Teachers & Staff

David Biespiel

President of the Attic Institute

David Biespiel (pronounced buy-speel) is widely recognized as one of the leading poets of his generation, a liberal commentator on national politics, and also one of the nation's experts in teaching writing. His teaching experience is innovative and vast: He has taught at every level of education, from a one-room schoolhouse to large university campuses, from public high schools to graduate seminars, from teaching poetics at Stanford University to developing national champions in the Olympic sport of diving, and he has lectured and spoken to audiences throughout the United States.

Looking to create an independent writing studio in 1999, David founded the Attic Institute as a haven for writers in Portland's historic Hawthorne district.

Among his publications are Shattering Air, Pilgrims & Beggars, Wild Civility, The Book of Men and Women which was named Best Poetry of the Year for 2009 by The Poetry Foundation and also received the Oregon Book Award, and Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces. He has been honored with a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature.

Since 2008, he as been a frequent contributor to Politico's "Arena," a cross-party, cross-discipline daily conversation about politics and policy among more than a hundred current and former members of Congress, governors, mayors, political strategists and scholars.

In 2010 he was elected to the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle where he serves as a judge for the NBCC annual book awards.

Read David's complete bio and find links to his works on the Web

Jeff Baker

Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute

Jeff Baker is The Oregonian's book editor. He has won regional and national awards for criticism, feature writing, and sports journalism. Follow Jeff's books blog.

David Ciminello

Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute

David Ciminello is a New York-based writer and educator. His fiction has appeared in the Lambda Literary Award winning anthology Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City, Lumina, Underwater New York, and on broadcastr. His poetry has appeared in Poetry Northwest.

As a professional screenwriter, David has developed projects with Aaron Spelling Productions, All Girl Productions, Sony Pictures, HBO, and Twentieth Century Fox. His original screenplay, Bruno, was directed by Shirley MacLaine for HBO.

David is currently working on a novel manuscript -- a queer journey through WWII era New York and New Jersey involving tomatoes, cooking, Coney Island, a missing baby, a runaway gay boy, and a burlesque queen.

David teaches workshops at the Attic Institute during the summer.

Kerry Cohen

Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute

Kerry Cohen is the author of six books: Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity; Seeing Ezra: A Mother's Story of Autism, Unconditional Love, and The Meaning of Normal; Dirty Little Secrets: Breaking the Silence on Teenage Girls and Promiscuity; and the three young adult novels Easy, The Good Girl, and It's Not You, It's Me.

Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Psychology Today, and many other anthologies and journals. She is on the faculty of the Red Earth Low-Residency MFA program out of Oklahoma City, Gotham Writers' Workshops, and here. Find out more at www.kerry-cohen.com.

Matthew Dickman

Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute

Matthew Dickman is the author of All-American Poem (APR/ Copper Canyon Press, 2008). He is 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 and two Fellowships from Literary Arts of Oregon. He has also received residencies and fellowships from The Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, The Vermont Studio Center, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and The Lannan Foundation.

Matthew has been profiled in The Oregonian, Poets & Writers Magazine, The Seattle Post Intelligencer, and The New Yorker. Born and raised in the Lents District of Portland he has been a guest lecturer and teacher at institutions including Reed College, Writers in The Schools, Portland State University, Vermont College of Fine Arts, Hamline University, and Smith College.

His poems have appeared in Tin House Magazine, McSweeny’s, Ploughshares, and The New Yorker, among many others. W.W. Norton & Co. will publish his second book in 2012.

Merridawn Duckler

Senior Fellow at the Attic Institute

Merridawn Duckler is a senior fellow at the Attic Institute, a prominent teacher of fiction and nonfiction, a member of the Attic Atheneum faculty, and a leading writing coach in the Individual Consult Group.

Merridawn has published fiction and nonfiction in Carolina Quarterly Main Street Rag, Isotope, Green Mountains Review, Night Train with work forthcoming in Contact Quarterly, Cerise, Brevity and a novel excerpt in the existential journal Fiddleblack.

She is a three-time winner of Professional Society of Journalists. She is an NEA awardee with work performed at the Red Cat at Disney Hall and reviewed in The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. Her most recent play was performed in the Manhattan Shakespeare Projects New Playwright Festival. She was a non-fiction runner-up at Writers@Work.

Other fellowships include residencies at Yaddo, Centrum, Squaw Valley Writers Community, Summer Literary Seminar in St. Petersburg, Russia the Bertha Anolic Visual Arts Fellowship to Israel. A past moderator at the Continental Philosophy of Religion symposium at Syracuse University, she’s a forthcoming presenter on “New Jewish Icons” in Vancouver BC. A conceptual show on an essay by Walter Benjamin is forthcoming at Blackfish Gallery in Portland.

Merridawn is an Associate Editor at Narrative Magazine and represented by the Weingel-Fidel Agency, NY.

Check out Merridawn's blog

Other links:

Visit Merridawn's website.

Read the The New York Times review on her libretto Copera.

Read Merridawn's report on the "The Problem of Fiction."

Shanna Germain

Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute

Shanna Germain is the author of Beneath Sea and Sky: Erotic Stories of Fantasy. Her poems, short stories, and essays have been widely published in places like McSweeney's, Salon, Best American Erotica, Best Gay Romance, Hint Fiction, The American Journal of Nursing, Storyglossia, and elsewhere.

A former Attic student, Shanna has received awards such as the C. Hamilton Bailey Fellowship from Literary Arts, a Pushcart nomination, and a Soapstone residency.

Other links:

Visit her website at www.shannagermain.com

Martha Gies

Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute

Martha Gies is the author of Up All Night (Oregon State University Press, 2004), a portrait of Portland told through the stories of 23 people who work graveyard shift. Her short stories and literary essays appear widely in literary quarterlies, including Orion, The Sun, and Zyzzyva, and in various anthologies, and her journalism has appeared in magazines and newspapers for the last 35 years. Martha has received support for her work from Literary Arts and the Regional Arts & Culture Council, and has won prizes for her short fiction from PEN and the Seattle Weekly. She taught as an adjunct instructor in both the Lewis & Clark graduate writing program and, for 20 years, at Marylhurst University. Since 2000, she has taught her annual Traveler’s Mind (www.veracruzworkshops.com) workshop abroad in Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, India and Spain. Martha is also a long-time activist for low-income housing and human rights.

Other links:

Visit Martha's website.

Ariel Gore

Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute

Currently based in Sante Fe, Ariel Gore is the founding editor of the zine Hip Mama, author of Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness, Whatever, Mom, Atlas of the Human Heart, How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead: Your Words in Print and Your Name in Lights, The Hip Mama Survival Guide, The Mother Trip, & editor of the anthologies Breeder, Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City, & The Essential Hip Mama: Writing from the Cutting Edge of Parenting. A former Attic student, she's a contributor to Ms. & Utne.

Store links:

Browse Ariel's bookshelf at Powell's Bookstore.

Other links:

View Ariel's blog. And this interview.

Emily Harris

Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute

Emily Harris is an award-winning journalist who has gathered stories all over the world. She reported for NPR from Europe, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Washington DC and shared in NPR's 2005 Peabody award for coverage of Iraq.

Emily grew up in Oregon, and returned in 2007 to help start Think Out Loud, an award-winning public affairs program on OPB, which she hosted for several years.

Emily studied Russian at Lincoln High School in Portland and at Yale. From 2002-2007, she was the Central and Eastern European correspondent for NPR; from 2005-2006, she was Knight Fellow at Stanford University; from 2000-2002, she was a special correspondent for NPR and PBS; and from 1996-1998, she was a senior producer for KCRW in Los Angeles.

Her current projects include being Editorial Director of the Journalism Accelerator, developing a parenting stories app, honing a twisted tale from the battlefields of Iraq, and exploring the places journalism and other ways of life intersect.

Emily's skills include: interviewing, moderating, listening, questioning, audio collection and editing, story-finding, getting the big picture, and making complicated things make sense.

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