Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Daughters, Breaking, Navigation, 40 Weeks and most recently, Solastalgia, a collection of poems about climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene Age (JackLeg Press, 2023). Brittney was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon for more than three decades, where she is an alumna and employee of Reed College. Her recent debut short story collection, The Ghost Town Collectives, won the 2023 Osprey Award for Fiction from Middle Creek Publishing. For more information, visit www.brittneycorrigan.com.

Elizabeth Costello is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. She works (remotely) as an editor for UC Berkeley and co-founded the ekphraestival, a generative exchange among visual artists and poets that culminates in readings and exhibitions in April, national poetry month. Her publications include arts writing for SF Weekly and 7x7 and the poetry chapbook RELIC. Her debut novel, The Good War, is out from Regal House on January 28 and an audiobook version will be available on February 11. Publishers Weekly describes The Good War as “dark and intense…lyrical…Moody and atmospheric, this gritty tale is worth a look.”

Jo Ann Fawcett is a California native. She has Associate of Arts degrees in film production and Accounting. She is the mother of a successful grown daughter and is the proud grandmother of three. She enjoys reading, needlework, walking, travel, and spending time with the family. She is owned by her Tuxedo cat Winston. 

Jo Ann never aspired to be a writer. In the late 90s she published a community newspaper, writing articles about interesting places to visit and environmental issues. Years later while speaking at a Super Soldier conference about her former husband’s military experiences, an attendee asked her when her next story was coming out. Not her husband’s next story – HER story. Several years later, Jo Ann finally put her story on paper. 

Jo Ann writes from the heart and is grateful for the inspiration that flows to her. She writes matter-of-factly, weaving in her own style of humor. She openly shares her vulnerability. Readers enjoy her honesty and praise her courage to share her story. Through her many struggles, she found her strengths, gifts, and inner power. She learned that dreams can, and do, come true. Today she is a warrior who proudly carries the title, Wise Woman-Crone.

Midlife Magic is Jo Ann’s first book. The memoir contains stories about her first six marriages involving abuse, divorce, and death. Jo Ann talks about meeting and marrying husband #7, a former military intelligence officer incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit. Having been an active member of the Mormon Church for nearly 30 years, Jo Ann left the Church to fully embrace the world of UFOs, elementals, magic and the paranormal – a new path she loves.

The Prince Was Wrong – Leaving the Narcissist Behind is Jo Ann’s second book, to be published in mid-to-late 2024. This book is a follow-up memoir to the first book as Jo Ann discovered the reality that husband #7 is a narcissist. This book discusses the red flags of this type of abuse. It lays out the demise of their relationship with clear examples of his narcissistic behavior. The ‘happy ending’ chapter shows that Jo Ann has found a joyous life after divorcing #7 and is on the path to creating her best life.

The magical benefit of writing these books and doing her healing inner work is that Jo Ann has found her voice, passion, and desire to help other women who feel stuck and overwhelmed in their toxic relationships. Jo Ann wishes to offer the hope that healing can happen. Their lives can get better. They can find peace and joy in their lives once again.  

M.L. Krishnan originally hails from the coastal shores of Tamil Nadu, India. She is a 2019 graduate of the Clarion West Writers' Workshop, a 2022 recipient of the Millay Arts Fellowship, a 2022 recipient of the Carnegie Corporation Fellowship, and a 2022-2023 MacDowell Fellow. Her stories and essays have appeared, or are forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Black Warrior Review, Zócalo Public Square, The Offing and elsewhere. While at Tin House, M.L. is working on her debut short-story collection whose characters come to terms with queer longing, ferocious desires, and codified traditions that they are forced to adhere to. Ultimately, this collection is about queer concealment as survival, about lives layered beneath other lives, about the gendered violences of place and caste and colonial hubris.

Ruby Hansen Murray is a columnist for the Osage News. She’s the winner of The Iowa Review and Montana Nonfiction Prizes, and a MacDowell, Indigenous Native Poets, Ragdale, and Hedgebrook fellow. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Ecotone, Moss, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Prism International. She’s a citizen of the Osage and Cherokee Nations with West Indian roots, living in the lower Columbia River estuary. While at Tin House, Ruby is working on When Blood is Oil, which places Osage life and history beside America’s false self-image, crafted of scenes from Little House on the Prairie and Ree Drummond’s soft-focus Pioneer Woman. Poems range across ancestral land, Wah Zha Zhe community life, and language preservation. The manuscript, which celebrates Osage lifeways, is an antidote to the battle against Osage sovereignty.

Anthony Hudson is a Grand Ronde / Siletz artist and writer working in theatre, drag, film/video, and nonfiction. Anthony's theatrical work, from Looking for Tiger Lily to Queer Horror—and performances as Portland's premier drag clown CARLA ROSSI—have earned him national fellowships, international engagements, and sainthood from the Portland Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Anthony’s writing has appeared in American Theatre, BOMB Magazine, and Arts and International Affairs. He is currently adapting Looking for Tiger Lily into a book.

Carla Crujido is the Assistant 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 Moss, Bellingham Review, Crazyhorse, Yellow Medicine Review, Ricepaper Magazine, and elsewhere. Her debut fiction collection, The Strange Beautiful, centers on the Mount Vernon Apartments in Spokane, Washington, offering a glimpse into the lives of ten tenants over a period of one hundred years.

An experienced fixer for journalists covering Haiti, Jean often unexpectedly finds himself on the subject side of stories. After his son was kidnapped and his house taken, Jean decided to move his family out of Port-au-Prince to the Dominican Republic. In the first of McSweeney’s new Dispatches series, Jean tells us the story of this struggle to relocate, another change of country in his search for a better life.

Dispatches from individual lives, as they happen: in our new Dispatches series, each compact book originates in short confidences recorded by individuals during borrowed moments from their interesting lives. Set amid some of our most pressing contemporary predicaments and edited by award-winning writers Peter Orner and Laura Lampton Scott, these invaluable books seek to document the highs and lows of daily human endurance.

Laura Lampton Scott is an editor and writer. Her work has appeared in Hobart, 68 to '05, and Michigan Quarterly, among other publications. A MacDowell Colony fellow, she teaches fiction at Portland State University. She is co-editor, with Peter Orner, of the Dispatches series published by McSweeney's Books.

Alyssa Ogi is a poet and editor in Portland, Oregon. The recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation grant and an Oregon Literary Fellowship, she received her MFA from the University of Oregon, and now works as an editor at Tin House. 

A cheeky how-to guide, as raunchy as it is heartfelt, from a bright new literary voice.

A bold and vulnerable collection from a new, young voice, How to Fuck Like a Girl is a daring mash-up of pillow book, grimoire, and manifesto by writer Vera Blossom. From hooking up to trans witchcraft, petty crime, capitalism, friendships, divorce, and survival, Blossom brings wit and melancholy, grandeur and smarts, debuting a bright literary voice as raunchy as it is heartfelt. A cheeky how-to guide that earnestly asks if it is possible to fuck oneself into girlhood, How to Fuck Like a Girl is a cult classic in the making.

VERA BLOSSOM is a proud transfemme Filipina. She was born in the Bay Area, forged in Las Vegas, and currently lives in Chicago. Her work explores desire, pleasure, gender, spirituality, art, and death with explicit vulgarity and frank humor. 

Vera’s writing has been supported by TinHouse, PEN America, and the Ann Friedman Weekly. Her work as an audio journalist includes Season 2 of The Anti-Trans Hate Machine which focused on the disinformation ecosystem constructed by the Christian Nationalist movement, as well as Black Mountain Radio, an artist-driven, community-focused audio project published in collaboration with Black Mountain Institute and the Believer magazine. Vera was a producer and co-owner of Your Magic, a mystical podcast that featured celebrity tarot readings and deep-dives into contemporary spiritual practices. 

She is the loser of many other fellowships, accolades, and awards. She does not have a post-secondary education. She is, however, very serious about playing around.

Chelsea Starr is a shining star in Portland and San Francisco's queer communities. Her iconic finery is made by her own hand. In addition to being a highly in-demand DJ, she’s a strong voice of equality and love.

2022 Betsy Joiner Flanagan Poetry Prize winner

Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter is a story about leaving religion and coming of age in a world of accelerating climate apocalypses and environmental loss. In her debut collection of poems, H. G. Dierdorff interweaves an investigation of wildfires in Eastern Washington with a personal account of growing up in Christian fundamentalism, calling our attention to the violent histories undergirding both.

“I want you to touch the fire / sparking from my lips” the opening sonnet commands, daring the reader to abandon the safety of analytical distance and draw near to the moment of ignition itself. The voice that emerges is incessant, ecstatic, explosive. Fire erupts from every page, multiplying into rage, desire, judgement, responsibility, and renewal. 

A love song to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, a dramatic portrait of a daughter struggling to find her place in her family, and a philosophical exploration of the limits of language and belief, this collection demands the necessity of both pleasure and grief as responses to a world on fire.

H. G. Dierdorff is a poet from the scablands and pine savannas of eastern Washington, the ancestral, unceded land of the interior Salish people. She is the author of Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter, which was selected for the 2022 Betsy Joiner Flanagan Award in Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Nevada Press in 2024. Her work has been awarded a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and appeared in journals such as Cut Bank, Arkansas International, and Willow Springs. You can currently find them in Oregon, where they volunteer with Write Around Portland and teach poetry through Literary Arts.

A miraculous book envisioned by Allison deFreese at the Oregon Society of Translators & Interpreters, and edited by Allison deFreese and Kim Stafford.

Thanks to Allison’s international network, Kim’s peace poem in English is translated into fifty languages, together with notes on translators and their languages, and QR access to dozens of voiced readings. This book sends a peace proclamation around the world so it may become a new poem in Arabic and Hebrew, Russian and Ukrainian, Tibetan and Mandarin, Tamil, Vietnamese, Polish, Yoruba, Yucatec Maya, and a host of other languages. With its fifty voices speaking gentle words, this book is for the children of the world. The cover image by Michael Nye shows a child holding a poem by Mahmoud Darwish:

I long for my mother’s bread

And my mother’s coffee

And my mother’s touch

And my childhood grows up

One day following days full of patience

And I love my life

Because if I die

My mother’s tears will shame me

Kim Stafford is Emeritus Professor at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. He writes, teaches, and travels to raise the human spirit through poetry. In 1986, he founded the Northwest Writing Institute, and he has published a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft and 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared. His most recent book is the poetry collection As the Sky Begins to Change (Red Hen Press, 2024). He has taught writing in dozens of schools and community centers, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan. In 2018 he was named Oregon’s 9th Poet Laureate for a two-year term.

Surveille’s queer speaker is on the cusp of motherhood, vacillating between attentiveness and paranoia. Exploring drone strikes, scorpion eradication, bird behavior, mating deer, ICE detainees, and family relationships, Caitlin Roach’s poems stare into and through the truth with a blazing intensity. This is a book about control (self-inflicted and external), about watching and being watched (by oneself, by others, by the state), and about the desperate search for meaning in a world that feels increasingly violent and filled with despair.

Caitlin Roach is a poet originally from San Diego, California. Her poems appear in Best New Poets (2023, 2021, and 2017), Narrative Magazine, Tin House, The Iowa Review, jubilat, Poetry Daily, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was the Provost Fellow and a Postgraduate Fellow. A three-time National Poetry Series finalist, she lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, the essayist José Orduña, and their two sons. 

Lisa Wells is the author of Believers, a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Her debut collection of poetry, The Fix, won the Iowa Poetry Prize. A new book, The Fire Passage, was selected by Diane Seuss for the Levis Prize in Poetry and will be published by Four Way Books in 2025.

Her essays have been published in Harper’s Magazine, Granta, N+1, The New York Times, The Best American Science & Nature Writing, and The Best American Food and Travel Writing. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with the writer Joshua Marie Wilkinson and helps edit the Kuhl House Poets Series.

SEAN ZERO has lived in Tampa, London, and Honolulu. He’s been in Portland for the last 10 years, currently in the Pearl with his partner and cat. He loves art, books, and coffee.

Before founding her band Public Universal Friend (PUF) in 2019, Friend began writing, recording, and performing original work in her mid teens and continued as a (mostly) solo artist for what would become a decade. PUF is known for their multifaceted embrace of punk informed americana adorned in southern gothic grit, attracting audiences rooted primarily in the midwest and Friend’s native south. Their debut album Perennials saw its independent release in March 2021, garnering attention from NPR, Mahogany, New Noise, and Emmy Award winning production Music in Transit. To date, Friend has written and recorded 11 albums of original music, with PUF’s next record Chrysalis expected to release in early 2023.

Friend came out publicly as a gay trans woman in 2021 following many years of genderqueer presentation. Her gender identity has played a major role in her ownership of the spectral nature of outward expression, with work focused mainly on trans representation and queer bodies within the commercial fashion and fine art world.

Friend is also the author of Transangelicism, a memoir recounting a closeted trans daughter’s adolescence in the evangelical South, anchored in the turning point found in young adulthood. The work serves as a touchstone for queer southerners, boldly encountering the vulnerability, visibility, and authenticity required in the narrative of her personal experience of trans reality. In the middle of all of it, Friend also graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Drawing from ETSU in 2015. The portfolio for her visual work can be found here.

cosima bee concordia is a femme leatherdyke based in Portland, Oregon who loves devotion and God. In past lives she’s been a bookseller, an English teacher, a philosophy student, and a limp-wristed sissy, but these days she’s a writer of horror, essays, theory, and weird experimental fragments as well as a co-host for a podcast about religious eroticism, anti-fascism, and queer perversion called Drunk Church. 

Her whole thing is pushing the boundaries of body and self in both her intimacy and art, and since contracting covid she’s been settling into her chronically ill mystic era. She generally can be found around the internet as bimbo theory, and you can keep up with and support her work by subscribing to her Patreon and Substack.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

Michael Keefe is the author of the novel All Her Loved Ones, Encoded (Running Wild Press, 2024) and the forthcoming collection Western Terminus: Stories and a Novella (Cornerstone Press, 2025). He is the Events Coordinator and Publicist at Annie Bloom's Books, an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his wife, the author Liz Prato, and their two cats.

KIMBERLY KING PARSONS is the author of the national bestselling novel We Were the Universe, a Dakota Johnson Book Club pick the New York Times calls “a profound, gutsy tale of grief’s dismantling power.” Parsons’s story collection, Black Light, was longlisted for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and Columbia University, Parsons won the 2020 National Magazine Award for “Foxes,” a story published in The Paris Review. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner and children.