Past Poetry Readings
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- Season 01
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- Season 11
- Season 12
- Season 13
- Season 15
- Season 16
William Stafford Birthday Celebration
Poetry Reading and Open Mic.
Season 16
These celebrations are held during January in Oregon and the nation in honor of poet William Stafford who taught for many years at Lewis and Clark College and was Oregon Poet Laureate from 1975 through 1989. The event will be hosted by Tom Hogan and Greg Chaimov. Our Featured Readers will be David Filer, Stephanie…
Read More Charles Goodrich
Season 16
Charles Goodrich’s new book of poems, Watering the Rhubarb, is just out from Flowstone Press. Previous books include the poetry collections A Scripture of Crows; Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden; and Insects of South Corvallis, along with a collection of essays, The Practice of Home, and two co-edited anthologies, Forest Under Story: Creative Inquiry in an Old-Growth Forest and In the Blast…
Read More Wendy Willis
Season 16
Wendy Willis has published two books of poems, a book of essays, and a textbook. Her last two books, These are Strange Times, My Dear, and A Long Late Pledge were finalists for the Oregon Book Award. Wendy is also the founder and director of Oregon’s Kitchen Table, a statewide community engagement program housed at Portland State University. She…
Read More David J. S. Pickering
Season 16
David J.S. Pickering is a native Oregonian, having grown up and lived much of his life in the working-class culture of the North Oregon Coast. He received the 2020 Airlie Prize for his first poetry collection, Jesus Comes to Me as Judy Garland (Airlie Press, 09/2021). His poetry is published in a variety of journals…
Read More Ann Staley
Season 15
Ann was published as an essayist and a poet, and edited both poetry and fiction. Her first two books of poems, Primary Sources (2011) and Instructions For The Wishing Light (2013), were published by Booktrope Editions, Seattle Washington, where she was also the Poetry Editor. She later independently published Afternoon Sky, Harney Desert (2017), and three small collections, Nota Bene (2017), The Age Of…
Read More Jennifer Perrine
Season 15
Jennifer Perrine is the author of four award-winning books of poetry: Again, The Body Is No Machine, In the Human Zoo, and No Confession, No Mass. Their recent short stories and essays appear in Buckman Journal and The Gay & Lesbian Review. Perrine lives in Portland, Oregon, where they co-host the Incite: Queer Writers Read series, teach creative writing to youth and…
Read More Maggie Chula
Season 15
Maggie (Margaret) Chula has published over a dozen collections of poetry including, most recently, Firefly Lanterns: Twelve Years in Kyoto. While living there, she practiced Soto Zen, studied the traditional arts of flower arrangement and woodblock printing and, of course, composed haiku. All of Maggie’s poems—including haiku, tanka, haibun, and free verse—explore the interconnectedness between our…
Read More Gary Lark
Season 15
A lifelong Oregonian, Gary Lark grew up in the Umpqua River Valley and was shaped by the river. His most recent collection is Easter Creek. (Main Street Rag 2021). Other work includes, Daybreak on the Water, (Flowstone Press, 2020); Ordinary Gravity, (Airlie Press, 2019) River of Solace, (Flowstone Press, 2016); In the House of Memory, (BatCat Press, 2016);Without a Map, (Wellstone Press, 2013); Getting By, (Logan House Press,…
Read More Jessica Mehta
Season 15
Jessica (Tyner) Mehta is a multi-award winning Aniyunwiya interdisciplinary author and artist. Born and raised in Oregon and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, she is currently preparing for her Fulbright U.S. Scholar award in Bangalore, India. Jessica is the recipient of a 2021 GLEAN: Portland award, Regional Arts and Culture Council Make/Learn/Build award, and…
Read More Doug Stone
Season 15
Doug Stone is a fourth generation Oregonian and lives with his wife amid hop yards and vineyards near the Willamette River in Benton County, Oregon. In past lives he has worked on a county road crew, been a grocery store clerk, a case worker, and an analyst and a consultant on public policy issues to…
Read More Ashley Toliver
Season 15
Ashley Toliver is the author of Spectra (Coffee House Press), a finalist for the 2018 Believer Book Awards. She teaches poetry at the The Attic Institute in southeast Portland and serves as poetry editor at Moss. A Journal of the Pacific Northwest. Her work has been supported by fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts, the Cave Canem Foundation,…
Read More Christopher Howell
Season 15
Born in Portland, Oregon, Christopher Howell attended Pacific Lutheran University from 1963 to ’66. After service as a military journalist during the Viet Nam war, he received graduate degrees from Portland State University and the University of Massachusetts. He is author of twelve collections of poems, most recently The Grief of a Happy Life (U. Washington Press,…
Read More Kate Gray
Season 15
Kate Gray’s passion stems from writing, teaching, leading salons, and volunteering. For Every Girl: New & Selected Poems was published by Widow & Orphan House in 2019. Her first full-length book of poems, Another Sunset We Survive (Cedar House Books, 2007) was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and followed chapbooks, Bone-Knowing (2006), winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Prize and Where…
Read More Judith Barrington
Season 15
Judith Barrington’s sixth collection of poetry, Long Love: New & Selected Poems, 1985 – 2017 came out in 2018 from Salmon Poetry. She is also the author of The Conversation (2015), whose title poem was the winner of the Gregory O’Donoghue International poetry award, and three previous collections of poems, as well as two chapbooks. Her Lifesaving: A Memoir was the…
Read More Marilyn Johnston
Season 15
Marilyn Johnston is a writer and filmmaker. She has received writing fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women, and was the winner of the Donna J. Stone National Literary Award for Poetry, a Robert Penn Warren writing competition prize, and the Salmon Creek Journal’s Flash Fiction Contest. She is the…
Read More Quinton Hallett
Season 13
Quinton Hallett writes and edits from Noti, Oregon. She has four chapbooks (Quarry, 1992; Shiver Quench Slake, 2004; Refuge from Flux, 2010; Stranger by the Hour, 2018). She founded Fern Rock Falls Press in 2004, and her work appears or is forthcoming in journals and anthologies including: Willawaw Journal, Cirque, The Edge of Awe, and december. She has coordinated a reading…
Read More John Sibley Williams
Season 13
John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. A nineteen-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and…
Read More Kim Stafford
Season 13
Kim Stafford, founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft and 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared. He has taught writing in dozens of…
Read More Greg Simon
Season 13
Greg Simon was born in Minnesota but has lived most of his life in the Pacific Northwest, near the Umpqua River, the Tualatin River, the McKenzie River, the Willamette River, and on Whidbey Island. He was educated in Seattle, Iowa City, and Palo Alto, and has an MFA in Creative Writing from Stanford University. He…
Read More Clemens Starck
Season 13
Clemens Starck was born in 1937. A Princeton dropout and former merchant seaman, he has supported his literary and intellectual interests for more than fifty years by working with his hands, mainly as a carpenter and construction foreman. He is the author of seven books of poetry, including the recently published Cathedrals & Parking Lots: Collected…
Read More Judith Montgomery
Season 13
Judith H. Montgomery lives in Oregon City. Her poems appear in The Bellingham Review, Prairie Schooner, and Tahoma Literary Review, among other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies. She’s been awarded fellowships in poetry from Literary Arts and the Oregon Arts Commission; residencies from Playa, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, and Caldera; and prizes from the Bellingham Review, Persimmon Tree,…
Read More Don Colburn
Season 13
Don Colburn came to poetry late, in the midst of a long career as a journalist. He worked as a reporter for The Washington Post and The Oregonian and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. Since 2006, he has published five poetry collections, including four chapbooks. All five either won or placed in national manuscript…
Read More Matthew Minicucci
Season 13
Matthew Minicucci’s most recent collection, Small Gods (New Issues), won the 2019 Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award in Poetry. His first book, Translation (Kent State University Press), was chosen by Jane Hirshfield for the 2014 Wick Poetry Prize. His poetry and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from numerous journals including The Believer, POETRY, The Southern Review, and the Virginia Quarterly…
Read More Claudia Savage
Season 13
Claudia F. Saleeby Savage’s work appears in print, onstage, and in museums and explores multidisciplinary collaboration and diaspora. She is a Black Earth Institute fellow for 2018-2021 and part of the music-poetry performance duo Thick in the Throat, Honey. Raised in Queens, NY and the south, she received her M.A. in literature and women’s studies in Colorado and teaches…
Read More Bilingual Poetry Reading – English and Arabic 3/9/2019
Season 12
Milwaukie Poetry Series – Season 1 – Bilingual Poetry Reading – English and Arabic 3/9/2019 Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here! Poetry Reading. These readings include a total of 12 poems read in both languages, six English poems with an Arabic translation and six Arabic poems with an English translation. The English readers are Baher Butti, David Filer, Dan…
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