Jodi Varon
Jodi Varon is a writer and translator. Her memoir Drawing to An Inside Straight (University of Missouri Press) was a finalist for the Willa Award. Her translations from the Chinese of Li He are collected in The Rock’s Cold Breath (Ice River). She teaches Creative Writing at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande, Oregon.
Ben Mitchell
A writer and curator who serves as the Senior Curator of Art at the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture in Spokane, Washington, among Ben’s many articles and books is the Jewelry of Ken Cory: Play Disguised (University of Washington Press). He recently edited and introduced the exquisitely beautiful volume Ruben Trejo: Beyond Boundaries/Aztlan y Mas Alla (University of Washington Press).
David Axelrod
David Axelrod’s most recent book, Departing by a Broken Gate, appeared early in 2010. The Cartographer’s Melancholy, won the Spokane Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2006 Oregon Book Award. His collection of cultural and environmental essays about the interior Northwest, Troubled Intimacies, appeared in 2004. He teaches Creative Writing at Eastern Oregon University and lives in La Grande, Oregon.
James Crews
James Crews has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work has appeared in Columbia, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Best New Poets 2006 and 2009 as well as other journals. His manuscript, The Book of What Stays, recently won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and will be published by the University of Nebraska Press later this year. He has most recently been writer-in-residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and Caldera Arts in Sisters, Oregon.
