Visiting Authors
THIRD ANNUAL YAMHILL COUNTY TERROIR CREATIVE WRITING FESTIVAL
April 14, 2012 McMinnville Community Center
VISITING AUTHORS
CHELSEA CAIN - http://chelseacain.com/
Novelist and author of The New York Times bestselling thrillers Heartsick, Sweetheart, Evil at Heart, and The Night Season. Her Portland-based thrillers, described by The New York Times as “steamy and perverse,” have been published in over 30 languages, recommended on “The Today Show,” and included in NPR’s list of the top 100 thrillers ever written. According to Booklist, “Popular entertainment just doesn’t get much better than this.”
WILLY VLAUTIN - http://www.willyvlautin.com/
Novelist and Oregon Book Award winner. Born and raised in Reno, Nevada, Vlautin started playing guitar and writing songs as a teenager and quickly became immersed in music. It was a Paul Kelly song, based on Raymond Carver’s Too Much Water So Close to Home that inspired him to start writing stories. Vlautin has published three novels, THE MOTEL LIFE (2007) and NORTHLINE (2008) and LEAN ON PETE (2010).
MATT LOVE - http://nestuccaspitpress.com/about.html
The author/editor of Let it Pour, The Beaver State Trilogy, Citadel of the Spirit: Oregon’s Sesquicentennial Anthology, Super Sunday in Newport: Notes From My First Year in Town, Gimme Refuge: Education of a Caretaker, and Love & The Green Lady: Meditations on the Yaquina Bay Bridge, Oregon’s Crown Jewel of Socialism. He grew up in Oregon City and now lives in South Beach on the Oregon Coast. From 1998-2008 he served as caretaker of the Nestucca Bay National Wildlife Refuge near Pacific City. Love teaches English and journalism at Newport High School.
LEANNE GRABEL – http://leannegrabel.com/Website/Leanne_Grabel.html
A teacher, a writer, and a long-time activist in Portland’s poetry community. Known for her music-enhanced spoken word performances and the founding of Cafe Lena with her husband Steve Sander, Grabel has authored several books of poetry including Lonesome and Very Quarrelsome Heroes, Flirtations, Short Poems by a Short Person, Anne Sexton Was a Sexpot, The Last Weekend of Sylvia Plath, and just out is badgirls, a collection of prose poems about Grabel’s students, and brontosaurus, a memoir. Grabel is a graduate of Stanford, PSU and most recently Lewis and Clark’s Graduate School of Education. She teaches language arts and poetry fulltime at a local treatment center for teenage girls.
CHARLES GOODRICH – http://www.charlesgoodrich.com/
Poet, environmentalist and OSU Spring Creek Project Program Director. Author of Insects of South Corvallis and Going To Seed: Dispatches from the Garden (poetry) (Silverfish Review Press, 2010), and The Practice of Home, essays about nature, parenting, and building his own house. For twenty-five years Goodrich worked as a professional gardener, and in his writing and teaching he still looks to the garden as a model for interacting with nature. Goodrich has an MFA in creative writing from Oregon State University.
EVELYN HESS – http://osupress.oregonstate.edu/author/evelyn-searle-hess
Winner of the 2011 WILLA Award in Creative Nonfiction. Her memoir To the Woods is the true story of Evelyn Searle Hess, who, in her late fifties, walks away from the world of modern conveniences to build a new life with her husband on twenty acres of wild land in the foothills of Oregon’s Coast Range. To the Woods describes Hess’s day-to-day challenges and explores the joys of living simply, building a relationship with the natural world, and awakening to the interconnectedness of all life. She currently teaches nature writing to middle school students. Since 1992, Evelyn and her husband David have been living on their property in the coast range foothills outside of Eugene, Oregon.
MOLLY JOHNSON http://mollyejohnson.com/about/
–Johnson recently published her first novel, Spartacus and the Circus of Shadows, a fantasy aimed at the Middle School reader. She always loved writing but officially became a writer after reporting sports for her small town newspaper in Sisters, Oregon. While earning her BA from Linfield College she wrote for the college newspaper. She has an MA from Portland State University and blogged through a year of teaching English to some of the coolest kids in China. She now lives in Portland and works as a copywriter and author.
Local Authors & Book Arts
LINDA KUHLMANN – http://www.lindakuhlmann.com/
Novelist, grew up in Illinois and moved to Oregon over thirty years ago. She has been writing most of her life, but her fiction always took a back seat to her job as a Systems Analyst. After retirement from her day job in 2004, she began her new career as an author. Her first novel, Koenig’s Wonder, was published in October, 2004. Her second novel, The Red Boots, was released in 2011. She currently participates in a ‘Job Shadow’ program with local students who have an interest in writing as a career, and she’s held numerous readings and signings throughout Oregon and across the nation.
LEX RUNCIMAN – http://www.poetry.us.com/lexrunciman.html
Born and raised in Portland, Lex Runciman 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 he received the Edith Green Award in teaching in 1997. His newest collection of poems is Starting from Anywhere (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 2009). He is also the author of three earlier books of poems: Luck (1981), The Admirations (1989) which won the Oregon Book Award, and Out of Town (2004). He and Deborah Jane Berry Runciman have been married thirty-nine years and are the parents of two grown daughters.
MARILYN WORRIX - http://www.artharveststudiotour.org/2010/pages/artists/marilyn_worrix.html
The founder and director of the Books Arts Center of McMinnville. She has frequently opened her studio for the annual Yamhill County Art Harvest tour.. She says,”My love of books turned into a passion for making them after I took a bookbinding class several years ago. The combination of carefully engineered structures, conjoined with unlimited creative freedom, make for the ultimate self-expression. Today’s artist books stretch the definition of a book with unlimited possibilities. They present new ways of relating content to structure and can incorporate many different materials. I now walk through the world with a bookbinder’s eye, constantly asking, ‘Can I make a book out of this?’”
PHOEBE NEWMAN – Poet, lives in McMinnville. She is the author of Sugar, a collection of poems.
MARY SLOCUM – www.maryslocum.com
Poet, lives in Gaston, Oregon. Her first book of poetry will be published by Dancing Moon Press in the spring of 2012.
WINDFALL AUTHORS
BILL SIVERLY – http://www.poetry.us.com/billsiverly.html
Poet, was born and grew up in Lewiston, Idaho, and 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 four books of poems: Parzival (1981), Phoenix Fire (1987), The Turn (2000), and Clearwater Way (2009). 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.
MICHAEL MCDOWELL – http://spot.pcc.edu/~mmcdowel/
Michael McDowell is a poet, editor, and author of The Hundred-Year House (poems). His work 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 anthologies including 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.
BARBARA DRAKE – http://www.poetry.us.com/barbaradrake.html
Poet and author of Driving One Hundred (2009), Love at the Egyptian Theatre, What We Say to Strangers, Life in a Gothic Novel, Bees in Wet Weather, and Small Favors. Her memoir, Peace at Heart: an Oregon Country Life published by Oregon State University Press was a 1999 Oregon Book Award Finalist. Her widely used college textbook, Writing Poetry, has been in print since 1983. She earned her MFA from the University of Oregon and taught at Michigan State University before returning to Oregon to teach at Linfield College from 1983 to 2007.
