Archive: 2025 Raymond Carver Writing Festival

Allen Braden grew up in the Yakima Valley not far from where Carver grew up. He is the author of A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood, a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award judged by Mary Oliver, and Elegy in the Passive Voice, winner of the University of Alaska’s Midnight Sun Chapbook Contest. He has published recently in The Laurel Review, Interim and Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology.

Armin Tolentino is the author of the poetry collection We Meant to Bring It Home Alive (Alternating Current Press) and the children’s book, Mythwakers: The Manananggal (forthcoming from Hope Well Books). He served as poet laureate for Clark County, WA from 2021-2023. He earned an MFA at Rutgers University-Newark and is a former Oregon Literary Arts Fellow, Carolyn Moore House Writer in Residency, and Atticus Hotel Artist in Residency. He is a phenomenal clapper, a passable ukulele player, and a bumbling, but enthusiastic, fisherman.

Dayle Olson is a Lower Columbia poet and a zealous Raymond Carver fan. She is a former first prize recipient in the Oregon Poetry Association annual competition, as well as a recent Northwest Voices featured writer at Lower Columbia College and Longview Public Library.

Her poetry chapbook, From the Dead Letter Department, published by Moonstone Press in 2025, was awarded Honorable Mention in their annual contest. Dayle lives in Cathlamet with her husband, David.

Holly J. Hughes is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Hold Fast, coauthor of The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World, and editor of several anthologies. Her fine-art chapbook Passings received an American Book Award in 2017. She is copublisher of Empty Bowl Press, directs Flying Squirrel Studio, which offers residencies for women, and consults as a writing coach. She divides her time between a log cabin in Indianola and her home in the Chimacum valley.

Joseph Green lives in Longview, Washington, where he retired in 2010 after teaching for twenty-five years at Lower Columbia College. He serves on the board of directors for the C.C. Stern Type Foundry and Museum of Metal Typography in Clatskanie. His most recent poetry collection is What Water Does at a Time Like This (MoonPath Press, 2015).

Laura Moulton is the founder of Street Books, a street library that serves people who live outside in Portland. She is the author of Loaners: The Making of a Street Library, co-written with Ben Hodgson. Moulton taught writing in Portland high schools for 20 years for Literary Arts, and for the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College. She is currently on the faculty of the Attic Institute. She is the founder of Truth & Dare, contemporary art/writing workshops created during the pandemic that is now a monthly community writing and art project published on substack. In 2025 Moulton received the Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award from Literary Arts in honor of her contributions to the literary life of Oregon.

Mandy grew up on the beaches of southern California, went to high school in Albany, Oregon (where she skipped class to hide out in the poetry section of the local used bookstore), and studied comparative literature at Berkeley (where she skipped class to hear the Lunch Poem readings in the Morrison Library). After a brief stint as a bookseller, Mandy found meaningful work in her favorite community spaces: public libraries. A lifetime pursuer of poetry, lover of languages, player of pianos, mother of twins, and slave to curiosity, Mandy can most often be found barefoot with a pocketful of lichens.

Marj Hogan lives in Portland, OR, and teaches Spanish at Union High School. She received the 2025 Astoria Writers’ Guild Writer-in-Residence to begin a series of poems about labor: what we do for work, how it shapes us, how it consumes and fails to define us. Her poems have appeared in various publications including Voicecatcher; 3Elements; Pretty Owl; High Shelf; Paperbark; Cold Mountain; and A Lantern, Radical Light/Linterna, Luz Radical, among others.

Portland writer Martha Gies has published widely over the last four decades in newspapers, magazines and literary quarterlies, including Gettysburg Review, Notre Dame Review, Orion, The Sun, and Zyzzyva. Her memoir, Broken Open, was published last fall by Wandering Aengus Press. A previous book, Up All Night (OSU Press, 2004) portrayed Portland through interviews with people who work graveyard shift, and was listed by the two major Oregon newspapers as one of “Ten Best Books of the Year.” In addition to her writing and teaching, she has been an activist for human rights and for maintaining housing affordable for the poor and elderly amidst a gentrifying city.

Moe Bowstern contributes to underground literary culture as a reader, writer, and editor, notably of XtraTuf zine. She performs annually at the Fisher Poets Gathering in Astoria, Oregon. From 1997 to 2007 Moe gave her time to DIY agitprop, co-creating space for citizens to protest within the queer, fun-centered, anarchist Amalgamated Everlasting Union Chorus, and making ceremony outside of mainstream capitalism with an annual mega-collaboration, the Winter Solstice Puppet Show, among other projects. She co-wrote narration for the award-winning independent podcast “It Did Happen Here” and was the principal author for the subsequent book (PM Press, 2023).

Bob Brajcich is the current mayor of Clatskanie. Clatskanie is governed by a Mayor and six-member council elected by the people. The population of Clatskanie, Oregon is 1,774 (2023).

Tess Gallagher, author of eleven books of poetry, lives and writes in Port Angeles, Washington, and her cottage in County Sligo in the West of Ireland. Her most recent collection, Is, Is Not, was published in 2019 by Graywolf Press and documents political and meditational crosscurrents in her Irish and American Lives. In 2023, she was the first and only American author presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Rome.