Announcing our 2018 Keynote Speakers!

We are thrilled to announce our keynote speakers for our 2018 Terroir Creative Writing Festival, happening April 14, 2018 at the Yamhill Campus of Chemeketa Community College, Tracy Daugherty and Fonda Lee.

Tracy Daugherty was born and raised in Midland, Texas. He is the author of four novels, six short story collections, a book of personal essays, a collection of essays on literature and writing, as well as biographies of Donald Barthelme, Joseph Heller, and Joan Didion. His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Boulevard, Chelsea, The Georgia Review, Triquarterly, The Southern Review, and many other journals. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf, Artsmith, and the Vermont Studio Center. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters and PEN, he is a four-time winner of the Oregon Book Award. At Oregon State University, he helped found the Masters of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing, and is now Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing, Emeritus.

His work explores the intersections of public and private lives, art, architecture, music, and science, as well as urban life and American deserts, real and imagined. As Antonya Nelson has written, “Daugherty’s characters convince the reader that metamorphosis is possible, that beauty and peace are still available options.” He “combines the serious and literary with the funny and offbeat,” says Beverly Lowry, “resulting in sparkle-plenty prose with an ear for dialogue that never fails. His stories are first-rate.”

Fonda Lee writes science fiction and fantasy for teens and adults. Her debut novel, Zeroboxer was an Andre Norton Award finalist, Jr. Library Guild Selection, ALA Top 10 Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers, Oregon Book Award finalist, and Oregon Spirit Book Award winner. Her second novel, Exo, released from Scholastic in February 2017 and has also been named a Junior Library Guild Selection. Her third novel (and adult debut), the gangster fantasy saga Jade City, was released by Orbit Books in November 2017 to wide acclaim.

Fonda wrote her first novel, about a dragon on a quest for a magic pendant, in fifth grade during the long bus ride to and from school each day. Many years later, she cast her high school classmates as characters in her second novel, a pulpy superhero saga co-written with a friend by passing a graphing calculator back and forth during biology class. Fortunately, both of these experiments are lost to the world forever.

Fonda is a former corporate strategist who has worked for or advised a number of Fortune 500 companies. She holds black belts in karate and kung fu, goes mad for smart action movies (think The Matrix, Inception, and Minority Report) and is an Eggs Benedict enthusiast. Born and raised in Calgary, Canada, she currently resides in Portland, Oregon.

Have you saved the date yet? We are hard at work putting together a stellar program and will be opening registration mid-February. Stay tuned!