Sunday September 20, 2026

Bobby Elliott is an award-winning poet and teacher. 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 a finalist for the 2026 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, his writing has appeared in Adroit, BOMB, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and sons. 

Craig Brandis is the author of Crying of Small Motors and a contributor to Oxford Magazine, Palette Poetry, American Journal of Poetry, Plume, and Poetry Quarterly.  He shared first place in the 2025 Raymond Carver Writing Festival poetry contest and was a semifinalist for the 2022 Berkshire Prize for a first or second book. He teaches poetry at the Attic Institute for Literary Arts in Portland, Oregon.

Joseph Byrd is a 2025 Best Small Fictions winner, a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, was long listed for the Erbacce prize, and was in the StoryBoard Chicago cohort with Kaveh Akbar. An Associate Artist in Poetry under Joy Harjo at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, he currently serves as Poetry Editor for The Plentitudes, and was a facilitator with Shakespeare Behind Bars, Michigan, for five years.

Sunday August 16, 2026

RJ Equality Ingram lives in Portland, Oregon & works as a necromancer & weigher of soles for Goodwill Industries of the Columbia Willamette. RJ received their MFA in creative writing at Saint Mary’s College of California with concentrations in poetry & creative nonfiction. RJ’s second collection of poetry, Peacock Lane, was published on Summer Solstice 2026, and their debut collection of poetry The Autobiography of Nancy Drew was published by White Stag in 2024. RJ is also the author of the chapbooks How To Eat An Entire Wedding Cake, and Two Angels. RJ lives with their husband Michael Lee & their cats Twyla & Senator Padme Amidala who chase feathers tied to wands in the shadow of their late sister Brenda who lost a leg crossing Burnside in the moonlight. Follow @RJ_Equality

Diego is a Chicano poet and performer originally from South Central Los Angeles, now based in Portland, Oregon. Deeply influenced by the voices of Miguel Piñero, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Pablo Neruda, and Nikki Giovanni, his work blends political urgency with lyrical intimacy. Diego’s poetry addresses the struggles of Brown and Black communities, the weight of silence, and the complexity of love in a broken world. Diego has been a featured poet in many of the poetry events in the Portland area. He is the founder of Boca Ardiente, a bilingual poetry group in Portland, Oregon. @BocaArdiente was created to give those who feel they aren’t heard in their own language a place to express themselves freely through a monthly open-mic, monthly workshops, a book club and book publishing. Diego has self-published two chapbooks that have collectively sold over 500 copies. Known for his raw delivery and unapologetic voice, Diego writes because silence is no longer an option

July 19, 2026

Allie Marini is a Florida woman, cross-genre writer, visual artist, maker, and tarot reader. She runs Creepy Girl Trap PDX, where she slings cards & oddities. Find her online: @creepygirltrap.pdx, @kiddeternity, https://linktr.ee/creepygirltrap.pdx

Brennan DeFrisco is a poet, teaching artist, voice actor, & arts coordinator from the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s been a National Poetry Slam finalist, a Pushcart Prize nominee, Grand Slam Champion of the Oakland Poetry Slam, & program coordinator for California Poets in the Schools, Poetry Out Loud, Bigfoot Poetry Festival, Redwood Poetry Festival, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. He’s the author of A Heart With No Scars, by Nomadic Press and Black Lawrence Press and Honeysuckle & Nightshade, by Swimming with Elephants Publications. Brennan facilitates creative writing and performance workshops, serving K-12 classrooms, incarcerated youth, adults, seniors, and various arts education programs. His work has been published in Red Wheelbarrow, Oracle Fine Arts Review, Drunk in a Midnight Choir, Caesura, Gemini & elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles

June 21, 2026

A man with glasses, a beard, and messy hair sitting at a table inside a restaurant, smiling at the camera.

Benjamin Schmitt is the Elgin Award-nominated author of five books, most recently Satan’s School for Girls and Other Works (forthcoming Goldfish Press, 2026). His writing has appeared in Sojourners, Antioch Review, The MacGuffin, Sensitive Skin, Hobart, Columbia Review, The Seattle Times, and elsewhere. A co-founder of Pacifica Writers’ Workshop, he lives in Seattle with his children.

A black-and-white photo of a young man wearing glasses with a partial view of his face, short curly hair, and a casual T-shirt, standing inside a room with artwork on the walls.

Matthew Dickman is the author of All-American Poem (APR, 2008), Mayakovsky’s Revolver(WW Norton & Co, 2012), Wonderland (WW Norton & Co, 2018), and Husbandry (WW Norton & Co, 2022). A recipient of the May Sarton Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Kate Tufts award, his work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, London Review of Books, and Esquire Magazine, among others. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his son Owen. 

May 17, 2026

A man with long hair, a beard, and wearing a cap and a button-down shirt, is sitting in front of a curtain made of hanging metallic strips. He is looking slightly upward, and there is a microphone in front of him, with some papers on his lap.

Christopher Luna is a poet, editor, teacher, writing coach, and visual artist who served as the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Clark County, WA from 2013-2017. Christopher and Morgan Paige co-host the anti-fascist, LGBTQ+ friendly, all ages and uncensored Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic, founded by Christopher in 2004. Christopher’s books include Voracity, Exchanging Wisdom: A Guide for Parents of the Autonomous (with Angelo Luna), and Message from the Vessel in a Dream. In 2025 he received a Humanities Washington Award for his contributions to poetry and literature in Southwest Washington. 

April 19, 2026

Black and white photo of a woman with shoulder-length wavy hair sitting indoors, looking off to the side, wearing a sleeveless top.
A black and white portrait of a woman with glasses and dreadlocks, outdoors with a blurred natural background.
Black and white photo of a smiling woman with long wavy hair, sitting outdoors wearing a coat, with blurred trees in the background.

Genevieve DeGuzman (she/her) is a poet and writer with work in The Adroit, Nimrod, phoebe, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, and other publications. A Tin House Workshop alum and Alice James Award finalist, she has received the Oregon Literary Fellowship, the StoryBoard Fellowship from StoryStudio, as well as fellowships and support from AWP, Oregon Arts Commission, the Regional Arts & Culture Council, Poets & Writers, and Vermont Studio Center. Born in the Philippines and raised near San Diego, Genevieve now lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner and their unimpressed cat. Karaoke at the End of the World (out from JackLeg Press) is her first full-length collection. Find her at genevievedeguzman.carbonmade.com.

Camille T. McDaniel is a Portland, Oregon-based poet, book editor, and the founder of Benniefairy Books. Her poetry has been published in Black Fox Literary Magazine, Currency, Sundress Publications and more. In 2023, she received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets Anthology. Her debut book—Blood, Skin, and Water—is available online through World Stage Press and at Broadway Books in Portland.

Judy Nahum is a Portland-based poet whose work has appeared in Pile Press, Muleskinner Journal, and Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place, among others. She is the author of the poetry chapbook, i have wrestled with the way clouds weep, published in 2024 by Querencia Press. An alum of the Tin House Workshop and the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, Judy was the winner of the first annual Expedition Press Poetry Broadside contest. Her broadside is forthcoming this spring, so stay tuned! By day, Judy works in non-profit healthcare and goes on way too many dog walks.

March 15, 2026

Join us Sunday, March 15th at 4pm for our first-ever Poetry Salon, where words and music will partner together, featuring Craig Brandis, Casey Schreiner, Rene Lytle, Shilo Niziolek,  Courtney Edwards, and Joseph Byrd(and possibly Christopher Diaz!)

You’ll want to arrive a bit early, to claim a seat, and we won’t have time for an open mic that day, but I promise: you’ll be moved by what you hear.

Sunday January 15, 2026

Erik Manuel Soto is a Mexican-American poet from California, known for his lyrical and surrealist style that explores themes of generational trauma and folkloric genealogy. His debut collection, Inside the Umber Iris, was released in Fall 2025 and includes poems that traverse the realm of the subconscious and mythology. The collection is available at Barnes and Noble and was launched in Los Angeles on October 12, 2025. Soto’s work has appeared in various journals, and he has received the inaugural Gronk Nicandro first book prize for poetry. His work combines a plainspokenness about personal pain with an ornate sense of ritual across time and space, creating a deeply felt and hallucinated book of visions.

Laurence Lillvik (Portland, OR) is the editor of “Skullcrushing Hummingbird,” an international arts and literature zine. A new full-length collection of poems, “Catharsis Is Never Fully Shorn From Glee,” is forthcoming from Trident Press in the spring of 2026. His chapbook “Criterion”  (Greying Ghost Press) was a featured small press title at Powell’s Books. His poetry has also appeared in several literary journals and DIY poetry chapbooks. Musically, Laurence is the founder of KalloHumina, an umbrella project for solo work and live improvised collaborations. He’s worked in Public Libraries for over two decades.