Virginia Black is the award-winning author of three novels, Consecrated Ground, No Shelter but the Stars, and Incendiant (all from Bywater Books), and short stories in anthologies from Sapphire Books, Brisk Press, Bold Strokes Books, and Flashpoint Publications. A 2024 Lambda Fellow, she lives in Portland. Learn more at virginiablackwrites.com

Bobby Elliott is an award-winning poet and educator. His debut collection of poems, The Same Man, was selected by Nate Marshall as the winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press on September 9th, 2025.  His writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from BOMB, The Cortland Review, ONLY POEMS, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, RHINO and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and sons.

​As a playwright I center the question and honor the questioner; I give attention to language, cadence, and the occasion for song; I aspire to unthread conventions of community in order to reveal the authentic individual making and finding a space in which they belong in that community; I work to model the brave conversations necessary for true connection; I laugh a lot; I recognize affinity and solidarity are not the same and that the difference between the two is the source of both conflict and a path to liberation; I know that however small we are in the cosmos, we are not insignificant. 

LMNO is Corvallis based band with Page Hundemer on Bass, Brian Bucolo on Drums, Nick Rivard on Guitar/vocals, and Rob Birdwell on horns/vocals. They play a variety of originals and covers with hip grooves and soaring melodies.

Zoë Bossiere (they/she) is the author of Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir. They are the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction and co-editor of the acclaimed anthologies The Best of Brevity and The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins. Find them online at

The author of three books of experimental fiction, Madeline McDonnell’s latest is Lonesome Ballroom, which Leni Zumas describes as “a gleaming, teeming symphony of a novel.” Madeline lives in Corvallis with her family.

Oregon poet laureate and author Ellen Waterston has dedicated herself to writing and advocating for the literary arts in the high desert region of Oregon while continuing to write poetry and nonfiction works that have evolved into essential reading about Oregon and the West.  She has published five literary nonfiction titles, including, most recently, We Could Die Doing This (2024). Her fifth poetry title, As Far as I Can Anthem (working title), will be published December 2025. Waterston is the founder of the Writing Ranch and of the annual Waterston Desert Writing Prize.

John Daniel is the author of eleven books of poetry, essays, memoir, and fiction. The winner of three Oregon Book Awards, he lives with his wife, Marilyn, and three cats, under tall Douglas-firs in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene.

Jaclyn Moyer is the author of On Gold Hill, which won the 2025 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Originally from northern California's Sierra foothills, she now lives in Corvallis, Oregon with her partner and two young children. 

​Kate Carroll de Gutes used to travel with a band in a converted white school bus across the U.S.,
Canada, and Europe. They played in exciting locations such as Cylinder, Iowa, population 67.
When Kate’s band rolled through Cylinder in 1981, the mayor decided the band should kick off
the town centennial—two years hence.
The band played at dusk in front of the grain elevator. As the sun sank lower,
hundreds—possibly thousands—of mice ran out from the all-they-could-eat buffet of the grain
elevator and across the feet of the musicians. Kate increased the tempo of the show and then
decided right then that writing seemed like a better career.