Finalists Reading II: Fiction, Poetry, and Creative Nonfiction

Alisha Dietzman is the author of Sweet Movie (Beacon Press, 2023), selected by Victoria Chang for the 2022 National Poetry Series, and shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize in 2024. Her chapbook, Slow Motion Something For No Reason, received the Tomaž Šalamun Prize Editors’ Choice Award (Factory Hollow Press, 2022). She received her PhD in Divinity with a focus on aesthetics and ethics from the University of St Andrews, supported by a grant from the US-UK Fulbright Commission. Her creative and critical work has also received support from the Rebecca Swift Foundation, the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Raised between Prague, Czechia and Columbia, South Carolina, she now lives in Oregon.

Brian S. Ellis first began performing his poems at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge. He is the author of Pharmakos, Uncontrolled Experiments in Freedom, Yesterday Won’t Goodbye, American Dust Revisited, and Often Go Awry. He received the William Stafford “War No More” Award. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Ferris Jabr is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He has also written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Scientific American. He is the recipient of a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant and fellowships from UC Berkeley and MIT. His work has been anthologized in several editions of Best American Science and Nature Writing. Ferris Jabr lives in Portland, Oregon, with his husband, Ryan, their dog, Jack, and more plants than they can count.

Darla Mottram (they/she) is a poet, writer, and visual artist based in Portland, Oregon. They created and ran Gaze, an online literary journal, from 2018-2021. RECURRENT is their first book.

Jaclyn Moyer grew up in northern California’s Sierra Foothills. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Atlantic, High Country News, Salon, Guernica, Orion, Ninth Letter, and other publications. She has been a Fishtrap Fellow, a Sozopol Literary Seminars Fellow, and a finalist for the PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize. She has worked as a vegetable farmer, bread baker, teacher, and native seed collector. Moyer lives with her partner and 2 young children in Corvallis, Oregon.

Charlie J. Stephens was born and raised in Salem, Oregon. Their debut novel, A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest, (2024) was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and was awarded the Leslie Feinberg Award in Trans and Gender-Variant Literature and the Foreword Indies Bronze Award in LGBTQ+ Adult Fiction. Their new collection of short stories, Annihilation for Beginners, will be published by Buckman in early 2026. More at www.charliejstephenswriting.com

Willy Vlautin is the author of five novels: The Motel Life, which was made into a film starring Dakota Fanning, Emile Hersh, and Stephen Dorff; Northline, Lean on Pete, which won two Oregon Book Awards and was made into an A24 film starring Chloe Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, and Charlie Plummer; The Free, which won the Oregon Book Awards Reader’s Choice Award; and Don’t Skip Out on Me, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and an ALA Notable Book. Vlautin lives outside of Portland, Oregon and is the founding member of the bands Richmond Fontaine and The Delines. His new book is The Horse.