Category: WilWrite26 Faculty

  • Write Around Portland

    Write Around Portland

    Write Around Portland’s mission is to change lives through the power of writing. Write Around Portland holds free creative writing workshops in hospitals, prisons, schools, treatment centers, low income residences, homeless shelters and social service agencies. Write Around Portland workshops are based on respect, writing and community. Three times a year, Write Around Portland publish books of participants’ writing and organize readings where participants share their writing with each other and with the greater community.

    Learn more at https://www.writearound.org/.

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  • Keri-Rae Barnum

    Keri-Rae Barnum

    Keri-Rae Barnum has empowered hundreds of authors to launch and grow their writing careers with confidence and real-world results. She is the owner and CEO of New Shelves Books, where she partners with publishers and authors alike to strengthen production, distribution, and visibility in bookstores and libraries.


    She is also the author of Tough Love for Indie Authors: An Honest Look at What It Takes to Win in Self-Publishing (Sibyl Writing Craft, February 2026), a practical guide grounded in her hands-on experience working across every stage of the publishing process to help indie authors publish, market, and sell their books. Through her work, Keri specializes in platform building, strategic book launches, and innovative marketing approaches that have helped numerous titles reach bestseller lists and long-term sales success.

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  • Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito

    Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito

    Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito is the founder of Demagogue Press. When she’s not rolling a d20 and playing with meeples, she’s reading or writing SF/F/H/genre-busting stories. Her writing has appeared in several venues including Nightmare Magazine, Flame Tree Press’s Asian Ghost Stories and Immigrant Sci-fi Stories, Mother:Tales of Love and Terror, Death’s Garden Revisited, and Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror. Frances also co-chairs the Young Willamette Writers program that provides free writing classes for high school and middle school students. You can find her on FB Frances Pai and IG @francespaippolito.

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  • Christopher Diaz

    Christopher Diaz

    Christopher Diaz (he/him) is an indigenous CHamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan. As a writer, performer, and photographer, he’s been featured by NBC News, Poets & Writers.org, and more. Recently he was awarded a fellowship with Indigenous Nations Poets and an artist grant from the Washington State Arts Commission. In 2025, he was the opening keynote speaker at the Oregon Poetry Association’s annual conference. He’s a two-time grand slam champion and won the 2023 Bigfoot Regional Slam with his PNW team. He’s taught poetry with “Writers in the Schools”, offers writing and performance workshops online and in person, and co-leads monthly writing workshops at the juvenile detention center in Vancouver, WA.

    Find him at www.christopherdiazcreates.com.

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  • Fran Wilde

    Fran Wilde

    Two-time Nebula Award-winner Fran Wilde has (so far) published nine novels, a poetry collection, and over 70 short stories for adults, teens, and kids. Her stories have been finalists for six Nebula Awards, a World Fantasy Award, four Hugo Awards, four Locus Awards, and a Lodestar. They include her Nebula- and Compton Crook-winning debut novel Updraft, and her Nebula-winning, Best of NPR 2019, debut Middle Grade novel Riverland. Her short stories appear in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Nature, Uncanny Magazine, and multiple years’ best anthologies.

    The Managing Editor for The Sunday Morning Transport, Fran teaches or has taught for schools including Vermont College of Fine Arts’ MFA and St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She writes nonfiction for publications including The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, and Tor.com.

    You can find her on Instagram, Bluesky, and at franwilde.net.

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    • Courtenay Hameister

      Courtenay Hameister

      Courtenay is an author, teacher, and the former host and head writer of the nationally-syndicated public radio show, Live Wire. Her first book, Okay Fine Whatever: The Year I Went From Being Afraid of Everything to Only Being Afraid of Most Things was long-listed for the Thurber Prize for American Humor.

      Find out more at courtenayhameister.com

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    • Emmett Wheatfall

      Emmett Wheatfall

      Emmett Wheatfall is an American poet, Oregon Poet Laureate nominee, and recipient of the prestigious Oregon Poetry Association Patricia Ruth Banta Award. His poetry has been published in several books, collections, anthologies, and one of them, As Clean as a Bone, was a 2019 Eric Hoffer Award Finalist and a da Vinci Eye award finalist. Emmett has keynoted two Oregon Poetry Association’s Conferences. In 2020, Corban University produced a 9-part series documentary that highlights Emmett’s early life and poetry. Emmett Wheatfall is one of Oregon’s premier poets.


      Find out more at https://emmettwheatfall-poet.blogspot.com/

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    • Dana Haynes

      Dana Haynes

      Novelist Dana Haynes has spent more than 20 years in Oregon newspaper newsrooms, split between weeklies and dailies. He has won awards as a reporter, columnist and editor. A native of the Pacific Northwest, he also served as spokesman for the mayor of Portland, Oregon.

      Haynes’ first thriller, CRASHERS was released in 2010 by Minotaur Books, a division of St. Martin’s Press. It won the Spotted Owl Award from Friends of Mystery as 2010’s best mystery or thriller written by a Northwest writer.

      His first screenplay, an adaptation of CRASHERS made it to the semifinals of the Nichols Fellowship in 2005.

      BREAKING POINT, the sequel to CRASHERS, made its debut in 2011, followed by ICE COLD KILL, the breakout thriller for Daria Gibron, in 2012; and GUN METAL HEART in 2014.

      His new novel, ST. NICHOLAS SALVAGE & WRECKING, marks Haynes’s debut with Blackstone Publishing in March 2019.

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    • Dustin Morrow

      Dustin Morrow

      Dustin Morrow bridges the worlds of creative practice and scholarly inquiry as an Emmy-winning filmmaker, bestselling author, film festival programmer, optioned screenwriter, podcaster and educator. He is a tenured Professor in the School of Film at Portland State University.

      More here: https://dustinmorrow.com/biography/.

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    • Valerie Sasaki

      Valerie Sasaki

      Valerie is a tax, business, and estate planning attorney in Portland, Oregon. Her favorite thing to do is to detangle complex language and solve problems. She has various degrees and accolades, none of which have to do with writing fiction. And yet we march on! It took her 20 years to feel competent at her day job, so she’s expecting a similar runway for her fantasy novel writing. Why novels? She admits that she doesn’t have the discipline or attention span for short stories. Valerie recently acquired a mini-velociraptor who is coming to believe that his name is “why are you chewing that?”

      Find out more at www.jomizuno.com.

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