Sandra Williams,
Board President

Sandra Williams began coordination of Mountain Writers Series in 1973 at Mt. Hood Community College in Gresham, Oregon, where she taught until her retirement in 2001. In her capacity as director of Mountain Writers Series, she has coordinated Northwest Regional Residencies, which have brought hundreds of authors to the region for literary events at high schools, colleges, and community arts centers.

Active in regional and national literary community for over thirty years, she has also served as coordinator for the "Across the River" program for Oregon and Washington, worked on the Board of Directors for the Portland Poetry Festival, and worked on program development for the Western States Arts Federation. In 1990, the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts presented her with the Stewart H. Holbrook Award for significant contribution toward the advancement of literary life in Oregon. Also a published poet, she was awarded an Oregon Institute of Literary Arts Poetry Fellowship in 1991. Her collection of poems, Detours, published in 1995, was nominated for an Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

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Lynn Darroch,
Board Chair

Lynn was born in Vancouver, Washington, in 1947. He received his BA in psychology from Lewis and Clark College in 1969 and his Master's in English from State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1970. He currently teaches writing and literature at Mt. Hood Community College. From 1984 to 1987, he wrote a weekly column and feature articles for Willamette Week and is a freelance contributor to The Oregonian.

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Robert Kreider,
Treasurer

Bob has been following Mountain Writers Series since 1988 and has served on its Board of Directors for the past three years. He is an accountant with Wilsonville Concrete Products and is married with two children in college. In his spare time, Bob enjoys playing hardball and reading the odd book.

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Timothy John Schell

Bio coming soon.

Judith Root

Photo and bio coming soon.

Chad Bartlett

Photo and bio coming soon.

Marianne Klekacz

Photo and bio coming soon.

Yusef Komunyakaa

Yusef Komunyakaa, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet, has been appointed the Distinguished Senior Poet at New York University. Komunyakaa will be part of the faculty in NYU’s Graduate Creative Writing Program. Komunyakaa’s books of poems include the following: Taboo : The Wishbone Trilogy, Part 1 (2004); Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999 (2001); Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000); Thieves of Paradise (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989 (1993), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Magic City (1992); Dien Cai Dau (1988), which won The Dark Room Poetry Prize; I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award; and Copacetic (1984).

Komunyakaa’s prose appears in Blues Notes: Essays, Interviews & Commentaries (University of Michigan Press, 2000). He also co-edited, with J. A. Sascha Feinstein, The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1991) and co-translated, with Martha Collins, The Insomnia of Fire by Nguyen Quang Thieu (1995).

He has received numerous honors and awards, including the William Faulkner Prize from the Université de Rennes, the Thomas Forcade Award, and the Hanes Poetry Prize as well as fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Louisiana Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1999, he was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Maggie Anderson

Maggie Anderson is the author of Windfall (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000) and the editor of several essential recent anthologies, including Learning by Heart: Contemporary American Poetry About School, (Univ. of Iowa Press, 1999). A faculty member in the Creative Writing Program at Kent State University, Maggie Anderson directs the Wick Poetry Center and Wick Poetry Series.

Robert Wrigley

Robert Wrigley is the author of Reign of Snakes (Penguin 1999) which won the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Award. His previous book, In the Bank of Beautiful Sins, won the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets. He is a faculty member in the MFA Program at the University of Idaho and lives with his wife, the memoirist Kim Barnes, and their two children in the canyon of the Clearwater River in Idaho.

Gerald Costanzo

Gerald Costanzo is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon. He has published more than three hundred poems, articles about poetry, and literary essays in addition to three limited edition collections of poems, four full-length collections, and two edited anthologies. He has been the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, Pushcart Prizes, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Writing Fellowship, and an Editorial Fellowship from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines. In the early 70s, he founded Three Rivers Poetry Journal and Carnegie Mellon University Press.

Donald Hall

Donald Hall has been making marks on the literary life of the United States for more than 40 years. He is the author of fourteen books of poetry, four plays, and twenty-two prose books. Hall's awards include the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry for The One Day and the 1987 Lenore Marshall Award for The Happy Man. Hall is the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire.

Robert W. Nunn

Robert W. Nunn is a managing partner/co-founder of Nunn, Motschebacher & Blattner. A member of the founding board of Mountain Writers Series, he has also served as a trustee for Willamette University, the World Affairs Council of Oregon, and the American Cancer Society.