washington State Book Award and the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Prize. Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment of the Arts award, and Image’s 2004 Denise Levertove Award. She currently resides in Portland, OR. October 2010 Wednesday, October 20 @ 8 PM Robin Cody Robin Cody is the author of Richochet River and Voyage of a Summer Sun, both of which appear on the Oregon State Library's "150 Oregon Books for the Oregon Sesquicentennial" list. Voyage of a Summer Sun won the Oregon Book Award for literary nonfiction. His latest book, Another Way the River Has, is a collection of short true stories published by Oregon State University Press. Cody has worked as an English teacher, a dean of college admissions, a baseball umpire, and a school bus driver. He lives with his wife, Donna, in Portland. September 2010 Wednesday, Sept. 15, @ 8 PM Verlena Orr & John Morrison Verlena Orr, twice nominated for Pushcart, hails from Kamiah, Idaho, one mountain west of Missoula, Montana. Raised on a farm, she attended school in Kamiah on the Nez Perce Reservation. She has worked has a secretary, social worker, hired girl, landlord, instructor at PCC and with the Talented and Gifted Program for Portland Public. Her poems have been published from California and east to the U.K. She received her MFA from the University of Montana, she has published three chapbooks and two full-length books of poems, most recently, Taking It to the Limit (Dancing Moon Press, 2009). Now retired, Orr lives urban and does the real work of writing poems; she also recently produced a documentary on the life of her rancher cousin, Wayne James. John Morrison earned his MFA from the University of Alabama and received the 2003 C. Hamilton Bailey Poetry Fellowship from Literary Arts. His book, Heaven of the Moment, won the 2006 Rhea & Seymour Gorsline Poetry Competition and was a finalist for the 2008 Oregon Book Award in poetry. His poems have appeared in numerous national literary journals, including the Cimarron Review, Poetry East, Southern Poetry Review, and Poet Lore. He has taught poetry at the University of Alabama and Washington State University, Vancouver, and is a Writer-in-Residence for Literary Arts' Writers in the Schools program in Portland, Oregon. August 2010 Wednesday, August 18 @ 8 PM Ron Talney & Mary Soden Ron Talney has published five books of poetry, the most recent being A Secret Weeping of Stones, New and Selected Poems, from Plain View Press (2010). He is also the editor of Stone City I, an anthology of Oregon Poets, published by Stone City Press. He is an attorney retired from a non-profit, legal services program that represents low-income clients. He is married to Linnette and lives in Lake Oswego, Oregon. Mary Soden is a painter, a sculptor, a poet and a prose writer. Her first publication, Original Moons: Those Who Pull the Earth, is a collection of interviews with women in 1984 and again, asking the same questions, with women in 2007. Now retired from work as Director of the Senior Center in The Dalles, OR, she lives in Mosier, Oregon. July 2010 Wednesday, July 21 @ 8:00 PM Gary Thompson & Thomas Aslin Gary Thompson’s latest book, To the Archaeologist Who Finds Us, was published by Turning Point Books, and it joins three previous collections: Hold Fast, As for Living, and On John Muir’s Trail. He and his wife, Linda, are co-publishers of Cedar House Books, a poetry press they revived in 2005. They live on San Juan Island, where he likes to think of himself as the novice skipper of a modest boat, an old trawler named Keats. Thomas Aslin, born in Spokane, has lived his entire life in the Northwest. Aslin holds a B.A. from the University of Washington and an M.F.A. from the University of Montana where he studied with Madeline DeFrees and the late Richard Hugo. His poems have appeared in Natural Bridge, INTRO , and Artful Dodge, among others. Publications include a chapbook, SweetSmoke from Red Wing Press, West Sacramento, California and a full-length collection, A Moon Over Wings, from Clark City Press, Livingston, Montana. A Moon Over Wings was a finalist in 2009 for the Washington State Book Award. June 2010 Wednesday, June 16 @ 8:00 PM Peter Sears & Dave Jarecki Peter Sears is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, among them The Brink, winner of the Peregrine-Smith Poetry Competition and the 2000 WESTAF Book Award in Poetry, and most recently Green Diver (CW Books, 2009). Luge, his fifth chapbook, was published in 2008. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Saturday Review, The New York Times, Orion and many literary magazines and anthologies. A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers Workshop, he teaches at Pacific University’s MFA and lives in Corvallis, Oregon. Dave Jarecki writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction from his home in Northeast Portland, and facilitates youth and adult writing workshops throughout the Greater Portland area. In 2004 he founded Breakerboy Communications, a writing firm that helps businesses, individuals and non-profit organizations communicate their stories. He is the author ofBackwards On the Train, a chapbook of 11 poems, a contributor with Read Write Poem, an online poetry community, and features interviews with poets and writers on his website, DaveJarecki.com. His creative work has appeared inCloudbank Magazine,Baseball Savvy, andVoices of Central Pennsylvania. June 2010 Special Event Monday, June 7 @ 7:30 PM Spring 2010 "Graduation Reading" featuring Jessica Lamb Poet Jessica Lamb will be joined by her Portland Community College creative writing student Paul Guenther, Andrea Munoz, Casey Twining, Carmen Bradbury, Cassandra Schreiber, Dill McVein and Erik Olson Jessica Lamb received a master’s degree in Italian literature from Stanford University before settling in Portland, where she has taught writing for many years through the Northwest Writing Institute, Portland Community College, and Literary Arts Writers in the Schools program. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, includingPoetry,The Southern Review, andWillow Spring. Her collection of poems, Last Apples of Late Empires, from Airlie Press was published in 2009. This event will include brief readings by seven students from Jessica Lamb’s spring 2010 Portland Community College creative writing workshop: Paul Guenther, Andrea Munoz, Casey Twining, Carmen Bradbury, Cassandra Schreiber, Dill McVein and Erik Olson. May 2010 Special Event Monday, May 24 @ 7:00 PM Spring 2010 "Graduation Reading" featuring new work by fiction writers from The Pinewood Table Workshop. Workshop leader Joanna Rose will be joined by Scott Sparling & Sherri H. Hoffman Joanna Rose is the author of Little Miss Strange (PNBA Fiction Prize/Oregon Book Award Finalist); a teacher with Writers in the Schools and Wordstock; and special writer to The Oregonian. She has published poetry and short prose in ZYZZYVA, Artisan Journal, High Desert Journal & forthcoming in Bellingham Review. An alumni of Dangerous Writers, she has guided critique at The Pinewood Table for over ten years. Scott Sparling, born in Michigan, rode freights around West and Midwest before moving to the Northwest. Began Wire to Wire with a grant from the Seattle Arts Commission. His short story "Walking" was a second-place winner in the Wordstock Fiction competition a few years ago. WTW will be published by Tin House in March 2011. He has been at The Pinewood Table for four years. Sherri H. Hoffman is a local working writer, social media geek, sports fanatic, occasional traveler, and the mother of many girls. Some of her short stories are published in Etchings, Duck and Herring Field Guide, and are online at the Noneuclidean Cafe, and Whidbey Writers Student Choice. During the day when not writing, she has been known to blog and design websites. She has been at The Pinewood Table since 2005. May 2010 Wednesday, May 19 @ 8:00 PM David Axelrod and David Memmott David Axelrod is the author of five collections of poems, including The Cartographer’s Melancholy, winner of the 2004 Spokane Prize for Poetry and finalist for the 2006 Oregon Book Award in Poetry, and most recently, Departing By A Broken Gate, published in 2010 by Wordcraft of Oregon. His collection of cultural and environmental essays about the interior Northwest,Troubled Intimacies, appeared in 2004. His poems and essays have been published inNew Letters, Boulevard, Alaska Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, River Styx, Verse Daily,among others. He also editsbasalt : a journal of fine & literary arts. David Memmott has published five books of poetry, a novel and a story collection. Recent work has been published by Strange Horizons, High Desert Journal, Windfall and in the anthologies, Deer Drink the Moon: Poems of Oregon, Salt: An Oregon Coastal Poetry Anthology, Writers on the Job: Tales of the Non-Writing Life and The Alchemy of Stars: An Anthology of Rhysling Award Winners. Memmott is a Fishtrap Fellow and has received three Fellowships for Publishing from Literary Arts, Inc. His newest book is the poetry collection, Giving It Away. His long narrative poem, “Where the Yellow Brick Road Turns West” is forthcoming in the Poets and Writers e-chapbook series edited by Walter Cummins and Thomas E. Kennedy on Web del Sol. He is the editor and publisher of Wordcraft of Oregon. April 2010 Wednesday, April 21 @ 8:00 PM Joseph Stroud Joseph Stroud's books of poetry include In the Sleep of Rivers, Signatures, Below Cold Mountain, Country of Light, and, most recently, Of This World: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press). His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and was featured on National Public Radio’s Writer’s Almanac. Among his honors is the Witter Bynner Fellowship of the Library of Congress, as well as a Pushcart Prize. Stroud makes his home on the California coast and in a cabin in the Sierra Nevada. March 2010 Wednesday, March 17 @ 7:30 PM Tom Bremer & David Filer Tom Bremer was born in Cincinatti and grew up in California. He has a B.A. from St. Mary’s College and an M.A. in Creative Writing from Colorado State University. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he was co-founder of the Portland Poetry Festival in 1973 and a charter member of the board of the Oregon Writers’ Workshop. Now retired from many years of teaching English, he is the author of three collections of poetry, Par Amour (1986); A Bird That Changes Trees, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in 1988; and Just Once (2001). David Filer grew up in the California desert, took degrees in English from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and taught in San Diego and Eugene. He then took a law degree from the University of Oregon and has been engaged in the practice of law for a federal agency in Portland. He lives with his wife Marlene Anderson and has a son, Curran, who lives in Chicago. He has published in numerous literary journals. His first chapbook, Night Verse, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2005 and in 2009 his chapbook, The Landscape There, was published by Stone City Press. February 2010 Wednesday, February 17 @ 7:30 PM Bill Siverly & Barbara Drake Bill Siverly was born and grew up in Lewiston, Idaho, and he has lived in Portland since 1972. He has published three books of poems: Parzival (1981), Phoenix Fire (1987), and The Turn (2000). Hel taught literature, composition, and creative writing at Portland Community College for twenty-five years. Since 2002 he has been co-editor with Michael McDowell of Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place, which features poetry of the Pacific Northwest and appears twice yearly on the equinoxes. His most recent book of poems, Clearwater Way, was be published by Traprock Books in August 2009. Barbara Drake’s most recent book of poetry, Driving One Hundred, was published in 2009 by Windfall Press. Other books of poetry include What We Say to Strangers, Love at the Egyptian Theatre, Life in a Gothic Novel, Bees in Wet Weather, and Small Favors. She is also the author of Writing Poetry, widely used as a college textbook, and Peace at Heart: an Oregon Country Life, a memoir, which was an Oregon Book Award finalist in 1999. Born in Kansas, she moved with her parents to Oregon as a small child and grew up in Coos Bay. She earned her B.A. and M.F.A. degrees from the University of Oregon, and subsequently lived in Michigan for sixteen years where she taught at Michigan State University before returning to Oregon to teach at Linfield College, from 1983 until her recent retirement. The author and her husband live on a small farm in the foothills of the Oregon Coast Range. January 2010 Wednesday, January 20 @ 7:30 PM Jim Kopp Jim Kopp is Director of the Aubrey R. Watzek Library at Lewis & Clark College in Portland. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from George Washington University and other graduate degrees in history and library science. His undergraduate degree in history and English is from the University of Oregon. His book, Eden Within Eden: Oregon’s Utopian Heritage (OSU Press, 2009) surveys nearly three hundred communal groups attempted or planned in Oregon over the past 150 years. He has written and presented on several aspects of utopian studies in both its literary and communal manifestations. His extensive private collection on the works by and about Edward Bellamy and of American utopian literature is described in a book published last fall by Berberis Press at Lewis & Clark. He lives with his wife, Sue, appropriately in Aurora, Oregon, which was the earliest communal settlement in the Pacific Northwest. In addition to his varied scholarly pursuits, Jim is completing a children’s book on Aurora Keil—the daughter of the founder of the Aurora Colony and for whom the colony was named—who died of smallpox in 1862 at the age of thirteen. December 2009 Wednesday, December 16th @ 7:30 PM Lex Runciman & Carlos Reyes Lex Runciman has lived most of his life in Oregon's Willamette Valley.Starting from Anywhere (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 2009) is his fourth collection of poetry, following Luck (1981), The Admirations (1989), winner of the Oregon Book Award, and Out of Town (2004).A co-editor of two anthologies, his own work has appeared in several anthologies including From Here We Speak and Portland Lights. He is Professor of English at Linfield College, where he received the Edith Green Award in teaching in 1997. Carlos Reyes is a noted poet and translator. His latest book of poetry is The Book of Shadows: New and Selected Poems (Lost Horse Press, 2009). Among his other volumes are The Shingle Weaver’s Journal (1980), At the Edge of the Western Wave (2004), and A Suitcase Full of Crows (1995), winner of the Bluestem Prize. His most recent book of translations is Ignacio Ruiz-Pérez's La señal del cuervo/The Sign of the Crow. Last year he was recipient of The Fortner Award from St Andrews College. He has been an Oregon Arts Commission Fellow, a Yaddo Fellow, a Fundacion Valparaoso Fellow, (Spain), a Heinrich Boll Fellow (Ireland) and most recently the poet-in-resident at the Joshua Tree National Park. November 2009 Wednesday, November 18th @ 7:30 PM Roger Wendlick Roger Wendlick was born in Portland, Oregon, where he worked for most of his adult life in heavy construction. Roger also lived a parallel life as an antiquarian book collector. In 1980 Roger began to obsessively collect materials related to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, making it his goal to assemble the world’s most complete collection of printed materials relating to the Expedition. In 1998 Roger achieved his goal and devoted himself full time to study and teaching about the Expedition.Wendlick will be reading from his book, Shotgun on My Chest: Memoirs of a Lewis and Clark Book Collector, which is the chronicle of one man’s obsession with book collecting. October 2009 Wednesday, October 21st @ 7:30 PM Gina Ochsner Gina Ochsner lives in Keizer, Oregon and divides her time between writing and teaching with the Seattle Pacific Low-Residency MFA program.Ochsner has been awarded a John L. Simon Guggenheim grant and a grant from the National Endowment of Arts. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Glimmertrain and the Kenyon Review. She is the author of the short story collection The Necessary Grace to Fall, which received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the story collection People I Wanted to Be. Both books received the Oregon Book Award. Her novel The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight (Portobello Press) is a finalist for the 2009 Oregon Book Award for Fiction. September 2009 Wednesday, September 16th @ 7:30 PM Katherine Dunn Katherine Dunn will be reading from her new collection of essays on the sport of boxing, One Ring Circus. These pieces range from portraits of legendary fighters such as Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, Marvin Hagler, and Mike Tyson to the unsung stories of trainers, amateurs and promoters. She has written about and reported on the sport of boxing since 1981. Her prize-winning boxing journalism has appeared in many publications from The Ring and KO Magazine to Vogue, Esquire and Playboy. Her column, Punch Lines, ran weekly in The Skanner Newspaper in Portland and Seattle from 1982 to 1995. Katherine Dunn is the author of the novel Geek Love, a finalist for the National Book Award in 1989. Dunn’s other publications include the novels Attic (1970) and Truck (1971). She also wrote the text for Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective's Scrapbook (1995), a book of homicide photography; the humorous The Slice: Information with an Attitude (1989) (also published as Why Do Men Have Nipples? And Other Low-Life Answers to Real-Life Questions (1990), which contains her collected newspaper columns from Willamette Week. Katherine Dunn lives and works in Portland. August 2009 Wednesday, August 19th @ 7:30 PM Paul Merchant & Jerry Harp Paul Merchant is William Stafford Archivist at Lewis & Clark College, Portland. A native of Wales, he taught for many years at Warwick University before taking up residence in Oregon. His fourth collection of poems, Some Business of Affinity (2006), was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award. His third volume of translations from modern Greek, Monochords by Yannis Ritsos, was published in 2007 by Trask House Press. Jerry Harp's books of poems are Creature (Salt 2003), Gatherings (Ashland Poetry Press 2004), and Urban Flowers, Concrete Plains (Salt 2006). With Jan Weissmiller he co-edited A Poetry Criticism Reader (University of Iowa Press 2006). His For Us, What Music: On the Life and Poetry of Donald Justice is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press. His essays and reviews appear regularly in Pleiades. He teaches at Lewis & Clark College. July 2009 Wednesday, July 15, 2009 @ 7:30 PM Marianne Kleckacz & Dick Bakken Marianne Klekacz lives and writes in Oregon’s Coast Range Mountains. A native of Oregon, she returned there after a journey that took her from the wilds of Alaska to the deserts of Arizona, to San Francisco, Switzerland, Denmark, England, The Philippines, the Caribbean Islands, and through many of the fifty states. She has been a cowgirl, police woman, race car driver, life guard, and a technical specialist in computers and telecommunications. She helps nurture (with husband Ben) 100 acres of mixed-tree forest. A river runs through it. Any or all of these things are likely to show up in her poems. Her first chapbook, Life Science, won the Edna Meudt Memorial Award in 2003. She was awarded a B.A. in English and Writing from Marylhurst University and an M.F.A. in Writing from Pacific University. Dick Bakken lived in Portland ten years, where he taught English and Creative Writing at Portland State University 1966–70, published an internationally reviewed anthology of contemporary inflammatory Bengali poetry in 1967, co-directed the Portland Poetry Center at University of Portland in 1968–70, made a celebrated resignation from PSU on National General Strike Day 1970, originated the USA poetry gathering icon the Portland Poetry Chicken in 1972, co-founded the Portland Poetry Festival in 1973–74, was one of the three speakers at the Governor’s inauguration of William Stafford as Oregon State Poet Laureate in 1975, as well as being sued for $75,000 over dirty words in his anthology of works by children in 1975, and much more. His most recent book—”Greatest Hits 1967-2002—includes six created while living in Portland. June 2009 Wednesday, June 17, 2009 @ 7:30 PM Tom Crawford and Carlos Reyes Tom Crawford* is the author of five books of poems: If It Weren’t for Trees; Lauds, winner of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry; China Dancing; The Temple on Monday, winner of the ForeWord Book of the Year Award; and Wu Wei (Milkweed Editions, 2007). Widely published in journals and anthologies, Crawford has been recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Oregon Arts Commission. For thirty years he has taught throughout the Western U.S. as well as in the People’s Republic of China and at Chonnam National University in Kwangju, Korea. He lives with his partner Mary and their dog Walt in Santa Fe, NM. Carlos Reyes is a noted poet and translator. His latest book of poetry is At the Edge the Edge of the Western Wave (2004). His The Book of Shadows; New and Selected Poems is due out next year from Lost Horse Press. A Suitcase Full of Crows (1995) was a winner of the Bluestem Prize. His most recent book of translations is Ignacio Ruiz Pérez’s La señal del cuervo / The Sign of the Crow. Last year he was recipient of The Fortner Award from St Andrews College. He has been an Oregon Arts Commission Fellow, a Yaddo Fellow, a Fundación Valparaíso Fellow, (Spain), a Heinrich Boll Fellow (Ireland) and most recently was poet- in- resident at the Joshua Tree National Park. May 2009 Wednesday, May 20, 2009 @ 7:30 PM Brian Doyle and John Daniel Brian Doyle [on the left] is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland – “the finest spiritual magazine in the United States,” says Annie Dillard. He is also the author of nine books of essays, nonfiction, and “proems,” and his work has appeared in The Best American Essays anthologies, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Orion, The American Scholar, and magazines and newspapers in Africa, Australia, Ireland, France, England, and New Zealand. His books have four times been finalists for the Oregon Book Award, and he received the 2008 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, which still makes him snort with laughter. The very idea. John Daniel’s new book, The Far Corner: Northwestern Views on Land, Life, and Literature (Counterpoint, April 2009), is a collection of personal essays that explore various subjects in the human and more-than-human worlds, seeking to define his allegiances to his home places and region and the wholeness of life itself. Author of nine books of poetry, essays, and memoir, Daniel has won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for Rogue River Journal, two Oregon Book Awards in Literary Nonfiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and James Thurber Writer-in-Residence at Ohio State University, Daniel lives with his wife, Marilyn Daniel, in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene, Oregon. Download PDF April 2009 Wednesday, April 15, 2009 @ 7:30 PM Patrick Brocarde, Sean Patrick Hill and Lindsay Hill March 2009 Wednesday, March 18, 2009 @ 7:30 PM Alison Apotheker and Molly Weller February 2009 Wednesday, February 18, 2009 @ 7:00 PM Endi Bogue Hartigan, Laura Winter and Paulann Petersen December 2008 Wednesday, December 17, 2008 @ 7:30 PM - CANCELLED BECAUSE OF WEATHER Dennis McBride and Paulann Petersen November 2008 Wednesday, November 19, 2008 @ 7:00 PM Fall 2008 Attic Poetry Workshop Reading featuring Ron Bloodworth, Carolyn Martin, Mitchell Mitchell McInnis, Alida Rol, Caitlin Scott and Wendy Willis introduced by poet & workshop leader Kathleen Halme October 2008 Wednesday, October 17, 2008 @ 7:30 PM Kate Gray, Melissa Silitoe and Chris Ridenour September 2008 Wednesday, September 17, 2008 @ 7:00 PM Carl Adamschick and Matthew Dickman August 2008 Wednesday, August 20, 2008 @ 7:30 PM Tom Mattox, Tommy Gaffney & Lisa Steinman July 2008 Wednesday, July 16, 2008 @ 7:30 PM James Grabill and dan raphael June 2008 Windfall: A Journal of Place A reading featuring Barbara Drake, Katy McKinney, Michael McDowell & Bill Siverly May 2008 Tim Schell May 15, 2008 Carl Reisman and Ron Talney Download PDF May 6, 2008 Seven Poets: Maureen Alsop, Dean Gorman, Jamalieh Haley, Ron Klassnik, Kelly Lenox, Annie Lighthart & Lauren Rusk Download PDF April 2008 Matt Love and Carla Perry Download PDF March 2008 B.T. Shaw and Peter Sears Download PDF January 2008 Verlena Orr and Michael Selker Download PDF December 19, 2007 Lynn Darroch Download PDF December 5, 2007 Herman Asarnow Download PDF October 2007 Kathleen Halme Download PDF September 2007 Ron Tainey and James Fleming Download PDF August 2007 Diane Averill and Jessie Ring Download PDF July 25, 2007 Erin Ergenbright Download PDF July 11, 2007 dan raphael Download PDF June 27, 2007 Clemens Starck Download PDF June 13, 2007 Ceiridwen Terrill Download PDF May 23, 2007 Monica Drake Download PDF






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