Teachers & Staff

Marc Acito’s comic debut novel, How I Paid for College, won the Oregon Book Awards’ Ken Kesey Award. It was also selected as an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times, has been optioned for film by Columbia Pictures and is translated into five languages the author cannot read. Its much-anticipated sequel, Attack of the Theater People, is now available. A regular contributor to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Acito has also co-written Holidazed, a twisted Christmas play which will receive its world premiere at Artists Repertory Theatre in November.

David Ciminello is a screenwriter, actor, short story writer, and novelist. As a professional screenwriter David has developed projects with Aaron Spelling Productions, All Girl Productions, Barry Sonnenfeld, Sony Pictures, HBO and Twentieth Century Fox. His original screenplay Bruno (2000) was directed by Shirley MacLaine and stars Gary Sinese, Kathy Bates, and Jennifer Tilly.

His short stories have been anthologized in Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City (Lambda Literary Finalist) and Best Gay Romance 2010. His fiction has also appeared in the literary journal Lumina and the online anthology Underwater New York: Stories from the Deep, his poetry has appeared in Poetry Northwest, As a professional actor David has appeared in guest leads on Seinfeld, Murder She Wrote, Matlock, and Kojak. He holds a BFA in Acting from The Catholic University of America and an MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.

Merridawn Duckler has published in Carolina Quarterly, Georgia State Review, & Main Street Rag among others with current work in Isotope, Green Mountains Review, Narrative & Night Train. A former Attic student, she is a two-time winner of Society of Professional Journalists Award & was nominated for Best Creative Non-Fiction Anthology 2009 and a Pushcart Prize. Reviews of her work have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Her original scripts have been preformed at the NOW Festival at Red Cat at Disney Hall and other venues in Los Angeles, Stanford, & New York in conjunction with the performance troupe Collage Dance Theatre of Los Angeles. She has been in residency at Centrum, Caldera, and Yaddo, among others. She was a non-fiction runner-up at Writers@Work in Salt Lake City & has won fiction fellowships to the Squaw Valley Writers Community, Wesleyan Writers conference, & Summer Literary Seminar in St. Petersburg, Russia. She teaches at the Attic for nearly ten years & is an Associate Editor at Narrative magazine.

Shanna Germain’s poems, short stories & essays have been widely published in places like Absinthe Literary Review, McSweeney's, Salon, Best American Erotica, Best Gay Romance, Imbibe, The American Journal of Nursing, Triangulations & more. Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of Nervy Girl, she is currently the editor of Roast magazine. A former Attic student, she’s ghost-written numerous books & has received awards such as the C. Hamilton Bailey Fellowship from Literary Arts & a Soapstone residency.

Martha Gies has published short stories and literary essays in many literary magazines and in several anthologies, including A Celestial Omnibus: Short Fiction on Faith and The World Begins Here: An Anthology of Oregon Short Fiction,and is the author of Up All Night (Oregon State University Press, 2004), a portrait of the city told through the stories of 23 people who work graveyard shift. She has received support for her work from Oregon Literary Arts and the Regional Arts & Culture Council.

Ariel Gore is the founding editor of the zine Hip Mama, author of Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness, Whatever, Mom, Atlas of the Human Heart, How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead: Your Words in Print and Your Name in Lights, The Hip Mama Survival Guide, The Mother Trip, & editor of the anthologies Breeder, Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City, & The Essential Hip Mama: Writing from the Cutting Edge of Parenting. A former Attic student, she's a contributor to Ms. & Utne.

Katrina Hays, Life Sketches Associate

Katrina is a writer who travels comfortably in different genres. Her award-winning poetry and essays have appeared online and in various literary journals and national magazines. She is a frequent contributor to Sail, Scuba Diving and Trail Runner magazines, and works as a freelance writer and editor.

Katrina has been a poet-in-schools, led memoir-writing seminars, and has taught people of all ages to kayak and scuba-dive as an outdoor instructor. She has been a professional opera singer, a whitewater raft guide and an actress, and has traveled extensively, particularly in Central America and the South Pacific.

She holds Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degrees in both Creative Writing and Acting, and has been the recipient of writing fellowships at The Vermont Studio Center, Centrum and Artsmith. She recently completed her first collection of poetry, Hydrography.

Henry Hughes grew up on Long Island, New York, and now teaches at Western Oregon University. His first collection, Men Holding Eggs,, received the 2004 Oregon Book Award. His second collection of poems, Moist Meridian, was published by Mammoth Books in July 2009. Hughes’ commentary on new poetry appears regularly in the Harvard Review. His poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Carolina Quarterly, Malahat Review, Queen’s Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Seattle Review and Poetry Northwest, and are represented in several anthologies including Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets published by Oregon State University Press.

Barry Hunt has a nearly twenty year history teaching screen writing, film making, & acting. He has been an actor and director for thirty years with credits on stage, film, and television. He is the Artistic Director of Sowelu Theater. He has worked as director and dramaturge on 9 award recognized original scripts. Recent screenplays he has mentored are Quiet City, currently nominated for Best Film by the Independent Film Awards and Dance Party USA. Each film made top ten lists in both 2006 and 2007. The New York Times praised the original writing style. Hunt is the 2005 recipient of the Leslie O. Fulton Fellowship through the Portland Civic Theater Guild.

Dave Jarecki is the grandson of northeastern Pennsylvanian coalminers, and feels their work in his blood sometimes. He’s been writing professionally since 1998, including articles, profiles, non-profit grants and marketing communications.

In 2004 he founded Breakerboy Communications, a strategic writing and messaging service that focuses on the communications needs of small businesses and non-profit organizations. Jarecki also facilitates youth and adult creative writing workshops and independent studies throughout the Greater Portland area. His creative work has appeared in Voices of Central Pennsylvania, IN/UR Magazine, BaseballSavvy.com, Poet’s Hood online and 4&20 Poetry.

In July of 2008 he launched DaveJarecki.com as a way to help foster conversation and community around writing and the word. Through the Guest Writer feature and Interview series, Jarecki wishes to showcase the writing, thoughts and insights of new and established voices alike.

Dave's Attic Academy workshops are a partnership between The Attic Writers' Workshop and Breakerboy Communications.

Karen Karbo is the author of three novels and a memoir, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books. Her memoir The Stuff of Life, won the Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, and was a People Magazine Critics’ Choice. Her latest book is The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World's Most Elegant Woman forthcoming in September.

John Morrison's book, Heaven of the Moment, won the Rhea & Seymour Gorsline Poetry Competition & was a finalist for the 2008 Oregon Book Award in poetry. He received his MFA from the University of Alabama. His poetry has appeared in numerous national journals including the Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, Poetry East, & the Southern Poetry Review. A former Attic student, he has taught poetry for the University of Alabama, Washington State University, & in the Literary Arts Writers in the Schools program where he served as director from 2006-2009.

Paulann Petersen’s books of poetry are The Wild Awake, Blood-Silk, A Bride of Narrow Escape, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, & most recently Kindle. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and the recipient of the 2006 Holbrook Award from Oregon Literary Arts, she serves on the board of Friends of William Stafford, organizing the annual January Stafford Birthday Events. She’s been on the faculty for Summer Fishtrap, and has given workshops for Oregon Writers Workshop, Oregon State Poetry Association, Mountain Writers Series, OCTE and NCTE Conferences, and the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College. In 2010 she was named by Governor Ted Kulongoski as the Oregon Poet Laureate.

Liz Prato has published work in Zyzzyva, Iron Horse Literary Review, Subtropics, Massage, & Bodywork Magazine, as well as in Who’s Your Mama: An Anthology on Motherhood. A former Attic student, she’s a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a prize winner in the Berkeley Fiction Review's 2005 Sudden Fiction Contest, and the 2007 Juked Fiction Prize. She's working on a novel about grief, art, sexual identity, & the cosmos.

Judith Pulman, Life Sketches Associate

Judith Pulman has published two poetry chapbooks, written a bilingual play about Anton Chekhov’s romances, and studied acting intensively at the Moscow Art Theater in Russia. Her poems have appeared in small press magazines across Oregon. She has taught classes in English language and composition internationally as well as in Virginia. She is currently working towards her MFA in writing at Pacific Lutheran University.

G. Xavier Robillard's first novel, Captain Freedom, A Superhero's Quest for Truth, Justice and the Celebrity He So Richly Deserves (Harper Collins) was published in 2009. In addition to writing fiction he produces humiliating videos, writes music and has performed comic monologues for local shows True Stories and LiveWire Radio. A former Attic student, his work has appeared on National Public Radio, in McSweeney's, Cracked Magazine and Comedy Central.com.

Elizabeth Rusch’s first children’ book, Generation Fix, was a Smithsonian magazine Notable Children’s Book and a finalist for the International Reading Association’s Children’s Book Award and the Oregon Book Award. Will It Blow? was a Natural History magazine Best Book for Young Readers and a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. The Planet Hunter was also an Oregon Book Award finalist, while A Day with No Crayons won the OBA’s Eloise Jarvis McGraw Award for Children’s Literature and is a finalist for the Illinois Children’s Choice award. Her nonfiction picture book biography For the Love of Music: The remarkable story of Maria Anna Mozart is due out from Random House next spring. She also has two books forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin: The Man behind the Mars Rovers and Volcano SWAT.

As an award-winning freelance writer and former managing editor of Teacher magazine and contributing editor to Child, Rusch has published more than 100 articles in national magazines for children and adults. Her publishing credits include Muse, Read, American Girl, Harper’s, Mother Jones, Parenting, Smithsonian, & Backpacker, among many others. Rusch has received the Kay Snow Literary Award, a Maggie Award, & an Oregon Literary Fellowship, among other honors.
Rusch has led workshops & given lectures & presentations for children & adults at schools such as Childpeace Montessori, Winterhaven, Maimonides in Portland, Oregon; colleges such as Portland State University, Duke University, & the University of California at Berkeley; & conferences such as the Willamette Writers Conference, South Coast Writers Conference, Chalk It Up for Literacy, & the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators in Portland & Denver.

Watch a video of Elizabeth Rusch on Jody Seay’s show The Back Page: http://oregonstate.edu/media/cdrbcn
Read an interview with Elizabeth Rusch at: http://www.embracingthechild.org/arusch.html
Learn more at www.elizabethrusch.com

Cheryl Strayed's memoir, Wild, will be published by Knopf in 2011. Her novel, Torch, was published by Houghton Miflin in 2006 and was selected by the Oregonian as one of the top ten books of the year by writers living in the Pacific Northwest. Her personal essays have appeared in The New York Times magazine, The Washington Post magazine, the Sun, Allure, Self, Brain, Child, and other places and have twice been included in the Best American Essays.

Dao Strom was born in Saigon, Vietnam and grew up in the hills of northern California. She is the author of Grass Roof, Tin Roof, a novel, and The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys, a book of stories. Dao is also a writer of songs, with two independent releases, Send Me Home and Everything That Blooms Wrecks Me.

The New Yorker described her latest book as being “filled with social observation of contemporary…culture and indie sensibility” and “quietly beautiful.” Venus Zine described it as “an acute, often painful, exploration of identity, displacement, and sexuality.” Dao is also a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and a recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship, the Nelson Algren Award, and other honors. Her stories have been anthologized in Still Wild: Short Fiction of the West, compiled by Larry McMurtry, as well as Charlie Chan Is Dead 2, an anthology of Asian American fiction edited by Jessica Hagedorn.

Website - http://www.daostrom.com