Literary Northwest Series

The 2012-13 Literary Northwest Series

Susan Jackson Rodgers
Friday, October 12, 7:30PM
Valley Library Rotunda

Susan Jackson Rodgers is the author of two books of stories: Ex-Boyfriend on Aisle 6 (2012) and The Trouble With You Is (2004), which won the Mid-List Press First Series Award for Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared in journals such as New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Glimmer Train, Quick Fiction, Beloit Fiction Journal, Story Quarterly, and North American Review. She received her B.A. from Bowdoin College, her M.A. from Kansas State University, and her M.F.A. from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. Her website is www.susanjacksonrodgers.com.

Elena Passarello
Friday, November 30, 7:30PM
MU Journey Room

Elena Passarello is the author of Let Me Clear My Throat (Sarabande Books 2012), a collection of essays on the famous human voices of TV, film, music and "real life." Her writing on nature and pop culture is forthcoming in Sonora Review, BETTER, and Passages North, and has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Slate, Ninth Letter, Gulf Coast, as well as the music writing anthology Pop When the World Falls Apart. She is an MFA graduate of the University of Iowa, an Assistant Professor at Oregon State University, and the first female winner of the Stella! Shout Out screaming contest in New Orleans.

David Biespiel & Wendy Willis
Friday, January 11, 7:30PM
Valley Library Rotunda

David Biespiel is widely recognized as one of the leading poets of his generation, a liberal commentator on national politics, and also one of the nation's experts in teaching writing. His teaching experience is innovative and vast: He has taught at every level of education, from a one-room schoolhouse to large university campuses, from public high schools to graduate seminars, from teaching poetics at Stanford University to developing national champions in the Olympic sport of diving, and he has lectured and spoken to audiences throughout the United States. Looking to create an independent writing studio in 1999, David founded the Attic Institute as a haven for writers in Portland's historic Hawthorne district. Among his publications are Shattering Air, Pilgrims & Beggars, Wild Civility, The Book of Men and Women which was named Best Poetry of the Year for 2009 by The Poetry Foundation and also received the Oregon Book Award, and Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces. He has been honored with a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature. Since 2008, he has been a frequent contributor to Politico's "Arena," a cross-party, cross-discipline daily conversation about politics and policy among more than a hundred current and former members of Congress, governors, mayors, political strategists and scholars.

Wendy Willis is the author of Blood Sisters of the Republic. She splits her time between her roles as mother, poet, and advocate for democracy. She is the Executive Director of the Policy Consensus Initiative, a national non-profit organization devoted to improving democratic governance. Her poetry and essays have appeared in a variety of national and regional journals and she works as an adjunct fellow in poetry at the Attic Institute, Willis has served as a federal public defender and as the law clerk to Chief Justice Wallace P. Carson, Jr. of the Oregon Supreme Court. She graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown Law Center and holds a B.A. in Political Science from Willamette University. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, his son and her two young daughters.

Clem Starck & John Daniel
Friday, January 18, 7:30PM
Valley Library Rotunda

Co-sponsored by the Spring Creek Project for Nature, Ideas, and the Written Word

Clemens Starck is a Princeton drop-out and a former merchant seaman. He has worked at many jobs, but mostly as a 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.

Born in South Carolina and raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., John Daniel has lived in the West since 1966. Daniel’s newest book, Of Earth: New and Selected Poems, was published in September 2012 by Lost Horse Press. This volume gathers work from his two previous collections, Common Ground (Confluence Press, 1988) and All Things Touched by Wind (Salmon Run Press, 1994), and puts them between covers with a generous selection of newer poems. Common Ground was an Oregon Book Award finalist in 1989. Daniel’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, North American Review, Sierra, Orion, Poetry of the American West, The Pushcart Prize VIII, and other magazines and anthologies. He lives with his wife, Marilyn Daniel, plus two cats, a dog, and usually a pack rat, in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene, Oregon.

Karen Holmberg
Friday, February 1st, 7:30PM
Valley Library Rotunda

Karen Holmberg’s second book of poems, Axis Mundi, won the John Ciardi Prize and will be published in the fall of 2012 by BkMk Press. Her poetry and nonfiction has appeared in such magazines as Southern Poetry Review, New England Review, Nimrod, West Branch, Cave Wall, Black Warrior Review, Poetry East, Indiana Review, and Cimarron Review. She teaches poetry writing in the MFA program at Oregon State University.