Speakers Announced for TCWF 2015

We are pleased to announce the speakers we will be hosting at this year’s Terroir Creative Writing Festival. You will find we’ve put together a stellar mix of poets, prose and fiction writers, bookbinders and makers to provide you with a full literary experience on April 18, 2015 at Chemeketa’s Yamhill Campus.

Please follow us and check-back soon for registration information.

2015 Terroir Creative Writing Festival Speakers and Workshop Leaders

Barbara Drake lives with her husband on a small farm and vineyard in Yamhill County. Her most recent book of poems is Driving One Hundred from Windfall Press (2009), and her new collection of essays, Morning Light, is forthcoming from OSU Press in the fall of 2014.

Rene Denfield has written for many publications including The New York Times Magazine, The Oregonian, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. She has published three non-fiction books .In addition to her writing career, Rene Denfield is a death penalty investigator who works with men and women facing execution.

Adam Gallardo has lived in Oregon for more than 25 years, the last ten of those in Salem. He began writing professionally for comic books with Star Wars: Infinities – Return of the Jedi. He’s also created a pair of creator-owned series, 100 Girls and Gear School. His first YA horror novel, Zomburbia, was published in 2014. The sequel, Zombified, was published earlier this year.

Emily Grosvenor is a magazine writer, columnist and essayist who writes for Sunset, Salon.com, The Atlantic and others. She is the books editor for Eugene Magazine. She lives in McMinnville, where she is writing a humorous memoir about connecting to place through scent.

Harold Johnson was born during the heart of The Great Depression into the small African-American community of Yakima, Washington. He came to Portland for college, and throughout a long career teaching English and art in Portland, he has been active in music, sports, visual arts, and writing. Citizenship, published by Many Voices Press, is his first full-length volume of poetry.

Sean Jones has over 25 years of experience in the book industry, reviewing books for publication, consulting with authors, and opening bookstores and training management teams all over the United States, Europe, and the Pacific Rim. Sean is an Oregon native and has a BS in both Sociology and History.

Stephanie Lenox is the author of Congress of Strange People (Airlie Press) and The Heart That Lies Outside the Body (Slapering Hol Press). Her poems and prose are forthcoming in Passages North, Crab Creek Review, and Juked. She teaches creative writing at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.

Lisa Ohlen Harris is a writing coach and freelance editor living in Newberg. She is the author of the Middle East memoir, Through the Veil, and of The Fifth Season: A Daughter-in-Law’s Memoir of Caregiving.

Paulann Petersen was Oregon’s sixth Poet Laureate, and she has six full-length books of poetry, most recently Understory from Lost Horse Press. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and received the 2006 Holbrook Award from Oregon Literary Arts. She serves on the board of Friends of William Stafford, organizing the January Stafford Birthday Events.

Peter Sears is a graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers Workshop. He has taught at Reed College and Pacific University and has served as Dean of Students at Bard College, community services coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission, and director of the Oregon Literary Coalition. He splits his time between Corvallis and Portland.

Stephanie Shaw completed her Bachelor of Science degree in Education at Oregon State University and her Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology at Lewis and Clark College. Her career has included school counseling, school administration, and teaching children with severe emotional disabilities.

Samuel Snoek-Brown lives in Portland, OR, where he teaches writing and serves as production editor for Jersey Devil Press. His short fiction has appeared in dozens of journals, and he is the author of the flash fiction chapbook Box Cutters and of the novel Hagridden, for which he received a 2013 Oregon Literary Fellowship.

Juniper White is a mom, writer, teaching artist, and letterpress printer who cultivates handwork throughout the Northwest, and grooves on making things. A graduate of The Evergreen State College and the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Creative Writing at Pacific Lutheran University, she founded Dwell Press in 2010.

John Sibley Williams has an MFA in Creative Writing and MA in Book Publishing and works as Marketing Director of Inkwater Press and as a freelance literary agent. The author or editor of nine poetry collections, John enjoys navigating authors through the wealth of contemporary media to help them reach their audience.

Marilyn Worrix took a bookbinding class many years ago, which turned her general love of books into an obsession for making them. She finds that creating books is a continuing evolution of ideas, form, content, and materials. Marylin Worrix is the Founder and Director of the Book Arts Center of McMinnville.