Kim Stafford is a writer in Oregon who teaches and travels to raise the human spirit. He founded the Northwest Writing Institute in 1986, and co-founded the Fishtrap Writers Gathering in 1987. He is the author of a dozen books of poetry a prose, including Having Everything Right: Essays of Place, and Singer Come from Afar.

In our time is a great thing not yet done--it is the marriage of Woody Guthrie's gusto and the Internet. It is the composing and wide sharing of stories, poems, songs, and blessings by those with voice, for those with need.

In 2018, Gov. Kate Brown named him Oregon's ninth poet laureate, and he visited over a hundred groups statewide to share the reading and writing of poetry.

Why write poems in a time of technology and haste? Writing a poem can help us slow down, think, wonder, notice, and jot a few words to improve our sense of well-being. And writing deepens our connection with the inner life, with each other, and with the Earth.

He has taught writing in dozens of schools and colleges, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan.

All around us, daily news inflicts attrition because it is incomplete--it gives facts, events, quotations, but without offering meaning. Writing a poem can ease this injury, providing a way to "talk back to all that darkness" by exploring questions, offering remedies, and making connections between what we have experienced and what we might say.

Ann Stinson grew up near Toledo, Washington. After high school, her interests took her to Japan, New York City, and Portland, Oregon. She earned a BA in English from Western Washington University and a MA in East Asian Languages and Culture from Columbia University. A former school teacher, she is president of the Family Forest Foundation and is on the board of the Washington Farm Forestry Association.

Ann Stinson writes about life on a working forest in SW Washington State in her first book, The Ground at My Feet: Sustaining a Family and a Forest. It was published by Oregon State University Press in November 2021 and a finalist for the Oregon Book Award.

Jessica Gigot, PhD, is a poet, farmer, and coach. She lives on a little sheep farm in the Skagit Valley. Her second book of poems, Feeding Hour (Wandering Aengus Press, 2020) was a finalist for the 2021 Washington State Book Award. Jessica’s writing and reviews appear in several publications, such as Orion, The New York Times, The Seattle Times, Ecotone, Terrain.org, Gastronomica, Crab Creek Review, and Poetry Northwest. Her award-winning memoir, A Little Bit of Land, was published by Oregon State University Press in September 2022.

Eric Tran (he/him) is a queer Vietnamese poet and the author of Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke, winner of the Oregon Book Award and finalist for the Thom Gunn Award, and The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer. His poetry has been featured in All Things Considered, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Best of the Net, among other publications. He is a psychiatrist in Portland, OR and co-organizes PDX Queer Asian Social Meet-Up.

Njelle Hamilton (a/k/a Njara) (she/her) is a Jamaican singer, songwriter, storyteller and scholar. She teaches and writes literary criticism on contemporary Caribbean novels and narrative theory by day. But at night and on weekends she moonlights as a novelist, in a quest to recover her writing voice from academese. She is working on a novel, Everything Irie, as well as a monograph about Caribbean time travel sci-fi. She lives in Charlottesville with her plastic plants and enjoys relaxing on her fake tropical oasis balcony, ‘Fauxhemia.’

Koye Oyedeji (he/him) is a fiction and non-fiction creative based in Washington D.C. His work is often centered around the black diaspora. His writings have appeared in a number of publications including Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, Wasafiri Magazine, The Believer and elsewhere. His past fiction fellowships include the Callaloo Writer's Workshop and VONA writing workshop, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship at the Sewanee Writers Conference and a Work Study Scholarship at the 2016 Bread Loaf Writers Conference. He has taught at American University and the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. He is currently working on a composite novel and a novel.

Joanne McNeil is the author of the novel WRONG WAY (2023) and LURKING (2020). She was the inaugural winner of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation's Arts Writing Award for an emerging writer. She has been a resident at Eyebeam, a Logan Nonfiction Program fellow, recipient of the Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation.

She's currently working on another nonfiction book, TOO EARLY FOR THE FUTURE, on the practice and history of speculating on the future.

For years, Teresa has passed from one job to the next, settling into long stretches of time, struggling to build her career in any field or unstick herself from an endless cycle of labor. The dreaded move from one gig to another is starting to feel unbearable. When a recruiter connects her with a contract position at AllOver, it appears to check all her prerequisites for a “good” job. It’s a fintech corporation with progressive hiring policies and a social justice-minded mission statement. Their new service for premium members: a functional fleet of driverless cars. The future of transportation. As her new-hire orientation reveals, the distance between AllOver’s claims and its actions is wide, but the lure of financial stability and a flexible schedule is enough to keep Teresa driving forward.

Joanne McNeil, who often reports on how the human experience intersects with labor and technology brings blazing compassion and criticism to Wrong Way, examining the treacherous gaps between the working and middle classes wrought by the age of AI. Within these divides, McNeil turns the unsaid into the unignorable, and captures the existential perils imposed by a nonstop, full-service gig economy.

Top 20 Books of 2023, Esquire

Best Books of 2023, The New Yorker

Endless Bookshelf Book of the Year

Esquire Book Club Pick

“Joanne McNeil’s masterful debut is a powerful example of what the contemporary novel can and should be in our endlessly perplexing times.” ―Tim Maughan, author of Infinite Detail

“No one understands the dark side of the gifts offered by billionaire tech gurus better than Joanne McNeil. With Wrong Way, our most prescient tech critic has turned to fiction, giving us a glimpse of a near future defined less by wondrous new gadgets and genius AI than by with the pretense of innovation slapped on ever more alienating work done by people who remain, despite everything, human. In prose at times dreamy and lacerating, McNeil shows us what’s coming, and how easily we might wind up accepting it.”

―Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won’t Love You Back

"A strange, surprising, and sinister kaleidoscope of a novel. Joanne McNeil, with a dazzling wit and eye for detail, guides us through a capitalist gig-economy world both relatable and startlingly visionary. WRONG WAY stands out sparklingly from the crowd of current novels. I found myself describing it, recommending it, to a person on the subway I barely knew. I really love this book.”

—Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin

"With her signature mix of intelligent, tender, and engaging prose, Joanne McNeil has written a brilliant novel in Wrong Way, which interrogates the promises of the tech utopia through the lives of the invisible labor behind the hype."

—Zito Madu, author of The Minotaur at Calla Lanza

"Wrong Way is a chilling portrait of economic precarity, and a disturbing reminder of how attempts to optimize life and work leave us all alienated."

―Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire

"[A] smart debut novel...By creating a predicament for her protagonist that could soon resemble ones we'll face, McNeil creates a compelling examination of work and our relationship to it."

—Booklist

Courtney Stanton is an extravagantly queer trans man whose writing has previously appeared in Buzzfeed, Jezebel, Wired, and more quote-tweets than he would prefer. He spent 2020 driving an ambulance, 2021 recovering from that experience, and he's spending 2022 producing zines of poetry, most recently Schatzi. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his husband, two cats, and a few plants that insist on living despite his best efforts.

Visit him on Instagram @mrcourtneystanton to know when the next zine will be released.

Liz Asch is a writer, visual artist, and creative embodiment instructor. She holds a BA from Vassar, an MFA in Creative Nonfiction, and a Masters in Chinese Medicine. Liz hosts Body Land Metaphor Medicine, a collection of surrealist guided visualizations you can listen to on your podcast apps. Liz writes literary erotica, lyric essays, poetry, meditations, and explorations on visual art. An intellectual sensualist, she believes in seeking new ways to grant ourselves permission to become who we are meant to be. Her short story collection, Your Salt on My Lips: (Mostly) Queer Literary Erotica (Cleis Press, 2021) was celebrated as "reinventing the genre of erotica" and "erotica at its best."

Sara Jaffe is a writer living in Portland, OR. Hurricane Envy, a short story collection, is forthcoming in 2026 from Rescue Press. Dryland, a novel, was published by Tin House Books and Cipher Press (UK ). Her short fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared or are upcoming in publications including Catapult, Fence, BOMB, NOON, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She co-edited The Art of Touring (Yeti, 2009), an anthology of writing and visual art by musicians drawing on her experience as guitarist for post-punk band Erase Errata.

Sara holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, RADAR Productions, and the Regional Arts and Culture Council. She is also co-founding editor of New Herring Press, a publisher of prose chapbooks. She teaches creative writing at Reed College and as part of the Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Low-Residency Creative Writing MFA.

Martha Shelley is a longtime political activist from Brooklyn. After the Stonewall Riot, she organized a protest march that morphed into today’s pride parades, and she was one of the founders of the Gay Liberation Front. Her essays, poetry, and short stories have appeared in many anthologies. She has published three novels and four books of poetry. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Joni Renee Whitworth (he/they) is a poet, experimental filmmaker, and curator from Oregon.

They have performed at The Moth, the Segerstrom Center for the Performing Arts, and the Museum of Contemporary Art alongside Marina Abramovic. ​Whitworth served as the inaugural Artist in Residence at Portland Parks and Recreation, Poet in Residence for Oregon State University's Trillium Project, and 2020 Queer Hero for the Gay & Lesbian Archives of the Pacific Northwest. They are currently a New Media Fellow at ​​Portland Art Museum’s Center for an Untold Tomorrow. They were a 2021 Fellow at Lambda Literary and a 2019 and 2020 Fellow at Tin House.

They work at the intersection art, performance, and activism, with a focus on queer and neurodivergent perspectives and themes. They've given lectures, participated in panel discussions, founded a non-profit queer art museum and artist collective, been a teaching artist for a youth program, and hosted a podcast about the future of art and culture. Additionally, they have written and performed several plays and participated in a variety of performances and art installations that deal with issues of mental health and neurodivergence, queer culture and the intersection of spirituality, technology and body consciousness.

Their writing explores themes of nature, future, family, and the neurodivergent body, and has appeared in Lambda Literary, Tin House, Oregon Humanities, Proximity Magazine, Seventeen Magazine, Eclectica, Pivot, SWWIM, Smeuse, Superstition Review, xoJane, Inverted Syntax, Unearthed Literary Journal, Sinister Wisdom, Dime Show Review, the Oregonian, and The Write Launch. They are currently working on slipstream climate fiction.

Patrick Dundon is the author of the chapbook The Conspirators of Pleasure (Sixth Finch Books). He holds an MFA from Syracuse University and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Witness, The Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, OR where he serves as an editor for the Burnside Review and is working on a novel.

Donal Mosher is a photographer and filmmaker, occasional writer and musician.

Co-director at Wishbone Films with Mike Palmieri.

Joshua Barnhart (he/they) is a poet, educator, and musician from the central coast of California who performs under the name Strange Pilgrim. Their debut album is available on Royal Oakie Records. They've published their first chapbook, Paper Ghosts, with Bottlecap Press, and their work has been featured in Blue Mountain Review and The Coachella Review. With a BA in English from UC Berkeley and an MFA from Oregon State University, Josh now resides in Portland, OR. Follow them on IG @joshuabarnhart & @strangepilgrimband.

Ben Kassoy (he/him) is a strawberry spinning like a dreidel. His debut chapbook, The Funny Thing About A Panic Attack, is available now, and his poetry has appeared in Ghost City Review, JMWW, Defunct Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Cobra Milk, Bodega, Sky Island Journal, and others. Follow Ben on IG @bkassoy, and learn more at www.benkassoy.com/books.

Cee Chávez is the court jester by day and moonlights as your child’s favorite teacher. Their debut chapbook, Directions for Deliverance (Bottlecap Press, 2023), draws readers into an intimate world where the body is a conduit for distraction, exploration, pleasure, and healing. Their poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Sundress Publications, The Acentos Review, Isele Magazine, East French Press, and elsewhere. Their recent projects integrate photography, illustration, and archival documents to explore their current obsessions: the body, death, gender, family, and how they influence and inform one another.

Alissa Schwartz, MSW, PhD, Principal of Solid Fire Consulting, is a master facilitator and organizational culture builder with over 25 years of experience working with groups. She is co-editor and chapter author of a special issue of New Directions in Evaluation that focuses on the intersectionalities of evaluation and facilitation and holds a PhD from Columbia University, where she studied organizational psychology and behavior.

In an earlier iteration of her ongoing fascination with group process, Alissa created and directed avant-garde theater and performance. This early influence sneakily shows up in her current consulting work, as well.

Alissa is based out of Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, where she parents, grandparents, bikes, practices yoga, and occasionally performs with Bread & Puppet Theater and in her own work. Learn more about her work and writing at www.solidfireconsulting.com.

Organizational Performance Art is a holding space art. Holding space is witnessing. Witnessing is performing. Performing is playing. Playing is dancing. Dancing is delighting. Delighting is co-creating the conditions for thriving and liberation. And that is what it’s all about.

“Organizational Performance Art is a radical approach to transforming organizations.”

— Robert Gass, EdD, co-founder, Rockwood Leadership Institute

The workplace, in both its physical and virtual manifestations, offers productive possibilities and space for joy. Organizational Performance Art: Holding Space for Joy and Possibility is a vibrant memoir and inspirational manual that examines how the concepts and practices of several performance arts traditions and philosophies—avant-garde theater, social constructionism, and shamanic practice—support organizations and communities in communal thriving and liberation.

An artistic stance towards organizational change does not just offer band-aid solutions to complex challenges; it is a way of harnessing imagination and a willingness to dance with the unknown in service to social justice and equity. Organizational Performance Art shows how to turn drab workplace routine into creative performance, isolation into positive connectivity, anxiety into openness, and hierarchal rigidity into collaborative teamwork.

In a world teeming with trauma and inequity, Schwartz offers her readers space to thrive. To imagine. To dance.

“Organizational Performance Art is a radical approach to transforming organizations. Alissa brings her ideas to life with stories from theater, performance art, political protest, parenting, shamanism, and her work with organizations to challenge the frames and limitations of traditional organizational development. We are invited to be and work in ways that are more collaborative, real, present, intuitive, uncertain, passionate, and emergent. Open the book, open your senses, and come take the journey!”

— Robert Gass, EdD, co-founder, Rockwood Leadership Institute

“Organizational Performance Art is a delightful tribute to Alissa Schwartz’s rich journey and powerful work—dancing between worlds. It is an inspiration to those of us who aspire to make visible the creative and caring potential in all social systems.”

— Arawana Hayashi, Director of Social Presencing Theater at the Presencing Institute

“Organizational Performance Art is grounded in the body, and also it is more than the body. It is a metaphor for tending to the complexity of an organization as a container for collective sense-making and action.”

— from the foreword by Susan Misra, principal of Aurora Commons and co-author of Influencing Complex Systems Change

“Alissa’s visceral joy in working with groups is ever present. She pulls away the fourth wall and welcomes us in. She takes us through homes, fields, workplaces, stages, and beaches, inviting us to be authentic in each of them, even when it is uncomfortable. In a time when old masks are crumbling and organizational structures are in dire need of change, Alissa shows us how to embrace the unknown and step into an unpredictable and ultimately more connected way of being together.”

— Helen Klonaris, author, If I Had the Wings

Andrew Drury has been called “one of the most adventurous drummer/percussionists in creative music today, and a dedicated humanitarian,” (Karl Ackerman, All About Jazz). Growing up in the Seattle area, Drury moved East in 1983 to mentor with the legendary Jazz drummer Ed Blackwell and since then has worked with great artists, well-known and obscure, in 30 countries and on over 80 recordings, including (D)ruminations for Edward Blackwell by the percussion quintet, The Forest. Drury is founding Artistic Director of Continuum Culture & Arts, a non-profit organization that presents concerts and workshops internationally, including an ongoing partnership in Seattle with the Low Income Housing Institute. Andrew has given workshops and masterclasses at 20 universities on three continents and later in November will lead an online course on Ed Blackwell through Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Swing University program. He is recipient of the “2023 Brooklyn Jazz Hero” Award from the Jazz Journalists Association. www.andrewdrurymusic.com

The Institute of American Indian Arts (formally known as the Institute of American Indian and Alaska Native Culture and Arts Development) is one of 37 tribal colleges in the United States. IAIA is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) and is a member of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC).

Established as a high school in 1962 under the leadership of Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee), Dr. George Boyce, and others, IAIA embodied a revolutionary approach to arts education. Now, sixty years later, we continue to fill a vital role as the only fine arts college in the world dedicated to the study of contemporary Native American and Alaskan Native arts.

Over the past six decades, IAIA’s influence on the art world has been monumental. “From the start of the Institute of American Indian Arts, students were encouraged to experiment,” says IAIA President Dr. Robert Martin (Cherokee Nation). “The boundaries were limitless. Our students were taught to develop their artistic style without being bound by tradition or history.” According to Dr. Martin, what makes IAIA a noteworthy institution is its student body, which enriches the campus community with its diversity, creativity, talents, and passion. “What I’ve admired most during my tenure here is observing the evolution of our students’ creativity and the ways in which they learn to take risks and manifest other leadership qualities while advancing their artistic expression.”

Carla Crujido is the Nonfiction Editor at River Styx Magazine. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and has had writing published in Crazyhorse, Yellow Medicine Review, Ricepaper Magazine, Tinfish Press, The Ana, and elsewhere. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Stacie Denetsosie is a citizen of the Navajo Nation her clans are Todích'íí'nii (Bitterwater Clan), born for Naakaii (Mexican Clan). She is from Kayenta, Arizona but currently resides in Northern Utah. She is a recipient of the UCROSS Native American Fellowship. Stacie graduated with her MFA in Fiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2021. Her work has appeared in Yellow Medicine Review, Phoebe Magazine, and Cut Bank. Her debut story collection, The Missing Morningstar and Other Stories, received a Kirkus Star.

Deborah Jackson Taffa is the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing at IAIA (Institute of American Indian Arts) in Santa Fe, NM. Her memoir, WHISKEY TENDER, was named one of the most anticipated books to watch for in 2024 by Zibby Media. She has won fellowships and grants from PEN America, MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Rona Jaffe, Tin House, A Public Space, the Ellen Meloy Fund, the Kranzberg Arts Foundaion, and the NY State Summer Writer’s Institute.

A citizen of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo, Deborah earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Prior to her job at IAIA, she taught Creative Nonfiction at Webster University and Washington University in Saint Louis. She also served as an Executive Board Member with the Missouri Humanities Council where she was instrumental in creating a Native American Heritage Program in the state.

She serves as the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine, River Styx. Her writing can be found at The Rumpus, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, A Public Space, Salon, Huff Post, Prairie Schooner, The Best Travel Writing, The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, as well as other places. Her play, “Parents Weekend,” was performed at the Autry Theater’s 8th Annual Short Play Festival in Los Angeles in 2018, and “Digadohi,” a documentary she co-wrote with Stratigraphic Productions, can be found streaming on local PBS channels.

As a performer, Deborah has had the incredible honor of reading a series of poetic interludes for the Chaco Symphony featuring the Grammy nominated flautist, R. Carlos Nakai. She will be performing again with the symphony in Durango, Colorado, on March 15, 2024. She can be reached at deborah.taffa@iaia.edu or followed on Twitter @deborahtaffa.

Jennifer Fliss (she/her) is the writer of the story collections As If She Had a Say (2023) and The Predatory Animal Ball (2021.) Her writing has appeared in F(r)iction, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She can be found on Twitter at @writesforlife or via her website, www.jenniferflisscreative.com.

Michelle Kicherer covers books and music for The San Francisco Chronicle and Willamette Week. She is a writing coach and teaches for Literary Arts, Portland Community College and The Attic Institute. Michelle aims to have one weird new experience everyday.

Who has a right to tell us how to experience our grief? How to perform—or not perform—the roles society prescribes to us based on our various points of identity?

As If She Had a Say, the second story collection from Jennifer Fliss, uses an absurdist lens to showcase characters—predominantly women—plumbing their resources as they navigate misogyny, abuse, and grief. In these stories, a woman melts in the face of her husband’s cruelty; a seven-tablespoons-long woman lives inside a refrigerator and engages in an affair with the man of the house; a balloon-animal artist attends a funeral to discover he was invited as more than entertainment; and a man loses all his nouns.

Fans of Karen Russell and Carmen Maria Machado will appreciate how As If She Had a Say’s inventive narratives expose inequities by taking us on imaginative romps through domesticity and patriarchal expectations. Each story functions as a magnifying glass through which we might examine our own lives and see ourselves more clearly.

“Inventive, witty, and bracingly true, As If She Had a Say made me laugh, made my heart drop, and made me think deeply about the ways women must navigate a world that is not made for us. These are sneaky stories that got under my skin in the way the best art can, ever expanding to reveal new layers of meaning and depth. Unforgettable and most certainly what I want to be reading now. Fliss is all-seeing, a fearless noticer, and exactly the right person to deliver us to the heart of what matters, and to ourselves.” —Chelsea Bieker, author of Godshot and Heartbroke

“The stories in As If She Had a Say are beautifully written and pack a tremendous punch. Fliss’s use of absurdism and speculative technique juxtaposed with hyperrealist details and storytelling are captivating. This is a resonant collection that doesn’t shy away from darkness but nonetheless remains relatable and poignant throughout.” —Kimberly Lojewski, author of Worm Fiddling Nocturne in the Key of a Broken Heart: Stories

Adesina (uh-day-sin-uh) is a biracial Black Trinidadian and white queer, non-binary, 22-year-old person. They were raised on unceded Tongva territory (“Los Angeles, CA”) and currently resides on unceded Chinook territority (“Portland, OR”).

Their work has been featured in Minola Review, Rigorous Magazine, Exposition Review, and more. Where the Rain Cannot Reach, Book One of Doman’s Despair, is their debut fantasy novel, published by Atmosphere Press in December 2021. They are currently creating a poetry collection and a new speculative fiction series. They are also an editor for Perennial Press and a Room Collective member, after having been a mentee to Téa Mutonji in the Room Magazine 2021 Mentor-In-Residence Program. On the rare occasion they are not writing, editing, or reading (follow their GoodReads and StoryGraph accounts!), they like to care for their plants, listen to music, and rest.

Tair has never known what it means to belong. Abandoned at a young age and raised in the all-Elven valley of Mirte, the young Human defines herself by isolation, confined to her small, seemingly trustworthy family.

Abruptly, that family uproots her from Mirte and leads her on an inevitable but treacherous journey to Doman: the previous site of unspeakable Human atrocities and the current home of Dwarvenkind. Though Doman offers Tair new definitions of family and love, it also reveals to her that her very existence is founded in lies. Now, tasked with an awful responsibility to the Humans of Sossoa, Tair must decide where her loyalties lie and, in the process, discover who she wants to be... And who she has always been.

In their debut fantasy novel Where the Rain Cannot Reach, Adesina Brown constructs a world rich with new languages and nuanced considerations of gender and race, ultimately contemplating how, in freeing ourselves from power, we may find true belonging.

Justine Chan is a poet, writer, and singer-songwriter from Chicago. Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Baltimore Review, Beecher's, Booth, Poetry on Buses, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington and has worked many seasons as a park ranger with the National Park Service. She currently lives in Seattle. For more information, visit justinechan.com.

Miranda Schmidt is a writer living in Portland, Oregon whose work circles around the folkloric, the familial, queer magic, and the more-than-human world. Their writing has appeared in Triquarterly, Orion, Electric Literature, Catapult, and more. She has received support from the Lambda Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Writers and Bread Loaf Environmental Conference and taught creative writing at the Portland Book Festival, the Loft, the University of Washington, and Portland Community College. A current PhD candidate at work on a novel, Miranda shares adventures with two mischievous cat companions and a truly magical child.

Timmy Straw’s poems, essays, and translations appear in Yale Review, Jacket2, Paris Review, Annulet, Chicago Review, and elsewhere, and their work has been supported by a Fulbright research fellowship to Moscow, an Iowa Arts Fellowship, and a Postgraduate Visiting Writer Fellowship at the University of Iowa. A graduate student in Comp Lit at Penn, they are also working on translations of the contemporary Russian poet Grigori Dashevsky.

The Thomas Salto takes its name from a difficult and dangerous move in gymnastics, a leaping triple flip popularized during the last years of the Cold War. Both in its Reagan-grained historicity, and in the human body that bears the leap’s flight and risk, the Thomas salto is a kinetic figure for these poems’ action in time and space. They shadow the AIDS epidemic, the war on drugs, the US proxy wars in Central America, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, the Soviet collapse—not as history but as the camouflage-pattern of “then” and “to come” which form the flickering and very real habitus of the present.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson is a poet, novelist, filmmaker, and psychotherapist living in the Pacific Northwest. His debut novel, Trouble Finds You, is just out from Fonograf Editions. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including Selenography, Swamp Isthmus, and Meadow Slasher.

Born and raised in Seattle, he graduated from film school in Ireland and has taught in Italy, Turkey, Slovakia, and in MFA programs in Chicago and Tucson.

In 2019 he was the Mellon Writer-in-Residence at Rhodes University in Makhanda, South Africa.

Wilkinson's writing has appeared in Poetry, The Believer, Tin House, Pen America, and in nearly two dozen anthologies. He has edited severalcollections of essays, including a compendium on the work of Anne Carson, Poets on Teaching, and The Force of What's Possible with Lily Hoang.

With Solan Jensen, Wilkinson directed a tour film about the band Califone and, with the late Noah Eli Gordon, he cowrote Figures for a Darkroom Voice.

He has given readings at the Pitchfork Music Festival, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Newport Folk Festival, and in Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin.

A new book of poems, Bad Woods, the final volume of his No Volta pentalogy, is forthcoming next year from Sidebrow.

Contact: joshuamarie at gmail dot com.

To say Harry Stables’s life has hit a bit of a low patch lately is an understatement. In his mid-20s, he’s been kicked out of his MFA program for fighting, his ex-girlfriend turned down his spur-of-the-moment marriage proposal, and he’s spent the last ten days in his dad’s falling-down Montana fishing cabin with his dog Greta trying to find out how his mother really died when he was a baby, something his father – now dying himself of cancer – has refused to tell either him or his sister their whole lives. On top of all this, he’s just been to a party outside Missoula where he received a nasty dog bite and where he may have been an accessory to a fatal shooting. Ignoring the advice of both his sister and Calvin Hogan – fishing guide, old friend of his father’s, and companion to the lovable mutt Herkimer – Harry first tries to untangle the details of the shooting himself and eventually winds up on the lam, pursued by persecutors both real and imagined. As the cops and the accumulated psychic weight of his actions bears down on him, Harry must ultimately reckon with what sort of man he will be.

According to George Saunders, “literature is a form of fondness-for-life. It is love for life taking verbal form” and so it is with Trouble Finds You, a modern-day Portis-like quixotic road trip replete with stumbling beauty and searing folly. Set against the beauty of the American West, this is a novel of many colors: a thriller, a mystery, a coming-of-age story, and a family drama. It is populated with characters – these men and their excellent dogs – who are sometimes frustrating, frequently stupid, often funny, but always full of life. Harry Stables bears more than a passing resemblance to the Coen brothers’ Llewyn Davis, a lovable curmudgeon committed to a quest of his own design.

Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Breaking, Navigation, 40 Weeks, Daughters, and most recently, Solastalgia, a collection of poems exploring climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene age. Brittney was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon for the past three decades, where she is an alumna and employee of Reed College. She is currently at work on her first short story collection.

Claire Wahmanholm received her BA from UW-Madison, her MFA from the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University, and her PhD from the University of Utah. Her chapbook, Night Vision, won the 2017 New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM chapbook contest. Her debut full-length collection, Wilder (Milkweed Editions), won the 2018 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, the Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the 2019 Minnesota Book Award. Her second collection, Redmouth, was published with Tinderbox Editions in 2019. Her third collection, Meltwater, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2023. A 2020-2021 McKnight Writing Fellow, her poems have most recently appeared in, or are forthcoming from, TriQuarterly, Ninth Letter, Blackbird, Washington Square Review, Copper Nickel, Beloit Poetry Journal, Grist, RHINO, The Los Angeles Review, Fairy Tale Review, Bennington Review, DIAGRAM, The Journal, and The Kenyon Review Online, and have been featured by the Academy of American Poets. She lives in the Twin Cities.

Andrea Carlisle is the author of The Riverhouse Stories and A River Runs Under It: Forty Years on a Houseboat in Oregon. Short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Yes, McSweeney’s, Catamaran, J Journal (John Jay College CUNY), So to Speak (George Mason University), Northwest Review, Calyx, The Ledge, Oasis, Texas Observer, Willow Springs, Seattle Weekly, Mountain Living, Funny Times, The Oregonian, Kaleidoscope and various other publications, both regional (Northwest) and national. Her poem, "Emily Dickinson's To-Do List," has appeared in four anthologies, including Visiting Emily: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Emily Dickinson, edited by Sheila Coghill and Thom Tammaro, published by the University of Iowa Press. Her essay "The Full Bronte” appeared in A Woman's Europe, a collection of essays by women travelers published by Travelers' Tales.

Judith Barrington’s Lifesaving: A Memoir was the winner of the Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. She is also the author of the best-selling Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art. Short memoirs have been published in many literary journals including Creative Nonfiction, Narrative, Prime Number, Catamaran Literary Reader, and have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Other awards include the grand prize in Creative Nonfiction’s Summer, 2016 issue for “The Walk Home.” She has been a faculty member of the University of Alaska, Anchorage’s low-residency MFA Program, and has taught memoir and poetry at many workshops and universities. She has also published six collections of poetry, most recently Long Love: New & Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2018).

Andrea Carlisle isn’t struggling with her new identity as the Old Woman in the ways society seems to think she should. In fact, she is finding her later years to be an extraordinary and interesting time. In trying to understand the discrepancy, she interrogates the sources of negativity in literature, art, and received wisdom that often lead women to dread this transformative time of life. Given the cultural pervasiveness of ill will toward older women, it is small wonder that growing older is not seen as a natural, even desirable, process. Although some elements of aging are hard to reckon with, there is much to make use of and delight in, along with mysteries, surprises, and revelations.

In these personal essays, Carlisle looks for new ways to bring herself more fully to this time of life, such as daily walks with other women and connecting to the natural world that surrounds her houseboat on an Oregon river at the foot of a forest. She writes about experiences shared with many, if not most, older women: wondering at her body’s transformation, discovering new talents, caregiving, facing loss, tuning in to life patterns and drawing strength through understanding them, letting go (or not) of pieces of the past, and facing other changes large and small.

Those curious about, approaching, or living in old age will find wisdom and insight in her unique perspective. In a voice that rings with clarity, humor, and humility, Carlisle shows us that old age is not another country where we can expect to find the Old Woman grimly waiting, but is instead an expansion of the borders in the country we’re most familiar with: ourselves.

Praise For…

“There Was an Old Woman is neither a memoir nor an angry fist-shaking rejection of the stereotypes, but instead a clear-eyed, moving, personal exploration of what it means to be growing older.” — Molly Gloss, author of The Jump-Off Creek and The Hearts of Horses

"Andrea Carlisle's glorious wry wit and brilliant wisdom have always lit up her readers and listeners so thoroughly that we stand in line waiting for her new book with greatest joy and gusto—as you might stand at an old-fashioned train station trembling to see your long lost loved one coming home at last." —Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners and The Tiny Journalist

Jonah Barnett is a genderqueer author, ex-filmmaker, art archivist, and multimedia-ish artist from the forests of Tenino, Washington. They take inspiration from their life in the mossy Pacific Northwest—with a love of prehistory, libraries, abandoned buildings, the sea, vast plains, and the weirde and fantastique. Jonah often releases content under the moniker “Malicious Wallydrags,” which is an old Tumblr URL, and that should explain enough, to be honest.

Jonah’s storytelling history reaches back all the way to the age of four, when they asked their parents to set up the family camcorder for them so they could act out Jurassic Park scenes with toys. They went on to learn stop-motion at age six (albeit it wasn’t very good) and began writing stories the following year. Almost every story, no matter what medium, featured dinosaurs in one form or another. They wrote their first script at age eleven on an old Corona-Smith typewriter–although again, it wasn’t very good (and also featured dinosaurs). Going on to create their own webseries in high school, Jonah received a Young Playwright’s Award in 2011 for a gay-themed one act in Seattle. In 2015 Jonah released their debut feature film, The Fabricated Partner of Cody McGuire, in collaboration with Jacob Earl of Save the Croissants, while simultaneously debuting their artist moniker “Malicious Wallydrags.” Overall, Jonah has directed and written three feature films, a dozen-ish short films, and four web series—with their film work being presented at the Olympia Film Festival, Northwest Film Forum, Grand Cinema, and Trans Stellar Film Festival. Their debut book, Moss-Covered Claws, came out from Blue Cactus Press in March 2021, and is being reissued in Fall 2023. It is essentially about gay people running around in forests being chased by monsters. Unlike the stop-motion and the typewriter script, it is actually pretty good. There is one dinosaur in it, though. Jonah has also been published in the Forest Avenue Press collections Dispatches From Anarres and City of Weird.

Moss-Covered Claws, the debut short story collection from fantasy author Jonah Barnett, is filled with tales of anxiety-feeding demons, anti-fascists that travel dimensions, and the vengeful spirits of dead seabirds. Barnett mashes dreams and reality together in these ten macabre tales of speculative fiction. They offer a fresh, cheeky voice to Queer fiction and fantasy, delivered in this multiverse of forgotten dreams and broken promises. Moss-Covered Claws is a reminder that the Pacific Northwest is not known for its sunny days, but rather an overcast world of soaking gloom. From the salty beaches of the West Coast to foreboding forests in alternate timelines, from red light districts of 1906 San Fransisco to the childhood room of a troubled youth, creatures weirde and fantastique ooze out from the pages of Barnett's worlds. For the faint of heart, don't worry, Barnett's stories - though dark and heady - will always leave you with a sense of hope.

"In shiveringly beautiful prose, Colleen Burner maps a wild voyage into grief, love, and radical forms of kinship. Their novel unstitches the fixed seams of self and stranger, inviting us to touch the peculiar, precise commotions that link one creature to another. A truly extraordinary book."

—Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks

"Sister Golden Calf is my favorite kind of novel: compact and meditative, delightfully strange, elegiac but awash in warm light and the promise of ineffable treasure in each sentence. Amid the variegated desert landscape and seductive kismet of the open road, the sisters face questions of longing and belonging, of how to care for each other and themselves, and of what artifacts to carry as they carry on. Colleen Burner has stolen my heart with this novel."

—Alexis Smith, author of Marrow Island and Glaciers

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"I was blown away by Sister Golden Calf, a wise and brutally intimate exploration of sisterhood and grief and the bonds that tie us to each other. Magical and hypnotic, poetic and fierce, every line contains a universe, and nothing is spared. Gloria and Kit will stay with me for a long time. Colleen Burner is an unmistakable talent."

—Chelsea Bieker, author of Godshot and Heartbroke

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"In Colleen Burner's stunning debut novella, Sister Golden Calf, a pair of sisters roam the New Mexico deserts with their beloved mother's cremains, their only plan: 'burying bits of her ash and smudging her all over her home state.' These are young women sensitive to the faintest traces of grace and beauty in the world; Burner recreates the usual buddy-buddy road trip as an intensely female narrative of longing and landscape, both metaphysical and sensual, in a gorgeous prose that puts the ineffable into wise words and brings the invisible into illuminating view."

—Tara Ison, author of At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf

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"'When a man steps onto the road, his journey begins. When a woman steps onto that same road, hers ends,' said Vanessa Veselka, in her examination of the absence of female road narratives. Colleen Burner's Sister Golden Calf imagines an otherwise. How would a story move—at what speed, at what gait—and what shape would it take, what mood would it assume, if it followed, not Quixote or Kerouac, but two misfit sisters on the road? Upon the cracked highways of New Mexico, yes, but also the road of grief, of what it means to drive into one's heartbreak and yet keep on living. Sister Golden Calf travels the mysteries of what can't be captured in language and invites us, the hitchhiking reader, with a warm hand and open door, along for the ride."

—David Naimon, host of Between the Covers podcast

Colleen Burner (they/them) is a graduate of the MFA writing program at Portland State University and an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship recipient.

Their short fiction has appeared in Fecund, Old Pal, Black Candies: Gross and Unlikeable, Permafrost, and Quaint. They are a coeditor of surely magazine. They live in Portland, Oregon. Sister Golden Calf is their first book.

Gloria and her sister Kit are in the trade of rehoming invisible ephemera they've captured in jars and now sell on the side of the road (can they interest you in SOMEONE ELSE'S DREAMS, NIGHT GREASE, or WHAT IS LEFT AFTER A STAR EXPLODES?). Motherless and rudderless, the sisters are on a road trip in their '93 Honda Accord across the sunburnt landscape of New Mexico. Restless with grief and doubt, Gloria becomes obsessed with a taxidermied eight-legged calf she meets in a roadside museum, and Kit takes a skeptical pilgrimage to a supposedly holy hole in the dirt floor of a church. The two cross paths with an array of characters, creatures, and places—The Calamity Janes, a roving motorcycle gang; an eyeless horse who reminds Gloria that she can see the unseen; and a ghost town where mysteries abound—in this sprawling and emotionally driven novella where the road is never-ending and sisterhood can be home.