I’ll be reading with a whole host of great writers this Saturday in Portland as part of the Oregon Writer’s Collective (info through the link and below). Love to see you there!
On August 2nd the Oregon Writer’s Collective arrives in the NE Portland backyard of poet Elyse Fenton for our second annual Portland reading of poetry, fiction, memoir, and musical genre-bending.
Drinks and mingling begin at 7:30 pm. We’ll have Laurelwood beer available for a suggested $3 donation (to offset costs). Please bring snacks if you’d like as well!
Leo London—the best singer and songwriter you’ve never heard of, whose current project is with the Portland rock and roll band The Domestics—will play a few songs to get our night started. We’ll follow with this star-studded cast, broken by an intermission:
Carl Adamshick’s first book, Curses and Wishes, won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and an Oregon Book Award. His second collection, Saint Friend, is published with McSweeney’s. He lives here in Portland and is a co-founder of Tavern Books, a non-profit publisher of poetry.
Elyse Fenton is the author of Clamor (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2010), winner of a number of prizes. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in American Poetry Review, Pleiades, Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner and The New York Times. In 2013, her manuscript-in-progress for a second book received the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. She teaches at Portland Community College and has an Icarus complex regarding her tomato plants.
Samiya Bashir’s books—Gospel, Where the Apple Falls, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art, and Best Black Women’s Erotica 2—have brought some people joy, according to them. Her poetry has recently appeared in Poetry Magazine, World Literature Today, Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Rumpus, and more. Samiya teaches creative writing at Reed College, where she sometimes takes her magic cat, who shares her obsession with trees, blackbirds, and hobo signs, to class. Find out more @ samiya bashir dot com.
Joe Wilkins is the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, winner of the 2014 GLCA New Writers Award and a finalist for the 2013 Orion Book Award, and two collections of poems, Notes from the Journey Westward and Killing the Murnion Dogs. He lives with his family in McMinnville, Oregon, where he teaches writing at Linfield College.
John Brehm is the author of Sea of Faith, winner of the Brittingham Prize, and Help Is on the Way, winner of the Four Lakes Prize, both from the University of Wisconsin Press. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Sun, New Ohio Review, The Gettysburg Review, and many other journals and anthologies. He teaches at Mountain Writers Workshop in Portland and The Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver.
Colie Hoffman is a poet, essayist, and recent transplant to Portland, OR from New York. She spends many days of the week working at a travel research firm, where she translates English into different English. Colie has been a writer in residence at Writers Omi in upstate New York and at Sangam House in South India, for which she won the M Literary Residency. Her poems have appeared in Sixth Finch, TYPO, Blood Orange Review, and elsewhere.
Molly Reid’s stories have appeared on NPR and in the journals Triquarterly, Redivider, Indiana Review, Pear Noir, The Literary Review, and others. She has received fellowship support from the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Ucross Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is at work on a novel.
Michael Copperman’s prose has appeared in The Oxford-American, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Gulf Coast, Guernica, Triquarterly Online, The Rumpus, UNSAID and Copper Nickel, among others, and has won awards and fellowships from the Munster Literature Center, Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Oregon Arts Commission. He currently is waiting on word from New York about a memoir he fears will never find a home, and finishing a novel-in-stories even less commercially viable than the memoir in question.
James Yu is from Beaverton, where last year he finally saw a beaver.
Thomas Dietzel is the creator of the musical art project, EURHAPSODOI, which performs short excerpts of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – in the original Greek and with musical accompaniment – to allow audiences to make the connection between ancient oral formulaic methods of composition and the use of the freestyle technique in hip hop. It is not hyperbolic to suggest that ten minutes of listening to EURHAPSODOI perform will communicate more about the shared aspects of these two cultures than twenty written volumes ever could. EURHAPSODOI has performed at the Portland Art Museum as part of The Body Beautiful Exhibit as well as part of Leo Daedalus’ Portland avant-garde variety show, The Late Now.
joewilkins.org 