Mountain Writers Series

Volunteers

Timothy John Schell, Board Chair

Tim Schell is the author of the novel The Drums of Africa (Mammoth Books, 2007), winner of the 2004 Mammoth Book Award for Prose. He is co-author of Mooring Against the Tide: Writing Fiction and Poetry (Prentice Hall, 2006) and co-editor of the anthology A Writer’s Country ( Prentice Hall, 2001). Schell’s fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Award, and in 1994 he was the winner of the Martindale Award for Long Fiction. Currently, he teaches English and writing at Columbia Gorge Community College, and he serves on the Board of Mountain Writers Series.

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Bob Kreider

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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Judith Root

Judith Root's first collection of poems Weaving the Sheets was published by Abattoir Editions (University of Nebraska at Omaha) and reprinted by Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press.Most recently, Free Will and the River (Limberlost Press) was completed with the assistance of a fellowship from the Idaho Council on the Arts. Her poems, stories and reviews have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, American Poetry Review, Three Rivers Poetry Journal, Commonweal, Paris Review and others.

She has taught at colleges and universities across the country: Minnesota, Texas, Iowa, North Carolina, Missouri, Idaho, California.

She now lives in Portland, Oregon.

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Sandra Williams

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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Chad Bartlett

Chad Bartlett teaches writing and literature at Mt. Hood Community College. He’s published a number of poems in journals such as Fourteen Hills, Columbia Poetry Review, Sentence, and others. He lives in Portland with his wife, daughter, and yellow lab.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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