Silverton Poetry Association / Oregon Poetry Association Collaboration April 12th - April 14th, 2013 in Silverton Friday, April 12, through Sunday, April 14, will be a weekend of poetry events in Silverton, jointly organized by the Oregon Poetry Association in conjunction with the OPA Annual Conference. Poets Don Colburn and Jennifer Richter will read on Friday evening and lead workshops on Saturday morning and afternoon. On Saturday evening, poets Chris Anderson, Barbara Drake, Donna Henderson, and Lex Runciman will talk about how they've sustained and renewed their poetry over their careers, and on Sunday morning they'll hold prescheduled individual consulting sessions. The weekend will conclude with a "Feast of Poets"--readings accompanied by edible delights. FEATURED POETS: Friday, April 12th White Steeple Gallery Jennifer Richter Jennifer Richter’s book, Threshold, selected by Robert Pinsky as a 2011 Oregon Book Award Finalist, has been a national bestseller. 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. Richter is currently the Visiting Poet in Oregon State University’s MFA Program. She lives in Corvallis with her children and her husband, the novelist Keith Scribner. Don Colburn Don Colburn has published three poetry collections, most recently the chapbookBecause You Might Not Remember. During a long journalism career, he worked for The Washington Post and The Oregonian and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. His first poetry chapbook, Another Way to Begin, won the Finishing Line Press Prize, and his full collection, As If Gravity Were a Theory, won the Cider Press Review Book Award. His poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest and Southern Poetry Review, among others. His many writing honors include the Discovery/The Nation Award, the Duckabush Prize for Poetry and residencies at The MacDowell Colony and Centrum. He is a board member of Friends of William Stafford. Favorite Poem Project: Saturday, April 13 Oregon Garden Educational Building As part of the OPA Conference, The Silverton Poetry Association will give a presentation from 9-10 am on the Favorite Poem Project. It is based on the national project initiated by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky in 1997. Steve Slemenda, R.S. Stewart, Kelley Morehouse, Larry Anderson, Margie Doolan, Juan Cervantes, Efrain Horna-Diaz, Rose Hope will read favorite poems and comment on their personal significance. Featured Talking Poets: Saturday, April 13 Frank Lloyd Wright Gordon House Donna Henderson Donna Henderson is the author of three collections of poems, including most recently The Eddy Fence, which was a finalist for the 2011 Oregon Book Award in poetry. Her poems, essays, reviews and song lyrics have appeared in a variety of magazines, anthologies, performance venues and recordings. She is a founding member of the piano and poetry performance trio Tonepoem, and a founding member and editor of Airlie Press. A licensed clinical social worker, Donna maintains a psychotherapy practice in Monmouth, and teaches both creative writing and counseling at area colleges. Chris Anderson Chris Anderson is the author of 13 books, including Edge Effects, a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. For the last three years, he was a poet/member of Airlie Press, a collaborative poetry press in the Mid-Willamette Valley. He has poems forthcoming in America, Ruminate, and Spiritus. Anderson is a professor of English at Oregon State Unviersity and a Catholic deacon, and has recently written Teaching as Believing: Faith in the University, a memoir reflecting on his experience as a Catholic deacon teaching at a state university. He teaches the Bible as Literature, Dante, and Spiritual Autobiography, as well as writing and writing theory. Barbara Drake Barbara Drake's books and chapbooks of poetry include Driving One Hundred (published in 2009 by Windfall Press), 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 a memoir, Peace at Heart: An Oregon Country Life, which was an Oregon Book Award finalist in 1999, and Writing Poetry, a widely used college textbook, in print since 1983. Her writing appears in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. Born in Kansas, she moved with her parents to Oregon as a small child and grew up in Coos Bay. After earning her MFA degree from the University of Oregon, she taught at Michigan State University for sixteen years before returning to Oregon to teach at Linfield College from 1983 until her retirement in 2007. Lex Runciman Lex Runciman’s fifth book of poems, One Hour That Morning & Other Poems, is forthcoming in 2014 from Salmon Poetry (Ireland). He is also the author of Luck (1981), The Admirations (1989) which won the Oregon Book Award, Out of Town (2004), and Starting from Anywhere (2009). His work has been featured on Verse Daily as well as in various anthologies, including Alive at the Center, forthcoming from Ooligan Press. Individual poems have received the Kenneth O. Hanson Award and the Silcox Prize. Born and raised in Portland, where he was adopted at birth, Runciman has lived most of his life in the Willamette Valley. Along the way, he worked as a warehouseman, a shipping-receiving clerk, and a stacker in a box mill. After receiving graduate degrees from the writing programs at the University of Montana and the University of Utah, he taught for eleven years at Oregon State University and is now Professor of English at Linfield College, where he has received the Edith Green Award in teaching. Featured Feast of Poets: Sunday, April 14th Silver Falls Vineyard Eleanor Berry Eleanor Berry moved to the Salem area from Wisconsin in 1994. A former teacher of writing and literature at Willamette University, Marquette University, and other colleges, she is currently President of the Oregon Poetry Association, and serves on the boards of the Marion Cultural Development Corporation and the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. Her poetry and essays on poetry have been widely published in journals and anthologies. Green November, a book of poems derived from her acclimation to western Oregon, was published by Traprock Books. Douglas Barricklow Douglas Barricklow, a retired teacher and school counselor, won 1st prize for fiction in Willamette Week’s writing contest. His poems have been published in The Bellowing Ark, West Wind Review, Fireweed, Potpourri, Windfall, The Iodine Poetry Journal, and the on-line poetry journals, Mastodon Dentist, and Right Hand Pointing, among others. His chapbook, Life Imitates French Poetry, is part of the second William Stafford Center Chapbook Series at Lewis and Clark College. He is also a calligrapher and a violinist. R. S. Stewart R.S. Stewart worked for many years in the Talking Book, Reference, and Outreach departments of the Oregon State Library. Formerly he taught literature and composition at Christopher Newport College (now University) of the College of William and Mary in Virginia, where he also founded the college theatre, directing ten plays during the first two seasons. Two of his own plays have been produced at Pentacle Theatre and Lord Leebrick Theatre in Eugene. His poems have appeared in San Jose Studies, Blue Unicorn, Able Muse, Canary, The Raintown Review, and Poetry Salzburg Review. Patricia Ann Love Patricia Ann Love has been a teacher for fifty-two years, continues to adamantly encourage older adults to write poems and personal stories that reflect the one-of-a-kind person each has become. Although born in New York State, Pat considers herself an Oregonian, valuing her 110 year-old house in Mt. Angel. When she isn't pruning shrubs or tending bird feeders, she is writing poems about living longer than one's own expectations. Besides small collections of poems and drawings, she has published a book entitled Feeding After Dark. Tim Pfau Tim Pfau writes narrative poetry of people caught in moments of lightness and dark. He draws on working for forty years in “other people’s problems” jobs, from Ambulance Driver to Union Negotiator, and allows story to drive the form. He prefers the spoken word over print. His poems have appeared in Canopic Jar, Gold Man Review, On Lesotho, Concelebratory Shoehorn Review, The Toucan Review, Eye Socket Journal as well as newspapers, mixed media shows, contests, anthologies and poetry boxes of great renown. He serves on the Board of the Oregon Poetry Association. He has recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for 2014.Cindy Stewart-Rinier Cindy Stewart-Rinier holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University. Her poetry has appeared in Calyx, The Smoking Poet, Crab Creek Review and Ascent. Among her awards are a first place prize in the 1997 Portland Pen Women Poetry Contest and a nomination for a Pushcart Prize. She has given poetry readings for Portland Pen Women, the Mountain Writers Series, The Market Day Poetry Series, and for the Pinoy Kultura Arts Center in Seattle, Washington, sponsored by Poets & Writers. A current board member of the Mountain Writers Series, she lives in Portland, Oregon with Todd, her husband of 29 years, Simon, the younger of two sons, and Keela, a bandy-legged pit bull rescue. Lois Rosen |