To celebrate National Poetry Month, Oregon Writers Colony (OWC) is once again holding Verse of Ages.

For the month of April, OWC members have been working on daily prompts, writing poems and will be sharing the fruits of the labor at the Verse of Ages Poetry Slam. The host for this event will be Susan Blackaby.

Susan Blackaby is an Oregon children’s book author, editor, and educator. Her collection, Nest, Nook, and Cranny, won the 2011 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry. Dabbling across genres in children’s literature is familiar ground; wandering beyond those boundaries is a relatively recent and uncharted adventure. Poetry “for grownups” has appeared in VoiceCatcher, The Gold Man Review, and Abandoned Mine. She has been OWC’s Verse of Ages coordinator for, well, ages and is looking forward to yet another thoughtful, insightful, and uplifting evening. 

Our next Craft Night will be May 2nd! We hope to see you there.

The Stacks hosts a Craft Night on the first Thursday of each month! Everyone is welcome, and this is a free event. Drinks and snacks available will be available for purchase, but no purchase is necessary to attend.

Bring your own craft projects and meet your neighbors for chit-chat while we craft together!

The Humble Poets' Open Mic will be at The Stacks Coffeehouse on the last Sunday of each month, 4:00-6:00pm.

The featured reader for April is Sherri Levine.

Sherri Levine believes that poetry saves lives. She is a poet, a mental health advocate, a teacher, a former poetry series host, and a squirrel lover living in Portland. Her poem, “Facedown,” won the Lois Cranston Memorial Prize. She also won First Prize (Poet’s Choice) in the OPA Contest. Sherri has published four poetry collections—In These Voices (Poetry Box 2018) Stealing Flowers from the Neighbors,” (Kelsay Press 2021) A Joy to See—an ekphrastic poetry book of prominent poets responding to her late mother’s paintings. Her illustrated poetry book, I Remember Not Sleeping (Fernwood Press) will be released this year. She escaped the long harsh winters of upstate New York and has ever since been happily soaking in the Oregon rain.

 We are encouraging poets and storytellers to come share their works, and musical accompaniments are welcome as well. The address is 1831 N. Killingsworth (between Interstate and Denver). And even though poets are generally quite wealthy, this event will be free, with only a suggested donation for those who can. Hope to see you all there!

Our next Craft Night will be April 4th! We hope to see you there.

The Stacks hosts a Craft Night on the first Thursday of each month! Everyone is welcome, and this is a free event. Drinks and snacks available will be available for purchase, but no purchase is necessary to attend.

Bring your own craft projects and meet your neighbors for chit-chat while we craft together!

Every Tuesday is Writing Cafe at The Stacks! Learn more here.

Every Tuesday is Writing Cafe at The Stacks! Learn more here.

Our next Craft Night will be March 7th! We hope to see you there.

The Stacks hosts a Craft Night on the first Thursday of each month! Everyone is welcome, and this is a free event. Drinks and snacks available will be available for purchase, but no purchase is necessary to attend.

Bring your own craft projects and meet your neighbors for chit-chat while we craft together!

Every Tuesday is Writing Cafe at The Stacks! Learn more here.

Every Tuesday is Writing Cafe at The Stacks! Learn more here.

The Humble Poets' Open Mic will be at The Stacks Coffeehouse on the last Sunday of each month, 4:00-6:00pm.

The featured reader for February is Elisa Carlsen.

Elisa Carlsen grew up in Humboldt County, Nevada. Their writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Trumpeter, Anti-Heroin Chic, Oranges Journal, Brushfire, and elsewhere. Elisa is a Poetry Editor for New American Press and the author of Cormorant (Unsolicited Press 2023), a short collection of poetry addressing the human dimension and consequence of a controversial salmon recovery project in the Pacific Northwest. 

We are encouraging poets and storytellers to come share their works, and musical accompaniments are welcome as well. The address is 1831 N. Killingsworth (between Interstate and Denver). And even though poets are generally quite wealthy, this event will be free, with only a suggested donation for those who can. Hope to see you all there!

Every Tuesday is Writing Cafe at The Stacks! Learn more here.

Every Tuesday is Writing Cafe at The Stacks! Learn more here.

Every Tuesday is Writing Cafe at The Stacks! Learn more here.

Join us on the first Thursday at the month for Craft Night. Everyone is welcome.

Bring your own craft projects and meet your neighbors for chit-chat while we craft together!

Every Tuesday is Writing Cafe at The Stacks! Learn more here.

Join us on the first Thursday at the month for Craft Night. Everyone is welcome.

Bring your own craft projects and meet your neighbors for chit-chat while we craft together!

Filament is an all-genre Creative Writing Reading series from Portland State University’s MFA Program.

On December 1st. at 7pm, join us for readings from Tyler Wildeck, Katie Johnson, Jay Butler, and Kelly McLysaght.

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, reading and book launch. With Allison Tobey, Emily Prado, and Genevieve Hudson. Hosted by Kevin Sampsell.

INCANTATION: LOVE POEMS FOR BATTLE SITES is one Chicana's witness of Trump's America and the ongoing chaos that pains us all. Inspired by bell hooks’ All About Love, Audrey Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic,” and Adrienne Maree Brown’s Pleasure Activism, this new collection enlists love, pleasure, and the body to imagine a better world free of misogyny and white supremacy. Bermejo’s poetry explores US monuments, memorializes Black and brown bodies murdered by state sanctioned violence, and writes love poems to family, friends, and dalliances in rituals of resistance and resilience.

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications). Her second collection, Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites is forthcoming from Mouthfeel Press in fall 2023. Her poem “Battlegrounds” was featured at Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, On Being’s Poetry Unbound, and Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World (W.W. Norton). She teaches with Antioch University, MFA and UCLA Extension and is the director of Women Who Submit. Her writing, teaching, and organizing are inspired by her family, her Chicana experience, and her passion for creating love and comfort in chaotic times.

Join us to celebrate the launch of two Portland poets’ debut collections — You Can Call It Beautiful by Debra Elisa and Cormorant by Elisa Carlsen.

Debra Elisa’s You Can Call It Beautiful, MoonPath Press, is a mosaic of joy and grief, offering glimpses into loss and trauma that shape a family and travel that can open us up to wonder. It is a collection of free verse with the occasional sonnet and ekphrastic poems that celebrate the art of others and reflect on what keeps the human spirit growing. These are poems of ecology. They call us to live more graciously and consciously with the earth and all beings.

Debra Elisa explores joy and sorrow, grief and ecstasy through poetry and fiction and leads workshops inviting others to write and discover. She loves to lose herself in her backyard garden, along the coast, and in lush forest. Her writing has appeared in Kosmos, Oyez Review, VoiceCatcher, and other journals. She co-hosts The Humble Poets Open Mic @ The Stacks on Last Sundays. You Can Call It Beautiful is her debut collection of poetry.  Debra Elisa

Elisa Carlsen’s Cormorant, Unsolicited Press, is a work of contrition. The poems are political and personal. A response to the federal government’s plan to kill thousands of double-crested cormorants in the name of salmon recovery and a tribute to the person who died from heartbreak because of it. To support wildlife, all profits from this book will be donated to The Wildlife Center of the North Coast. 

Elisa Carlsen (she/they) grew up in Humboldt County, Nevada. They are an outsider poet and artist whose work has appeared in SixFold, VoiceCatcher, Anti-Heroin Chic, Nevada Arts Council, and Oranges Journal. Elisa won the Lower Columbia Regional Poetry Contest and was a finalist for the Editor’s Prize at Harbor Review. Elisa is a poetry editor for New American Press. Cormorant is her first published poetry collection. CORMORANT by Elisa Carlsen (unsolicitedpress.com)

Hosted by Erica Vaughn of The Intentional Gap, Gap Year Consulting and Rebecca Liebeskind of Carpe Diem Education.

Learn about:

• Career and life benefits of taking a gap year.

• The many paths a gap year can take (group and solo travel, internships, job opportunities).

• How a gap year can work for you.

This community event is free to attend and open to the public.

Join us to celebrate the launch of Shilo Niziolek’s new book of poetry! She will be joined by Catherine Broadwell.

On the heels of her memoir, Fever, Niziolek's debut poetry collection, Atrophy, continues pulling even further at the same threads: desire, grief, trauma, love, and illness. However, in Atrophy, the primary beast that stalks these pages is the body in isolation, the body in decay, the body as animalistic and wounded and deadly in its pursuit of living. Atrophy has all the promise of a young poet and all the grit of a grown woman who has repeatedly clawed her way through the dirt. 

Shilo Niziolek has written Fever (2022), A Thousand Winters In Me (2022), I Am Not An Erosion: Poems Against Decay (2022), and Atrophy (forthcoming Sept 2023 Querencia Press). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Juked, Honey Literary, West Trade Review, Entropy, Pork Belly Press, and Phoebe Journal among others. Shilo is a writing instructor at Clackamas Community College and is the editor and co-founder of the literary magazine, Scavengers. She is a queer disabled writer who lives in the Pacific Northwest with her partner and their pit bull. Find her on Instagram and twitter @shiloniziolek

Catherine Broadwall (formerly known as Catherine Kyle) is the author of Water Spell  (Cornerstone Press, 2025), Fulgurite (Cornerstone Press, 2023), Shelter in Place (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), and other collections. Her writing has appeared in Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. She was the winner of the 2019-2020 COG Poetry Award and a finalist for the 2021 Mississippi Review Prize in poetry. She is an assistant professor at DigiPen Institute of Technology, where she teaches creative writing and literature.

Named for the glassy, maze-like structures that can form underground when lightning strikes sand, Fulgurite weaves together reality and myth. Informed by fairy tales, domestic fabulism, and environmental concerns, the book examines gender on large and small scales. Patriarchal influences in domestic spaces are compared to patriarchal influences on national and global levels, and identity is made complex by the fusion of survival, dissociation, and promise. The collection bears witness to the grief of the everyday while simultaneously pursuing hope.

Join us for a reading and a party to celebrate the launch of Sister Golden Calf by Colleen Burner!

Gloria and her sister Kit are in the trade of rehoming invisible ephemera they've captured in jars and now sell on the side of the road (can they interest you in SOMEONE ELSE'S DREAMS, NIGHT GREASE, or WHAT IS LEFT AFTER A STAR EXPLODES?). Motherless and rudderless, the sisters are on a road trip in their '93 Honda Accord across the sunburnt landscape of New Mexico. Restless with grief and doubt, Gloria becomes obsessed with a taxidermied eight-legged calf she meets in a roadside museum, and Kit takes a skeptical pilgrimage to a supposedly holy hole in the dirt floor of a church. The two cross paths with an array of characters, creatures, and places—The Calamity Janes, a roving motorcycle gang; an eyeless horse who reminds Gloria that she can see the unseen; and a ghost town where mysteries abound—in this sprawling and emotionally driven novella where the road is never-ending and sisterhood can be home.

Colleen Burner (they/them) is a graduate of the MFA writing program at Portland State University and an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship recipient. Their short fiction has appeared in Fecund, Old Pal, Black Candies: Gross and Unlikeable, Permafrost, and Quaint. They are a coeditor of surely magazine. They live in Portland, Oregon. Sister Golden Calf is their first book.