PSW Conference Presenters

Possession Sound Writers Conference

2007 Presenter Profiles

David Biespiel
was born in 1964 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and grew up in Texas. He is the author of Shattering Air (BOA Editions, 1999) and Wild Civility (University of Washington Press, 2004). He is also the editor of Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets (OSU Press, 2006) and the esteemed magazine Poetry Northwest. A contributor to American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Parnassus, he also writes the “First Sunday on Poetry” column for The Oregonian. Biespiel has taught at the University of Maryland, Portland State University, and Stanford University. He now teaches at Oregon State University and is writer-in-residence at The Attic. His awards include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in literature. He lives with his wife and son in Portland, Oregon.

Andrew Feld
holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston and has received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. His other honors include a Michener Foundation grant and a "Discovery" / The Nation award. A widely published poet, his work has appeared in Agni, The Nation, New England Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, Triquarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review and many other journals. His first book, Citizen (HarperCollins, 2003), was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Ellen Bryant Voigt. He recently moved to Seattle and teaches creative writing at the University of Washington.

Richard Kenney
has published three books of poetry: The Evolution of the Flightless Bird (Yale UP, 1984), Orrery (Atheneum, 1985) and The Invention of the Zero (Knopf, 1993). In 1987 he received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. He is currently Professor of English at the University of Washington, where he has been on the faculty since 1987. His work is informed by science, and he is interested in Celtic and classical literatures. He thinks about human evolution and language origins, the cognitive basis of poetic forms, magical reasoning, and the Darwinian lives of subliterary species such as jokes, riddles, proverbs, charms, spells, nursery rhymes and weather-saws. Absent the Mediterranean, he lives with his family in Port Townsend.

Stacey Levine's
books include My Horse and Other Stories and Dra-, A Novel, both published by Sun & Moon Press; her novel Frances Johnson was recently published by Clear Cut Press. Her work has been anthologized frequently, and has appeared in Fence, the Denver Quarterly, 3rd Bed, Bookforum, the American Book Review, The Seattle Times, The Stranger and even scarier venues. Formerly a creative writing instructor, she is now working on a novel.

Brenda Miller
is Associate Professor of English at Western Washington University and Editor in Chief of the Bellingham Review. Her book, Season of the Body: Essays (Sarabande Books, 2002) was a finalist for the PEN American Center Book Award. She has received four Pushcart Prizes for her work in creative nonfiction, and her essays have appeared in such periodicals as The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Fourth Genre, The Sun, and Yoga Journal. She is the co-author of a textbook Tell it Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction (McGraw-Hill, 2003).

Mary Jo Salter
grew up in Detroit and Baltimore, and was educated at Harvard and at Cambridge University. She is the author of five poetry collection, including, most recently, A Kiss in Space (1999) and Open Shutters (2003), both published by Knopf. She is also an editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Her many awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. An Emily Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College, she lives in South Hadley, Massachusetts.