EOU Visiting Writers

Tuesday, March 4, 2025, 4 pm PT, in the EOU Library and livestreamed: Jessica E. Johnson on Mettlework: A Mining Daughter on Making Home. “In the weeks after her first child is born, Jessica E. Johnson receives an email from her mother that contains artifacts of the author’s early childhood: scans of Polaroids and letters her mother wrote in mountain west mining camps and ghost towns—places without running water, companions, or help. Awash in love and restlessness, Johnson begins to see how the bedrock images of her isolated upbringing have stayed with her, even when she believed she was removing herself from their logic. … Johnson starts digging through her mother’s keepsakes and the histories of the places her family passed through, uncovering the linked misogyny and disconnection that characterized her childhood world—a world with uncomfortable echoes in the present and even in the act of writing itself. The resulting journey encompasses Johnson’s early memories, the story of the earth told in the language of geology, bits of vivid correspondence, a mothering manual from the early twentieth century, and the daily challenges of personal and collective care in a lonesome-crowded Pacific wonderland. Mettlework traces intergenerational failures of homemaking, traveling toward presence and relationship amid the remains of extractive industry and unsustainable notions of family.”Jessica E. Johnson is the author of the book-length poem Metabolics, the chapbook In Absolutes We Seek Each Other, and the memoir Mettlework. Jessica is a career community college instructor based in Portland, Oregon. They are interested in inclusive learning environments, knowledge production, radical care, and the relationships between art, friendship, community, and social change. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, The New Republic, and Poetry Northwest among other publications. Her honors include an Oregon Literary Fellowship, and In Absolutes We Seek Each Other and Metabolics were finalists for the Oregon Book Award in poetry.

Tuesday, January 21, 2025, 4 pm PT, livestreamed: Jennifer Case on We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood. “When Jennifer Case became pregnant unexpectedly with her second child, the prospect of caring for another infant in a society with high expectations and low support for mothers overwhelmed her. … We Are Animals draws attention to these issues by examining key moments in Case’s life where her experience as a woman in twenty-first-century America came in conflict with her experience as a child-bearing mammal. In doing so, these essays offer a balm for women who have struggled in silence over childbirth trauma, conflicted responses to motherhood, or a deeply felt intuition that what their bodies needed as mothers did not match what society provided. The essays also offer a much needed, nuanced perspective for policymakers, activists, and medical professionals who continue to shape women’s experience of motherhood.” Jennifer Cases’s writing explores issues related to place, environment, home, family, and motherhood. Her work has appeared in journals such as Orion, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She is the author of two books: We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood and Sawbill: A Search for Place. She teaches creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas.

May 18, 2023, 6 pm PT, Zoom: Memoirist Bryce Andrews reading and in conversation with Taylor Brorby. Andrews’s latest book is Holding Fire: A Reckoning with the American West. As Alta magazine writes, “Andrews’s heartfelt reflection on the American West confronts one of the region’s essential paradoxes: that a place defined by innovation and beauty also has a  legacy of horrible violence. For the author, the catalyst is inheriting his grandfather’s Smith & Wesson handgun, which carries its own awful history. From his ranch in Montana, Andrews turns to neighbors and family as he seeks a new way to live in the West.” Andrews’s previous books are Down from the Mountain and Badluck Way, which won a Reading the West Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. Andrews will be in conversation with Taylor Brorby, author of the recent memoir Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land. Register here.

February 8, 2023, 6 pm PT, Zoom: Poet Sara Eliza Johnson reading and in conversation with MFA faculty member Christopher Kondrich. Johnson’s second book is Vapor (Milkweed 2022): “With a mind informed by physics, and a heart yearning for sky burial, Vapor’s epic vision swerves from the microscopic to telescopic, evoking an Anthropocene for a body and planet that are continually dying. … Almost omnipresently, Vapor stitches stars to microbes, oceans to space, and love to pain, collapsing time and space to converge everything at once.” Johnson’s first book is Bone Map, and she is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award among other honors. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks.

December 8, 2022, 6 pm PT, Zoom: Poet Robert Wrigley reading and in conversation with MFA Faculty Member Joe Wilkins. In his latest collection, The True Account of Myself as a Bird, Wrigley “means to use poetry to capture the primal conversation between human beings and the perilously threatened planet on which they love and live.” Wrigley has won numerous awards, including the Kingsley Tufts Award, the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award, and a Pacific Northwest Book Award. He lives in the woods of Idaho, with his wife the writer Kim Barnes. The True Account of Myself As a Bird is his twelfth collection of poems. He is also the author of a collection of personal essays, mostly about poetry, called Nemerov’s Door.