Oregon Literary Fellowship Reading

Zoë Ballering’s (she/her) debut collection of stories, There Is Only Us, was selected as the winner of the 2022 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and published by the University of North Texas Press. Her short stories are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review and Story Magazine and have appeared in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Hobart, and Craft. Zoë holds an MFA in creative writing from Western Washington University and currently works as a Senior Assistant Dean of Admission Communications at Reed College.

Iván Cantú-Villarreal (he/him) is a Mexican writer/director born in Monterrey, Nuevo León, México. In 2001 at eleven years-old he immigrated to Dallas, Texas with his mom and brother due to a lack of opportunity in their home country. As a culmination of award-winning projects he led as writer/director that were recognized in both national and international film festivals, an opportunity to join the team that would bring his idol’s Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio to the big screen presented itself which led him to move his life to Portland, where he’s continued to grow his career as a writer/filmmaker.

Brittney Corrigan (she/her)  is the author of the poetry collections Daughters, Breaking, Navigation, 40 Weeks and most recently, Solastalgia, a collection of poems about climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene Age (JackLeg Press, 2023). Brittney was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon for more than three decades, where she is an alumna and employee of Reed College. Her recent debut short story collection, The Ghost Town Collectives, won the 2023 Osprey Award for Fiction from Middle Creek Publishing.

Pronouns: she/her

Katherine Cusumano is a journalist and essayist who writes about culture and the natural world. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Orion, The Believer, and others, and has been anthologized in the Best American Food and Travel series. She earned her MFA from Oregon State University, where she received the 2024 Creative Writing Award for Nonfiction. In 2025, she was awarded the Oregon Literary Fellowship.

jessamyn duckwall (they/she) is a queer, autistic poet living in Hood River. They received an MFA in Poetry from Portland State University, and are currently working on their first full-length poetry manuscript. They teach writing at Columbia Gorge Community College, and they also sometimes teach community education poetry workshops. Their work has appeared in local lit mags like Old Pal, Kithe, and Scavengers, as well as farther-reaching publications such as Josephine Quarterly and Radar Poetry.

Amelia Díaz Ettinger (she/her) is a Latinx BIPOC poet and writer. Her books include Learning to Love a Western Sky, Speaking at a Time /Hablando a la Vez, These, These Hollow Bones, and two chapbooks Fossils in a Red Flag and Self Dissection. Amelia’s poetry and short stories have been published in anthologies, literary magazines, and periodicals. She has an MS in Biology and an MFA in creative writing. Her literary work is a marriage between science and her experience as an immigrant.

Jordan Jacks’ fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, The Yale Review, Electric Literature Recommended Reading, and elsewhere. He was the 2015-16 James C. McCreight Fellow in Fiction at The Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and has taught at UW-Madison, St. Albans School, The Cleveland Institute of Art, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he earned an MFA in Fiction.

Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong (she/her) was a 2024 Tahoma Literary Review Fellow at the Mineral School Artist Residency, and her writing has been featured in or is forthcoming from The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets, ONLY POEMS, Pleiades, and Poet Lore, among others. Kaylee has also received support from Fine Arts Work Center and Brooklyn Poets. She graduated from Columbia University in 2024 and works as a preschool teacher.

Alfred Jung Lee (he/him) is a writer and seasonal farm worker. He is currently working on a book of literary nonfiction that has received support from MacDowell, where he will be a fellow-in-residence in spring 2025, as well as from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, where he was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economics and Business Journalism. His reporting and essays have previously appeared in The Information, Los Angeles Review of Books, NPR and Wilson Quarterly.

Fuente Fountain Books is an independent small trade press that specializes in publishing progressive and bilingual feminist multicultural books (poetry, fiction, non-fiction, memoir, translation). Their first title, Adela Zamudio: Selected Poetry & Prose translated from the Spanish by Lynette Yetter, was a finalist for the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

Some People Press publishes autobiographies by currently and formerly incarcerated people and art, fiction, and nonfiction books. The autobiographies comprise the Same Times series whose first title was released in June 2024. The 2025 publication schedule includes three more titles in the series. Portland Art Museum commissioned the press to write, design, and publish a monograph by painter David Rosenak in 2023. In 2025, the Press launches “100 in 1,” a series of 100-page books created in one day by emerging and established artists.