Five amazing poets.
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Dara Barrois/Dixon (formerly Dara Wier) was born in Louisiana on December 30, 1949. She received her MFA in 1974 from Bowling Green State University.
Barrois/Dixon is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina (Wave Books, 2022); In the Still of the Night (Wave Books, 2017); You Good Thing (Wave Books, 2013); Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2009); Remnants of Hannah (Wave Books, 2006); Reverse Rapture (Wave Books, 2005), which received the 2006 San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award; Hat On a Pond (Wave Books, 2002); Voyages in English (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001); Our Master Plan (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998), which received the Phi Beta Kappa Award; Blue for the Plough (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1992); The Book of Knowledge (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1988); All You Have in Common (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1984); The 8-Step Grapevine (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1980); and Blood, Hook & Eye (University of Texas Press, 1977).
About Barrois/Dixon’s work, John Ashbery has said:
It may not be for the faint of heart—most intense experiences aren’t—but those who stay with it will find themselves face to face with a world whose eerily sharp focus suggests recent satellite photographs of Mars. And they will never be the same again.
The Harvard Review has published the following about her work:
Recalling at moments the philosophical comedy of Wallace Stevens and Wislawa Szymborska, many of Wier’s colloquial stanzas draw a reader away from a recognizable world into one in which women waltz with bears, houseflies chat with colonels, and the absence of sound makes a material presence.
Barrois/Dixon’s work has been included in recent volumes of Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her poetry has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and American Poetry Review. In 2005, she held the Rubin Distinguished Chair at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. She has been poet in residence at the University of Montana, the University of Texas at Austin, Emory University, and the University of Utah.
Barrois/Dixon lives and works in Factory Hollow in Greenfield, Massachusetts.Description text goes here
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Emily Kendal Frey is the author of Lovability (Fonograf Editions, 2021); Sorrow Arrow (Octopus Books, 2014), winner of the 2015 Oregon Book Award for Poetry; and The Grief Performance (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011).
Frey is a teacher and therapist and lives in Portland, Oregon.
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Juleen Eun Sun Johnson is an interdisciplinary BIPOC writer and artist. Johnson was born in Seoul, South Korea. She was adopted at three and taken to Valdez, Alaska. Johnson earned an MFA in Visual Studies from PNCA and an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Fellowship. Johnson is also a 2023 recipient of the Cannon Beach Art Association Grant for art and writing.
Johnson’s work has been published in: The Rio Grande Review, Whiskey Island Magazine, The Dunes Review, Poetry Northwest and other journals and anthologies. Her poem won the Zone 3 Press Prize for Poetry. Johnson’s poems have been nominated for the Best of Net. She is the founder and editor of Trestle Ties: A Landscape of Emergence.
Her debut chapbook, “Topography of Materials” was published by Bottlecap Press in 2023.
Johnson lives in Astoria, OR with her husband Aaron and two cats (Tobias and Bruce).
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John Morrison earned his MFA from the University of Alabama and received the 2003 C. Hamilton Bailey Poetry Fellowship from Literary Arts. His book, Heaven of the Moment, won the 2006 Rhea & Seymour Gorsline Poetry Competition and was a finalist for the 2008 Oregon Book Award in poetry. His poems have appeared in numerous national literary journals, including the Cimarron Review, Poetry East, Southern Poetry Review, and Poet Lore. He has taught poetry at the University of Alabama, Washington State University, Vancouver, and the Attic Writers Workshop in Portland, Oregon.
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Zachary Schomburg’s most recent book of poems is called Fjords v2, and he also wrote a novel called Mammother. He’s a painter, an illustrator, and a publisher of a small independent press, Octopus Books. He lives in PDX, OR with B and Y.