Teachers & Staff
David Biespiel
President of the Attic Institute
David Biespiel (pronounced buy-speel) is widely recognized as one of the leading poets of his generation, a liberal commentator on national politics, and also one of the nation's experts in teaching writing. His teaching experience is innovative and vast: He has taught at every level of education, from a one-room schoolhouse to large university campuses, from public high schools to graduate seminars, from teaching poetics at Stanford University to developing national champions in the Olympic sport of diving, and he has lectured and spoken to audiences throughout the United States.
Looking to create an independent writing studio in 1999, David founded the Attic Institute as a haven for writers in Portland's historic Hawthorne district.
Among his publications are Shattering Air, Pilgrims & Beggars, Wild Civility, The Book of Men and Women which was named Best Poetry of the Year for 2009 by The Poetry Foundation and also received the Oregon Book Award, and Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces. He has been honored with a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature.
Since 2008, he as been a frequent contributor to Politico's "Arena," a cross-party, cross-discipline daily conversation about politics and policy among more than a hundred current and former members of Congress, governors, mayors, political strategists and scholars.
In 2010 he was elected to the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle where he serves as a judge for the NBCC annual book awards.
Read David's complete bio and find links to his works on the Web
Kelley Baker
Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute
Kelley Baker has written and directed three full‑length features (Birddog, The Gas Café, & Kicking Bird), eight short films and a few documentaries. Kelley films have aired on PBS, The Learning Channel, and Canadian and Australian television and have been shown at Film Festivals including London, Sydney, Annecy, Sao Paulo, Chicago, Aspen, Mill Valley and Edinburgh.
Kelley Baker was the sound designer on six of Gus Van Sant's feature films including, My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, and Finding Forrester and Todd Haynes film, Far From Heaven. Kelley attended the University of Southern California. He received a BA (1980) and an MFA (1982) in Film Production, and did post graduate work at the American Film Institute (1989).
Kelley Baker’s book, The Angry Filmmaker Survival Guide: Making the Extreme No Budget Film is available on his website www.angryfilmmaker.com. The Stirling Art Centre at Macrobert University (Stirling, Scotland), had a retrospective of Kelley’s work in 2006. Pacific Film Archives and The Northwest Film Center have also hosted a retrospectives of Kelley's films. Kelley has spent years touring the US, Canada and the UK, teaching his subversive brand of filmmaking at workshops and showing his films to audiences at Art House Theaters, Colleges, Universities and Media Art Centers. Kelley has appeared in over 300 cities and 400 venues.
For more information check out www.angryfilmmaker.com
David Ciminello
Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute
David Ciminello is a New York based writer and educator. His fiction has appeared in the Lambda Literary Award winning anthology Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City, Lumina, Underwater New York, and on broadcastr. His poetry has appeared in Poetry Northwest. As a professional screenwriter David has developed projects with Aaron Spelling Productions, All Girl Productions, Sony Pictures, HBO, and Twentieth Century Fox. His original screenplay Bruno (2000) was directed by Shirley MacLaine. He is currently working on a novel manuscript; a queer journey through WWII era New York and New Jersey involving tomatoes, cooking, Coney Island, a missing baby, a runaway gay boy, and a burlesque queen.
Kate Carroll de Gutes
LIfe Sketches Associate
Kate started her career as a journalist, which means that she is a stickler for the truth (capital T) and that her writing is almost always sparked by some event or thing outside herself. Her writing has been featured in the Seattle Review, New Plains Review, Raven Chronicles, Gertrude, and other journals, as well as in various anthologies, newspapers, and on the Web. She has taught in Oregon and New Mexico, as well as on a sailboat plying the waters of Puget Sound. Kate holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from the Rainier Writing Workshop, and has been the recipient of writing fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Anderson Center, Centrum, and the Pride Foundation. She recently completed her second book, Letter to a Young Butch.
Matthew Dickman
Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute
Matthew Dickman is the author of All-American Poem(American Poetry Review/ Copper Canyon Press, 2008). The recipient of The Honickman First Book Prize, The May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Kate Tufts Award from Claremont College, the 2009 Oregon Book Award and two Fellowships from Literary Arts of Oregon. He has also received residencies and fellowships from The Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, The Vermont Studio Center, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and The Lannan Foundation. He has been profiled in The Oregonian, Poets & Writers Magazine, The Seattle Post Intelligencer, and The New Yorker. Born and raised in the Lents District of Portland he has been a guest lecturer and teacher at institutions including Reed College, Writers in The Schools, Portland State University, Vermont College of Fine Arts, Hamline University, and Smith College. His poems have appeared in Tin House Magazine, McSweeny’s, Ploughshares, and The New Yorker among many others. W.W. Norton & Co. will publish his second book in 2012. He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
Merridawn Duckler
Senior Fellow at the Attic Institute
Merridawn Duckler is a senior fellow at the Attic Institute, a prominent teacher of fiction and nonfiction, and a leading member of our Individual Consult Group.
She has published in Carolina Quarterly, Georgia State Review, and Main Street Rag among others with current work in Isotope, Green Mountains Review, Narrative and Night Train. A former Attic student, she is a two-time winner of Society of Professional Journalists Award and 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 and has won fiction fellowships to the Squaw Valley Writers Community, Wesleyan Writers conference, and Summer Literary Seminar in St. Petersburg, Russia. She has been teaching at the Attic Institute since 2002 and is an Associate Editor at Narrative magazine.
Visit Merridawn's website.
Read the The New York Times review on her libretto Copera.
Read Merridawn's report on the "The Problem of Fiction."
Shanna Germain
Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute
Shanna Germain’s poems, short stories & essays have been widely published in places like McSweeney's, Salon, Best American Erotica, Best Gay Romance, Hint Fiction, The American Journal of Nursing, Storyglossia & more. A former Attic student, she's received awards such as the C. Hamilton Bailey Fellowship from Literary Arts, a Pushcart nomination, & a Soapstone residency. Her first fantasy novel is scheduled for publication in early 2011.
Visit her website at www.shannagermain.com
Martha Gies
Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute
Martha Gies served for two years as editor of How to Travel Inexpensively, a nationally distributed newsletter, and has published travel-related articles in the Oregonian and elsewhere. Her short fiction and essays appear in magazines and anthologies, and she is the author of Up All Night(Oregon State University Press, 2004), a portrait of Portland 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.
Visit Martha's website.
Ariel Gore
Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute
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.
Browse Ariel's bookshelf at Powell's Bookstore.
View Ariel's blog. And this interview.
Emily Harris
Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute
Emily Harris is an award-winning journalist who has gathered stories all over the world. She reported for NPR from Europe, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Washington DC and shared in NPR's 2005 Peabody award for coverage of Iraq. She grew up in Oregon, and returned in 2007 to help start Think Out Loud, an award-winning public affairs program on OPB, which she hosted for several years. Emily studied Russian at Lincoln High School in Portland and at Yale. From 2002-2007, she was the Central and Eastern European correspondent for NPR; from 2005-2006, she was Knight Fellow at Stanford University; from 2000-2002, she was a special correspondent for NPR and PBS; and from 1996-1998, she was a senior producer for KCRW in Los Angeles. Her current projects include being Editorial Director of the Journalism Accelerator, developing a parenting stories app, honing a twisted tale from the battlefields of Iraq, and exploring the places journalism and other ways of life intersect. Emily's skills include: interviewing, moderating, listening, questioning, audio collection and editing, story-finding, getting the big picture, and making complicated things make sense.
Carol Hendrickson
Assistant to the President
Carol was the Executive Assistant to the Dean of the OGI School of Science & Engineering at OHSU for eight years and supported six consecutive Presidents of Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI) prior to its 2001 merger with OHSU. She has studied at Utah State University, the University of Utah and Portland Community College, where her love of everything green and growing led her to Landscape Architecture. She is a long-time student of the Portland Chapter of the Sogetsu School of Ikebana. Carol’s literary activities include five years of Women’s Life Writing classes by Marie Buckley through Hillsboro Parks & Recreation. Her additional creative activities include Ikebana (the Japanese art of flower arranging), gardening and ballroom dancing.
Dave Jarecki
Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute
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
Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute
Karen's first novel, Trespassers Welcome Here, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and a Village Voice Top Ten Book of the Year. Her other two adult novels, The Diamond Lane and Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me, were also named New York Times Notable Books. Her 2004 memoir, The Stuff of Life, about the last year she spent with her father before his death, was an NYT Notable Book, a People Magazine Critics' Choice, a Books for a Better Life Award finalist, and a winner of the Oregon Book Award for Creative Non-fiction. Her short stories, essays, articles and reviews have appeared in Elle, Vogue, Esquire, Outside, the New York Times, salon.com and other magazines. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a winner of the General Electric Younger Writer Award.
How Georgia Became O'Keeffe, Karbo's upcoming book is the third and final installment in what she calls her kick ass women trilogy. How to Hepburn, published in 2007, was hailed by the Philadelphia Inquirer as "an exuberant celebration of a great original"; The Gospel According to Coco Chanel, published in 2009, was a Nielsen Bookscan bestseller.
Jennifer Lauck
Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute
Jennifer Lauck is the author of four memoirs, including the New York Times Bestseller, Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found and her most recent book, Found. An award-winning investigative reporter, Jennifer has studied Tibetan Buddhism for nearly ten years, is a dedicated meditation student, and has received teachings from many great masters including the H.H. Dalai Lama, Lama Adzom Rinpoche, and Eco-philosopher Joanna Macy. She has taught memoir writing and "transformative writing" for more than ten years, here in Portland and around the U.S., and she speaks nationally on issues of adoption, motherhood, transcendence, happiness, and writing as a way to heal.
John Morrison
Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute
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
Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute
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 and is on leave from teaching at the Attic Institute.
Liz Prato
Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute
Liz's writing has received 4 Pushcart nominations and appeared in numerous publications, including Iron Horse Literary Review, Subtropics, salon.com, Los Angeles Review, Hunger Mountain, and ZYZZYVA. Awards include first place in the Berkeley Fiction Review's Sudden Fiction contest, and the Minnetonka Review Editor's Choice Award. When she's not moving characters around the chessboard of the American West, she dreams of palm trees. www.lizprato.com
Read interview with Liz.
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.
Erika Recordon
Associate, Individual Consult Group
Erika Recordon is an Associate for the ICG at the Attic Institute.
A former New Yorker, she has worked on the agenting side of the book publishing industry for over five years, first at The Writers House and later with Robin Straus Agency. She’s worked closely with editors and authors such as Stephanie Meyer, Alexander McCall Smith, Ha Jin, J.G. Ballard, and many others.
Here in Portland, she has served on the reading committee for Tin House Magazine and written book reviews for the Oregonian. Her short fiction has appeared in ZZYZVA, The Denver Quarterly, and others. She is currently the Associate Literary Manager at Portland Playhouse.
Erika works with writers looking to unpack the business of publishing. She helps writers with manuscript evaluation to collaboration to coaching to book proposal development. She maintains relationships with New York agents and editors and continues to keep her finger on the pulse of the market.
G. Xavier Robillard
Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute
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 and was a semi-finalist for the 2010 James Thurber Prize in American humor. 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.
Gigi Rosenberg
Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute
Gigi Rosenberg is the author of The Artist’s Guide to Grant Writing: How to Find Funds and Write Foolproof Proposals for the Visual, Literary, and Performing Artist (Watson-Guptill, 2010). This book grew out of her professional development workshops taught in Portland, Chicago, New York, and throughout the Pacific Northwest. Rosenberg has been published by Seal Press, The Oregonian, Jewish Review, Parenting, and Writer’s Digest, performed at On the Boards, and broadcast on Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Elizabeth Rusch
Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute
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
Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute
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.
Vanessa Veselka
Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute
Vanessa Veselka is the author of a novel, Zazen, which has been selected for many Best Novels of the Year lists in 2011 as well as a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress, and a mother. Her fiction has been in Tin House Magazine, YETI, and Le Zaporogue. Her non-fiction has appeared in The Seattle Weekly, Arthur Magazine, Bust, Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll, and has been anthologized in the FSG collection, Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism.
"Often, authors fall into two distinct camps: those who write gorgeous sentences, but who can’t spin conflict-driven yarns, direct storytelling taking a backseat to narrative navel-gazing; on the other side are the ones who emphasize plot, building much more filmic stories, yet those authors never take the time to make each sentence stand on their own as pieces of art. The lucky few are able to do both of these things simultaneously—think Denis Johnson, John Fante, Lynda Barry—and Veselka is one of thEM. —Joshua Mohr / The Rumpus
"Veselka's prose is chiseled and laced with arsenic observations." — Publisher’s Weekly
Wendy Willis
Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute
Wendy Willis has published her work in the internationally-acclaimed Alhambra Poetry Calendar, as well as in Poetry Northwest, Clackamas Literary Review, Bellingham Review, and elsewhere. In addition to her poetry career, Wendy is the deputy director for national programs at the Policy Consensus Initiative and the National Policy Consensus Center at Portland State University. Prior to joining PCI/NPCC, Wendy was the executive director for City Club of Portland. She has also served as an assistant public defender for the District of Oregon and a law clerk to Chief Justice Wallace P. Carson, Jr. of the Oregon Supreme Court. Wendy is also a senior fellow of the American Leadership Forum Oregon, and an active volunteer in the local food-to-school movement. She graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown Law Center and holds a BA from Willamette University.
Peter Zuckerman
Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute
Peter Zuckerman is a non-fiction author and a journalist. He has received some of the most prestigious recognitions in American reporting.
In 2005, he was one of the youngest people to ever win the Livingston Award, the largest, all-media, general reporting prize in America. Among the dozens of other awards his reporting has received is the National Journalism Award , given by the Scripts Howard Foundation for the best newspaper writing in the United States; and the Blethan Award, given for the best journalism in the northwest. PBS profiled Zuckerman in an hour-long documentary, “In a Small Town,” and Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Excellence in Journalism profiled Zuckerman as an example of a courageous reporter.
Zuckerman has served as visiting faculty at Poynter Institute, the St. Petersburg, Florida-based think tank for professional journalists, and he has taught journalism at universities and professional seminars. His articles for the Associated Press have appeared in thousands of publications, and, until he left his job to become an author, he was a reporter for The Oregonian.
His book, Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day, is being by published in the summer of 2012 by W.W. Norton & Company.
