Mountain Writers Series

Press Club

Please join Mountain Writers Series the third Wednesday of each month for literary readings at SE Portland’s most literate wine café, The Press Club, at 2621 S.E. Clinton.

May 2012

Wednesday, May 16, 7:30 PM

Catherine Brady, Gina Ochsner & Marjorie Sandor

Catherine Brady is the author of three short story collections, including Curled in the Bed of Love, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and The Mechanics of Falling, winner of the Northern California Book Award for Fiction. Her stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories. She's also the author of a book on writing craft, Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction, and a biography of a Nobel laureate, Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres: Deciphering the Ends of DNA. She is the academic director of the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco and is currently at work on a novel.

Gina Ochsner has received awards from the John L. Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment of Arts. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Glimmertrain and the Kenyon Review. She won the Oregon Book Award for her short story collection, The Necessary Grace to Fall, which also received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and the story collection, People I Wanted to Be. Her latest work, a novel, is entitled The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight.  She lives in Keizer, Oregon, and divides her time between writing and teaching with the Seattle Pacific Low-Residency MFA program.

Marjorie Sandor is the author of four books, including The Late Interiors: A Life Under Construction, and the 2004 Winner of the National Jewish Book Award in Fiction, Portrait of my Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime: Stories. The Night Gardener: A Search for Home won the 2000 Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in such magazines as the Georgia Review, AGNI, and TriQuarterly, as well as in Best American Short Stories 1985 and 1988, The Pushcart Prize XIII, Twenty Under Thirty, The Best American Spiritual Writing 2000, and other anthologies. She teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

View PDF

August 2012

Wednesday, August 15, 7:30 PM

Lynnell Edwards & Joseph Green

Lynnell Major Edwards is the author of three collections of poetry, The Farmer’s Daughter (2003), The Highwayman’s Wife (2007), and most recently Covet (2011), all from Red Hen Press. Her short fiction and book reviews have appeared most recently in Connecticut Review, American Book Review, Pleiades, New Madrid, and others. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky where she is on the Board of Directors for Louisville Literary Arts, a non-profit organization that sponsors the monthly InKY reading series and The Writer’s Block Festival. She is also Associate Professor of English at Spalding University. Prior to that she was Professor of English at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon.   She also teaches creative writing at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and is available for readings and workshops in a variety of settings. 

Joseph Green’s books of poems include Deluxe Motel (The Signpost Press, 1991) and four chapbooks: His Inadequate Vocabulary (The Signpost Press, 1986), Greatest Hits: 1975-2000 (Pudding House Press, 2001), The End of Forgiveness (Floating Bridge Press, 2001), and That Thread Still Connecting Us (Moon Path Press, 2012). He was PEN Northwest’s Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writer for 2000, and in 2002 he held a residency at Fundación Valparaiso, in Mojacar, Spain. Through his own printing operation, The Peasandcues Press, he and his wife, Marquita produce limited-edition, letterpress-printed poetry broadsides, using hand-set metal type; and at the C.C. Stern Type Foundry, in Portland, he is part of a team working to preserve the craft of casting the type itself. He lives in Longview, Washington, where he retired from teaching at Lower Columbia College. 

View PDF