POETRY
Lauren (Lolo) Arthur
Schurz, Nevada
"I grew up alongside willow bushes and pine trees...I would conquer my own world through words, utilizing love in its many possibilities, while only experiencing a few encounters myself. My battles show up, last to be picked, but is still choosing dusty winds, and whistles from the trees....The results stand for themselves in a catapult resolve of outpouring rant poems."
Gila Mon
Payson, Arizona
"When I was in third grade, a neighbor gave me a few Jonah Hex comic books, and I learned what homesickness was...Living in the West’s Most Western Town was a dream, even for a half-Mexican son of a teacher and a preacher...(Now) I’m the one with a portrait of Sid Vicious in the classroom, the one who tutors, who listens, who supports, who protects. I’m the outsider in the inside."
Darci Schummer
Colorado Springs, Colorado
"I grew up in Fall Creek, Wisconsin, population 1,380, as a Jehovah’s Witness. In this way, I have always felt like an outsider and identified that way. Even after having left that faith tradition...my lack of cultural references inexperience, and naivety kept me feeling like an outsider...I live in two worlds simultaneously. They call it leading a double life, but for many it was a means of coping and survival."
Troy McGee
Boise, Idaho
"I’m a Pentecostal soul, always hearing the train in Kingman, Az. Always waiting for Jesus to come back. Resurrection Day. The smell of sage. Hope in the West.
Foursquare?
Route 66, cowering
in the shadow of Interstate 40. A family
cowering in the shadow of
THE INTERNATIONAL CHURCH OF THE FOURSQUARE GOSPEL
gave birth to a son.
This and God’s omnipotence occupy a great deal of life..."
Erica Northam-Smith
Troy, Tennessee
"I collect impossible things. A hospice bracelet. Handwritten recipes. Wildflower seeds. The names of people no one says out loud anymore. Stories that survived the people who carried them. Years ago, I was told to prepare for death. Instead, I prepared a nursery and a child’s arrival...
If my stories have a purpose, it's to remind us that survival is only the beginning and that the world keeps asking us to harden while the soul keeps asking us to stay tender."
Poetry:
Mattie Achord
Hornbeak, Tennessee
"I started writing as soon as I could hold a tool, make a scratch
Into paper, into you
A scribe of tornado season
I was born in the shadows of the Mississippi,
Filtered by the Rockies
I have purified myself in the waters
Of the Vltava
And in the springs of the Sudetenland...
These days are spent again in those shadows..."
Cliff Taylor
Astoria, Oregon
"I am a fortysomething Ponca Indian who came-of-age in Nebraska and found a love for poetry during a decade-long stint of working the graveyard-shift at a now-legendary gas station. I’m a Sundancer, an unstoppable romantic. I talk to little people both in my dreams and while awake. I live for a vision where everyone knows they have a gift and a life-purpose. I’m busy giving talks, publishing books, helming a storytelling podcast, and building Native community wherever I go"
Ilyse Simon
Mojave Desert
"I saw the total eclipse in 2024 and began to write on the back of a crumpled napkin while stuck in traffic...I write because my sanity depends on it. Much of my writing has me on a hot dusty road somewhere from Vegas to nowhere. In my salad days I dropped out of college and walked across the country, twice, for peace. I lived on the road for almost seven years... I am a queer, Jewish road warrior who left the path carefully sanded for her. "
Dave Mehler
McMinnville, Oregon
"I am a poet of place and rural places, an autodidact who has made his living primarily as a truck driver driving long-haul for a time but now working locally for a landfill outside Portland...I write about being rootless... poverty and waste recounting the stories of co-workers, customers and the flora and fauna of landfills ... As desecrated as the landfill seems or looks, I believe and am coming to the slow recognition that it is and has always been holy ground."
Robbie Sugg
Albuquerque, New Mexico
"I was born and raised in the settlements surrounding San Francisco Bay: I spent my early childhood in a commune before being decamped to the further suburbs. I learned street smarts on the streets of San Francisco on the gritty sidewalks surrounding the Supreme Court...and in residency hotels where I first imbibed drugs and began having sex with other men. I was taken under the wing of poets in North Beach and on Bernal Hill, where I met my life companion, who helped to hone my word and my ear. "
Sherri Levine
Portland, Oregon
"How do I know who I am when I wake up, am I crying, and washing the toilet, am I scratching an itch I can’t seem to get to?...My father, at 89, says he is proud of me. I believe I am a survivor. Survivor of the mental health system. Committed to hospitals in US and abroad for years, months, too long, where I learned to smoke, and learned to help people in need. I learned to write poetry, even though it was bad. I learned that people believed in me...My mother who grew up in an orphanage and painted beautiful flowers."
Logan Garner
Astoria, Oregon
"I am a poet from Oregon’s north coast and a lifelong rural dweller. Raised in an Indiana farm town by a devout Catholic family, I spent the first half of my life steeped in religion and ritual, always with an eye toward what I was supposed to do, supposed to say, ultimately shaping me into a people-pleaser (and eventually, blessedly, a black sheep). As a boy I fell deeply in love with ritual and even found myself on a path to the priesthood before eschewing it for university."
Forrest Miller
Grand Junction, Colorado
"I grew up in small towns of rural Vermont...I've spent much of my life feeling slightly out of step with the people and places around me. While many of my peers were busy discovering themselves, life asked me to grow up pretty quickly. The woods were often the place where I felt most at home.....I've never been especially interested in grand narratives or extraordinary lives. I'm drawn to ordinary people, working-class communities, and the landscapes that quietly shape them."
Poetry:
Dan Van Note
Denver, Colorado
""I get right to the point. Direct, messy, even pretty fucking gross (but always with a splash of humor), My art is driven primarily by one thing: my struggle to accept myself as a gay man. In an age where pride is at every shop window (at least in the big cities), I have found it to be a gruelling and lonely journey. Even admitting to friends that I am still carrying a deep judgment - and even hatred - of myself took years to admit out loud...my untamable essence (is) something I call my “Indomitable Prankster Spirit...”"
Emily Moon
Portland, Oregon
"For 20 years I lived in the small town of Estacada in the Cascades foothills. I worked as a field service engineer. My territory was central and western Washington and Oregon. I lived in an old house built by hippies in the 70s....The cabin I fashioned became my womb. It allowed privacy for me to explore my gender identity over a period of 7 or 8 years....Although I feel I'll always be in some state of transition, I'm so happy to be me. "
Jamie Buehner
Monte Rio, California
"I’m Jamie Lynn Buehner, and I feel outside of almost everything except, hopefully, my own life. I’m a middle school teacher, and I feel like this mentality helps me excel at my job...One thing I learned was that not only could one timestamp oneself in writing, one could also tweak one’s perspective, even after the fact. Writing for me is a way of cleaning up, understanding, and tying a bow on my own story, which is, in the end, all I will leave behind."
T. Pesky
Union Pacific
"I always held a kind of mythical love and longing for the west...I'm an archivist and historian focused on labor and non-violent resistance to gentrification by migrant skid row communities in the mid 20th C. I grew up in the Folk punk community...after undergrad me and friend spent 2 years hopping trains and hitchhiking and finally GETTING OUT WEST!...My poetry is driven by movement and travel and my love of the west and never quite being able to catch it..."
Emily Ransdell
Camas, Washington
"I learned early on that keeping peace meant keeping secrets...Everyone knew us but no one knew the chaos in our home— dirty dishes and stinky ashtrays, sour laundry and juice glasses of watered-down whisky weeping rings on the furniture. I tidied up and kept my mouth shut...Now I see what my mother never did: being different does not have to mean being broken. Being outside “the norm” doesn’t make a person an outsider."
Drew Myron
Hood River, Oregon
"So much of my writing life is the drive to the story not yet told. Backroads and hillsides, wide sky and shifting light. Across highway and gravel, through fields and farms, bends and turns, my mind winding with anticipation...I will tuck your words in my ribs, a small cage of secrets, fears, and sometimes tears. I see you, I say without saying."
Rene Janiece
Cedaredge, Colorado
"I was six years old when I stepped on a rusty nail while playing outside in the yard... yelling for my mother through the screen door. She arrived, saw the corroded point sticking through the top of my foot, and ran screaming back into the house... it became quite clear: I was on my own. I learned to be silent. I made myself small. I knew I didn’t fit. I hid in that dilapidated attic and wrote it all down."
Elle Brown
Rural Texas
"I am a medically retired indigenous-focused anthropologist writing in piney woods just east of a southern fault line with frequent authorial veerings into nature, illness, justice, and incompetent gardening, primarily through nonfiction and poems. Living in a body that is unable to adhere to the production requirements of a capitalistic setting..."
Jennifer Handy
Quartzsite, Arizona
"When I was young, I lived in the suburbs, which I always hated: the beige houses, the feeling of emptiness, the lack of wild greenery, the dreary sameness of it all... When I turned 40, I found myself once again confined in the ugliness of the suburbs. I grew restless and discontent, and that old dream of camping and living outdoors resurfaced. This time, I decided to follow it...I’ve always felt like an outsider in civilization, and our time living outdoors was when I felt happiest and most at peace. It was there that I began writing again."
Amanda Evans
Augusta, Kansas
"I’m a 5th generation Kansan, born in the small town of Augusta in the 1970s...The population is about 9,000 people, and the main streets are still paved with brick. My Dad is the Mayor and loves driving around town with his dog. I work at a small country school where the only other buildings are a post office, a fire station, and a Mexican restaurant..."
Cleo Griffith
Salinas, California
"I was born into a family in Chelan, WA, on the lake in an apple orchard of two parents each there from the Mid-west, Minnesota and Kansas, and in my 7th year transported to Portland OR to be brought up my our divorced mother... and dabbled at writing throughout my life. Now, reaching toward age 90 in October, I continue."