Atheneum Faculty
Fiction
Merridawn Duckler has published in Carolina Quarterly, Georgia State Review, & Main Street Rag among others with current work in Isotope, Green Mountains Review, Narrative & Night Train. A former Attic student, she is a two-time winner of Society of Professional Journalists Award & was nominated for Best Creative Non-Fiction Anthology 2009 and a Pushcart Prize. Reviews of her work have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Her original scripts have been preformed at the NOW Festival at Red Cat at Disney Hall and other venues in Los Angeles, Stanford, & New York in conjunction with the performance troupe Collage Dance Theatre of Los Angeles. She has been in residency at Centrum, Caldera, and Yaddo, among others. She was a non-fiction runner-up at Writers@Work in Salt Lake City & has won fiction fellowships to the Squaw Valley Writers Community, Wesleyan Writers conference, & Summer Literary Seminar in St. Petersburg, Russia. She has taught at the Attic for nearly ten years & is an Associate Editor at Narrative magazine.
Vanessa Veselka is the author of a novel, Zazen, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and won the 2012 PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize for debut fiction. Her stories have appeared in Tin House, Zyzzyva, and SWINK. Her long form nonfiction can be found in GQ, The Atlantic, The American Reader, and Salon. She has also been, at times, a teenage runaway, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, a train-hopper, a waitress, and a mother.
Non-Fiction
Whitney Otto is the author of five novels: How To Make an American Quilt, which was a New York Times Best Seller (as well as other bestseller lists) and NY Times Notable Book; nominated for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award, and adapted into a feature film produced by Steven Spielberg. Now You See Her was nominated for an Oregon Book Award, and optioned for film. The Passion Dream Bookwas a Los Angeles Times bestseller, optioned for a film, and an Oregonian Book Club selection.
Karen Karbo's most recent book in what she calls her kick ass women books is Julia Child Rules, due out in 2013. Other books include: How Georgia Became O'Keeffe, How to Hepburn, published in 2007, hailed by the Philadelphia Inquirer as "an exuberant celebration of a great original," and The Gospel According to Coco Chanel, published in 2009, was a Nielsen Bookscan bestseller. Karen's first novel, Trespassers Welcome Here, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and a Village Voice Top Ten Book of the Year. Her other two adult novels, The Diamond Lane and Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me, were also named New York Times Notable Books. Her 2004 memoir, The Stuff of Life, about the last year she spent with her father before his death, was an New York Times Notable Book, a People Magazine Critics' Choice, a Books for a Better Life Award finalist, and a winner of the Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her short stories, essays, articles and reviews have appeared in Elle, Vogue, Esquire, Outside, the New York Times, salon.com and other magazines. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a winner of the General Electric Younger Writer Award.
Poetry
Matthew Dickman is the author of All-American Poem(American Poetry Review/ Copper Canyon Press, 2008), Mayakovsky’s Revolver (WW Norton & Co, 2012), Wish You Were Here (Spork Press, 2013) and has co-written along with his brother 50 American Plays (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) The recipient of The Honickman First Book Prize, The May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Kate Tufts Award from Claremont College, the 2009 Oregon Book Award, his poems have appeared in the London Review of Books, McSweeny’s, Esquire, Poetry London, The New York Times Style Magazine, The Believer and The New Yorker among many others. He is lives and works in Portland, Oregon where he is the poetry editor for Tin House Magazine.
Ed Skoog is the author of two collections of poems, Mister Skylight (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) and Rough Day (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Paris Review, The New Republic, Poetry, Narrative, Ploughshares, Tin House, and elsewhere. His work has received awards from the Faulkner Society and the Poetry Society of America. Skoog has taught at the Idyllwild Arts Foundation in Idyllwild, California, the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, and Tulane University. He has been the Jenny McKean Moore Writer in Washington at George Washington University and writer-in-residence at the Richard Hugo House.