2026 Oregon Book Awards Finalists Reading

Originally from Northern California, where the events of her debut memoir HOLDING mostly take place, Karleigh Frisbie Brogan’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and more. She is a 2024 Oregon Literary Fellow and a 2022 Rona Jaffe Scholar. She holds an MFA from Portland State University. She is also a grocer.

M.L. Herring is associate professor emerita of science communication at Oregon State University, where she continues to lead workshops to inspire people to experience the world through observation, art, and ecology. She lives in Corvallis, OR.

Garrett Hongo was born in Hawaiʻi and grew up in Los Angeles. His new book is Ocean of Clouds: Poems. Other collections are Yellow Light, The River of Heaven (a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), and Coral Road. Also published are his non-fiction book The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo as well as  The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays and Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaiʻi.  Honored with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Fulbright Program, and the NEA, he was the 2022 winner of the Aiken Taylor Award. He lives in Eugene where he is Distinguished Professor at the University of Oregon. 

Leah Sottile is a journalist, podcast host and the author of the book When the Moon Turns to Blood. Her investigations and essays have been featured by The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone and The Atlantic. She is the host of the podcasts “Bundyville” and BBC Radio 4's “Two Minutes Past Nine”.

Wayne Scott’s writing has appeared in The Sun, Poets and Writers, The Psychotherapy Networker, Huffington Post, and The Oregonian, among others. His New York Times essay, “Two Open Marriages in One Small Room” (January 2020) was adapted for the Modern Love podcast and read by Edoardo Ballerini (summer 2021), then “dutchified” for Modern Love (Amsterdam), the television series, in 2022. He was a Tin House Fellow in 2019. He is a psychotherapist and teacher in Portland, Oregon.

Lisa Wells is the author of two poetry collections The Fire Passage, winner of the Levis Poetry Prize (2025) and The Fix, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize (2018). Her book Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2021 and was a finalist for the 2022 PEN E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. She lives in Portland.

Aron Nels Steinke is an Eisner Award winning cartoonist, the creator of the best-selling Mr. Wolf’s Class graphic novel series for kids, and creator of Speechless—a 2026 PNBA Award winner. Aron is also a former elementary school teacher and lives in Portland, Oregon. Find him online at mrwolfsclass.com. 

David F. Walker is an award-winning comic book writer, author, filmmaker, journalist, educator, and leading scholar of African American cinema. His work in comic books includes Shaft, winner of the Glyph Award for Story of the Year; Power Man and Iron Fist, Nighthawk, Fury, Secret Wars: Battleworld, Cyborg, The Army of Dr. Moreau, and Number 13. He is also the creator of the critically-acclaimed YA series The Adventures of Darius Logan and the author of the Eisner-winning The Black Panther Party and Bitter Root.

Rebecca Grant is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon, who covers reproductive rights, health, and justice. Her work has appeared in NPR, New York magazine, The Atlantic, VICE, The Nation, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, HuffPost, and The Guardian, among other publications. She has received grants and fellowships from the International Women’s Media Foundation, the International Reporting Project, The Fund for Investigative Journalists, and Type Investigations, reporting stories around the US and the world. Rebecca studied English and art history at Cornell University and served in the Peace Corps in Thailand. Before full-time freelancing, she worked at Washingtonian Magazine and wrote about startups in San Francisco. She is the author of Birth and Access.

H. G. Dierdorff is a poet from the scablands and pine savannas of eastern Washington, the ancestral, unceded land of the Spokane people. She is the author of Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter, which was published by the University of Nevada Press in 2024. Their work has been awarded a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and appeared in journals such as Cut Bank, Arkansas International, and Willow Springs. You can currently find them in Portland, where they teach writing at Clackamas Community College and poetry through Literary Arts.