by Vievee Francis

VIEVEE FRANCIS is the author of four books of poetry, most recently The Shared World (Northwestern University Press, 2023) and Forest Primeval (TriQuarterly Books, 2015), winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award. She received a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. She has also been the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award and a Kresge Fellowship. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.

by Kerry Ruef

KERRY RUEF is an award-winning poet, writer, and the founder of The Private Eye Project, an internationally recognized educational program devoted to cultivating close observation, creativity, and interdisciplinary thinking. Her work — both literary and educational — invites readers and learners alike to look more closely at the world, think by analogy, and discover meaning through curiosity, imagination, and deep attention. A long time resident of the Gorge, she had recently returned to the Pacific Northwest after five years of living in Mexico. She died in December 2025.

by Mary Schlick

MARY DODDS SCHLICK (1925 – 2020), born in Ames, Iowa, became a long-time resident of the Columbia River Gorge, writer, weaver, and expert on the basketry of the Native peoples of the Columbia Plateau. Her fondest childhood memories were the summers she spent on Rainy Lake in northern Minnesota, happily occupied with nature and creating with her hands.

She married in 1949 and moved with her husband to the Colville Reservation in Washington. Mary spent the rest of her life working with and living among and near Native people on reservations in Washington (Colville and Yakama) and Oregon (Warm Springs). She wrote about those experiences in her memoir, Coming to Stay: A Columbia River Journey (Oregon Historical Society, 2006). She also wrote newspaper features and from 1985 – 2000, a weekly column “Mountain Musings” in the Hood River News.

Mary studied and documented the traditional native basket making creators, techniques, materials and styles of the Columbia Plateau. Her scholarly work was widely published and presented. Columbia River Basketry: Gifts of the Ancestors, Gifts of the Earth (1995), was her award-winning book on the history, makers, materials, and techniques of the Native peoples of the Columbia Plateau.

Mary was a prolific poet for decades and taught poetry writing at workshops including Beargrass in Trout Lake, Washington. From her verses for children to deceptively simple rhymes to haiku, Mary’s gift for words deftly wove many elements of nature and the human condition.

Stuart Watson fell in love with poetry during college. His love of poetic language infused a long Oregon newspaper career. Now retired, he publishes widely in small literary magazines. “An Uprising of Leaves,” his first collection, will be published this year.

by Elaine Kirby

ELAINE KIRBY, born and raised in a small town in the Ohio River Valley, made her career as a nurse and paramedic. When she and her husband Jim first visited the Hood River Valley in the fall of 1986, Elaine had the feeling that she had come ‘home.’ They purchased property in Mt Hood and returned after retiring in 1992 to build their log home. Self-taught as a writer, Elaine corresponded for over twenty years with her high school English teacher, an important influence. Inspired by the beauty of the Hood River Valley, Elaine began writing poetry about nature, which was published in the Hood River News. She is also an accomplished quilter.

by Fred Stager

FRED STAGER grew up in the Hood River Valley, spending his summers working on Rasmussen’s farm in Odell, graduating in the Hood River Valley High class of 1980. A trip to Alaska to pay for his education landed him aboard a commercial fishing boat and set him on a life of adventure on “a  road less travelled.” He’s spent his life plying the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean between Astoria and the Bering Sea. He’s a fisher-poet with a boat homeported in beautiful Kodiak Alaska, where he lives with his family; still fishing his boat, tending his subsistence farm, writing poems, prose, and music.

by Brian Johnson

BRIAN JOHNSON lived in the Gorge from the late 80’s to the early 00’s. During that time, he worked, loved, played, and enjoyed the rivers, mountains, rocks and crannies of the mid-Columbia area. He has always appreciated poetry but never seriously devoted much time to writing it until he moved to New Mexico. Since then, he has been engaged with other poets, and written dozens of poems, including a number inspired by his time in the Gorge. He says that, to date, he has little interest in publishing, preferring to share and trade work with other poets as the moment and times may inspire.

by Rena Priest

photo credit Mark Caicedo

RENA PRIEST is a citizen of the Lhaq’temish [Lummi] Nation. In a historic appointment, Priest was named Washington State’s sixth Poet Laureate (2021-2023), becoming the first Indigenous person to hold the position. In this role, she championed poetry that celebrated the ecological gifts of her ancestral homelands, the bioregion. She is an Academy of American Poets Fellow, an Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow, and winner of a Washington State Book Award for poetry. Her new essay collection, Positively Uncivilized, was published (October 2025) as the inaugural winner of the Keepers of the Fire Award from Raven Chronicles Press.

by Jessamyn Duckwall

JESSAMYN DUCKWALL is a neurodivergent poet from Hood River who enjoys reading tarot cards and talking to plants and mushrooms. They are a 2025 Oregon Literary Arts Fellow, and they hold an MFA in poetry from Portland State University. Their work has appeared in Pile Press, Radar Poetry, Josephine Quarterly, and other publications. You can find some of their published work here. They’re also on Instagram as @deadnettle__.