Mountain Writers Series

Volunteers

Chad Bartlett, Board Chair

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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Bob Kreider

Bob Kreider is a tax accountant who has been following Mountain Writers since 1988. He has served as Treasurer of its Board of Directors and volunteered as an assistant in the offices since 2005. During the tax season he volunteers his services for AARP, assisting seniors with tax preparation. An avid sports fan and fisherman, he is married, with two grown children and in 2009 a new grandson. In his spare time, Bob plays hardball and reads 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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Ron Talney

Ron Talney was born in British Columbia but has lived most of his life in Oregon. He is an attorney retired from a private non-profit legal aid program that provides free legal representation to low-income clients. He has published four books of poems, The Anxious Ground, The Quietness that is our Name, A Secret Weeping of Stones, New and Selected Poems, and, most recently, The Broken World, as part of the William Stafford Chapbook Series and published by Stone City Press. He is also the editor of Stone City I, an anthology of Oregon Poets, published by Stone City Press.

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Sandra Williams

Sandra Williams began work with 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. 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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Doug Erickson

Doug Erickson is head of Special Collections and College Archivist at Lewis & Clark College, where he has been for seventeen years. He is the past president of the Northwest Area Archivists Association and current President of the Oregon Chapter of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation. Among his publications are William Stafford: An Exhibit Catalog and Bibliography (Lewis & Clark College Ash Creek Press, 2000); The Literature of the Lewis and Clark Expedition: A Bibliography and Essays (Lewis & Clark College, 2003): and Jefferson's Western Explorations: Discoveries Made in Exploring the Missouri, Red River and Washita by Captains Lewis and Clark, Doctor Sibley, and William Dunbar (Arthur H Clark Co., 2004). He also teaches classes on the American West and on Archives & Special Collections at Portland State University and has served as consultant to government agencies, universities and colleges, businesses, and nonprofits on Lewis and Clark, archival management, books, and libraries.

Tom Bremer

Tom Bremer was born in Cincinatti and grew up in California. He has a B.A. from St. Mary’s College and an M.A. in Creative Writing from Colorado State University. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he was co-founder of the Portland Poetry Festival in 1973 and a charter member of the board of the Oregon Writers’ Workshop. Now retired from many years of teaching English, he is the author of three collections of poetry, Par Amour (1986); A Bird That Changes Trees, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in 1988; and Just Once (2001).

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David Filer

David Filer grew up in the California desert, took degrees in English from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and taught in San Diego and Eugene. He then took a law degree from the University of Oregon and has been engaged in the practice of law for a federal agency in Portland. He lives with his wife Marlene Anderson and has a son, Curran, who lives in Chicago. He has published in numerous literary journals. His first chapbook, Night Verse, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2005 and in 2009 his chapbook, The Landscape There, was published by Stone City Press.

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Karen Reyes

Karen Reyes has been actively involved with Oregon’s literary community since the early 1970s when she joined the board of the Portland Poetry Festival, eventually becoming its president. She was a board member of Oregon Writer’s Workshop for many years and served on the staff of Trask House Books, where she learned both editing and book design, before going on to become a founding editor of Hubbub Magazine. Her master’s thesis, Finding a New Voice: Oregon’s Literary Community between the World Wars, brought her to the attention of Brian Booth, founder of the newly formed Oregon Institute of Literary Arts, who shared a passion for Oregon’s literary history. As the first executive director of that new organization, she was responsible for the design and implementation of the Oregon Book Awards, which has now been incorporated as a Literary Arts, Inc. annual program. She lives in Portland.  

Zoe Trope

Zoe Trope is the pseudonym of a young writer living in Portland. In 2003, she published her controversial high school memoir, Please Don't Kill the Freshman. Since then, Zoe has graduated from Oberlin College with a Bachelors in Art History and is currently working on her Masters in Library Science through Emporia State University. Her short stories can be found in the anthologies Portland Noir, Sixteen: Stories About That Sweet and Bitter Birthday, and Northwest Edge iii.  [Zoe Trope prefers not to be pictured.]

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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, currently with Sussman Shank LLP, has over 30 years of handling business issues, serving as counsel to such primary clients as software companies, equipment manufacturers, nonprofit organizations and family business. A member of the founding board of Mountain Writers Series, he continues to serve the organization as advisor and general counsel. Mr. Nunn is a trustee for Willamette University and over the years has served as a member or director of many civic organizations. He education includes degrees from Willamette University (BS), Northeastern University in Boston (MS/MBA), and University of Oregon School of Law (JD).

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