OPA’s Spring 2014 Conference – Schedule & Registration Information

OREGON POETRY ASSOCIATION
SPRING CONFERENCE, 2014

DEADLINES
Group room rate at Doubletree Hilton: March 28th
Postmark deadline for conference registration member rate has been extended to April 4th

Theme for the conference is “Humor”

Dates: April 11th – 13th

Location: Bend, Oregon

Doubletree/Hilton
300 NW Franklin Ave.
Bend, OR 97701
541-317-9292

Reserve your room online at the Oregon Poetry Association rate with the Doubletree/Hilton.

Directions to the Doubletree/Hilton in downtown Bend, Oregon: MAP / TEXT

Keynote Speaker: Ellen Waterston

Workshop Leaders: Dave Harvey, Jarold Ramsey

Consultants: John Martin, Judith Montgomery, Anita Sullivan

REGISTRATION FORM 

SCHEDULE

Keynote

Ellen Waterston: “That’s Not Funny”

Ellen Waterston is poet, author and literary arts advocate. Her third collection, Vía Láctea, 2013, is based on walking the Camino de Santiago in 2012. Her awards include WILLAs for collections Between Desert Seasons and I Am Madagascar, and the Obsidian Prize. Other titles include Cold Snap; Where the Crooked River Rises; and Then There Was No Mountain, rated one of the top ten books of 2003 by the Oregonian. She has been featured poet at The Nature of Words, keynoter at the Northwest Poets’ Concord and Women Writing the West, and on the faculty of Summer Fishtrap. She has been awarded many writing residencies and has received an Oregon Arts Commission Artist Fellowship, a Career Opportunity Grant, a Literary Arts Fellowship, and a Werner Fellowship. She was founder/director of The Nature of Words (NOW) and of the Writing Ranch, which offers workshops at Central Oregon Community College and St. Charles Cancer Care Center and retreats in central Oregon, Spain and Mexico. Waterston also created creative writing residencies in central Oregon schools, social welfare programs, and prisons and at The Storefront Project at NOW’s literary arts center. She is working on a fourth collection of poetry and a second memoir. She lives in Bend, Oregon. Explore her writing online at http://www.writingranch.com/

Workshops and Workshop Leaders

Dave Harvey: “Limericks, Dorklettes, Pompouselles, Ogden-Nashies: Living Up to the Stafford Standard on the Days When You Can’t Write Something Great.”

Dave Harvey’s poems have appeared in The Occasional Misery, Summit, California English, Toyon, Cotyledon, Verseweavers, STROPHES, and Poets and Writers. He coordinates and is often the MC of the Down Towne Poets, a group holding monthly open-mic readings in Talent. He is the author of five chapbooks, three novels, and one true account, The Fifteen-Speed Cowboy. A retired English teacher, he has been the Secretary of the Oregon Poetry Association. Harvey’s passions include mountains, steam railroads, dancing, singing, bicycle touring, and Carol, seldom in that order. He is currently interested in mingling poetry and prose as Kipling did in many of his short stories. Cowboy, which tells of the six-month bike trip on which he met Carol in Alabama, has at least one poem per chapter, as does his third novel, You Have to Pedal a REAL Bike. He is married to Carol, a fiber artist, and they live in Talent.

Jarold Ramsey: “Writing: the Sidelong Glance.”

Jarold Ramsey grew up on a ranch north of Madras, Oregon, attended the Universities of Oregon and Washington (PhD in English from the latter), and for many years taught Shakespeare, modern poetry, and creative writing at the University of Rochester in New York State. He and his wife Dorothy moved back to the family ranch in 2000, and occupy it as “groundskeepers emeriti.” They have three grown children, Kate, Sophia, and John, and five very lively grandchildren. Ramsey’s six books of poetry include Love in an Earthquake, Hand-Shadows, and Thinking Like a Canyon: New and Selected Poems (2012). His  awards and fellowships include NEA and Ingram Merrill writing grants, the Helen Bullis Award, the Lillian Fairchild Award, and the Quarterly Review International Poetry Prize. In 1999, he was a judge for the National Book Award for Poetry.  He likes to think of poems as ceremonies of love, praise, and remembrance, and he wants his poetry to incorporate the energies of colloquial speech.

Consultants

John Martin is a poet, journalist and landscaper who has lived in Bend since 2001. His poetry chapbook, The Nick of Time, was published in 2006 by Iota Press. He has published poems in America Magazine, Manzanita Quarterly, and High Desert Journal, among others. Along with the other members of the High Desert Poetry Cell, he has self-published The Guys’ Big Book of Poetry and The Guys’ Home Relationship Maintenance & Improvement Poetry Manual. He teaches creative writing to prisoners, and he is currently trying to find a publisher for a manuscript of his most recent poems.

Judith H. Montgomery’s poems appear in Ars Medica, Cimarron Review, Measure, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Cave Wall, among other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies.  Her first collection, Passion, received the Oregon Book Award for poetry.  Her second collection, Red Jess, and third, Pulse & Constellation, followed.  She’s been awarded fellowships in poetry from Literary Arts and the Oregon Arts Commission to work on a new manuscript (Cicatrix ).  She lives in Bend with her husband and Springer spaniel, Ruby, and loves reading and talking about poetry!

Anita Sullivan is a poet, essayist and translator whose first collection of essays The Seventh Dragon: The Riddle of Equal Temperament won the Western States Book Award for creative nonfiction. She is an emerita founding member of the poetry-publishing collective Airlie Press, which published her collection Garden of Beasts in 2010. She has published poems, essays, and reviews on and offline. Anita lives in Eugene.

Bend Area Walk/Write: Walking into a Poem, a writing workshop with Katie Eberhart  

Let’s walk – and write – around Bend. Depending on the weather, we may walk as far as Drake Park and Mirror Pond (a straight line distance of 4 blocks) or we may wander over to the Deschutes Historic Society, the library (with lovely frescoes of poetry), then to Drake Park where there’s a big-wheel logging artifact and Mirror Pond. Again, assuming lovely weather, we’ll stop along the way to sit and write – yes there are benches in the park and across from the library or, if the weather is too chilly to write outside, we’ll spend more time at a tea or coffee shop. 

Katie Eberhart has conducted writing workshops at the Palmer (Alaska) Senior Center, the Northwest Poets’ Concord in Newport Oregon, the Nature of Words after-school program in Bend, Oregon, and while traveling with Students on Ice, on a hill above a fjord in Greenland. Katie Eberhart’s poems have appeared in Cirque Journal, Crab Creek Review, Sand – Berlin’s English Literary Journal, Elohi Gadugi Journal, and other places. Katie’s chapbook, Unbound: Alaska Poems, was published in 2013 by Uttered Chaos Press. Katie has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She is an Oregon Master Naturalist and blogs about nature and poetry at http://solsticelight.wordpress.com.

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