We are thrilled to announce that Oregon Poet Laureate Ellen Waterston will be giving the keynote address at the 2025 Terroir Creative Writing Festival, happening Saturday, May 3, 2025 at the Stoller Experience Center in Dayton, Oregon
About Ellen Waterston
Award-winning poet and author Ellen Waterston has dedicated herself to writing and advocating for the literary arts in the high desert region of Oregon, all the while continuing to write poetry and nonfiction works that have evolved into essential reading about Oregon and the West. She has published four poetry and five literary nonfiction titles, including, most recently, We Could Die Doing This (2024) and Walking the High Desert (2020). She is the founder of the Writing Ranch and of the annual Waterston Desert Writing Prize. 2024 was a banner year for Waterston who, that year, received Soapstone’s Bread and Roses Award, Literary Arts’ Stewart H Holbrook Award, and was named the eleventh Poet Laureate of Oregon.
Ellen Waterston’s Keynote Address
What is the ballast to your helium? What allows you, as a writer, to be at once temperate and tempestuous, respecting or pushing boundaries, tuned in and out, judicious and daring, seasoned and naive? For Oregon Poet Laureate Ellen Waterston, the high desert figures into her answer. Incorporating anecdotes, readings and prompts, Waterston will illustrate how dynamic and frustrating and generous and intrusive a relationship with place can be and, like most relationships, among our best teachers.
Terroir Creative Writing Festival 