Archive: 2026 Raymond Carver Writing Festival

Alice Derry has published six volumes of poetry and three chapbooks, most recently, Asking (MoonPath Press 2022).  Her new manuscript is titled Embraces.  During thirty years teaching at Peninsula College, she curated the Foothills Writers Series and helped initiate and host a writer-in-residence program. With artist Fred Sharpe, she has produced three volumes on native plants of the Olympic Peninsula. She and colleague Kate Reavey currently facilitate a workshop for Native writers on Zoom.

Craig Brandis’s poems and reviews have been published in Oxford Magazine, Palette Poetry, American Journal of Poetry, Poetry Quarterly and elsewhere. He co-won first place in the 2025 Raymond Carver Writing Festival contest for poetry. He was a semi-finalist for the 2022 Berkshire prize for a first book. His first collection of poems, Crying of Small Motors,  was released in 2024 by Finishing Line Press.  He teaches poetry at the Attic Institute for Literary Arts in Portland, Oregon.

Florence Sage is current MC and a regular reader at Ric’s Poetry Mic in Astoria. She has been poetry columnist for HIPFiSH, a poetry judge and Word & Image poet at Hoffman Center for the Arts, an invited poetry presenter in several area programs, a reader at Writers Read for Cannon Beach library, and recent first-place winner of the Neahkahnie Mountain Poetry Prize. Her three full-length poetry collections are at Astoria’s RiverSea Gallery.

Gary Copeland Lilley, originally from North Carolina, now lives in the Northwest Peninsula. He has published nine books of poems, most recently Raven on the Moaners’ Bench, from Four Way Books (2025) and The Bushman’s Medicine Show, from Lost Horse Press (2017). He is a Cave Canem Fellow and the Artistic Director of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference.

Janet Ebert RN, MN Emeritus. She has taught at OHSU, Concordia University, Mount Hood and Clatsop Community Colleges. She is a volunteer at the Astoria Middle School with the Creative Writing Club. Janet teaches privately in Astoria and Portland. A seasoned steward of narrative poetry. In 2026 Janet was the co-winner of Raymond Carver Writing Festival poetry contest. Janet hails from Multnomah Village. She enjoys cross country skiing and hiking in Sisters, Hood River and Mosier.

Jon Broderick is a founder of the FisherPoets Gathering, the annual creative celebration of commercial fishing the end of each February in Astoria.  A former high school teacher, he’s been a commercial salmon fisherman for nearly 50 years, first in Kodiak, then in Southeast Alaska and mostly in Bristol Bay where he and his family run a salmon set gillnet outfit each summer. He and Doreen raised five children there and in Cannon Beach.
 

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.

Ecologist Robert Michael Pyle has lived and studied natural history along a Lower Columbia tributary almost fifty years. His 30 books include Northwest classics Wintergreen, Sky Time in Gray’s River, and Where Bigfoot Walks, the novel Magdalena Mountain, five collections of poems, and a flight of butterfly books. John Burroughs Medalist, Guggenheim Fellow,and PEN America Art of the Essay finalist, Bob met both Tess and Ray when all three received Governor’s Writers Awards in 1987.

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.