Teachers & Staff

Emily Chenoweth

Adjunct Fellow in Fiction

Emily Chenoweth is the author of the novel, Hello Goodbye. She's a former fiction editor of Publishers Weekly. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Bookforum, and People, among other publications. Emily teaches in the Atheneum program.

Lila Cutter

Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters

Lila Cutter teaches poetry at Oregon State University. She has been awarded a Spring Creek Fellowship, International Writing Program Fellowship, and has been semifinalist for the Jane Underwood Poetry Prize. Lila’s poetry can be found in The Shore Journal, Sugar House Review, Mystic Yarn Podcast, The Citron Review, Miniskirt Magazine, Ursus Americanus Press, and The Racket Journal, among others.

Mo Daviau

Associate Fellow in Fiction at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters

Mo Daviau (pronounced DAH-vee-oh) is the author of the novels Every Anxious Wave and Epic and Lovely.   Born and raised in Fresno and San Diego County, California, Mo is a graduate of Smith College and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Mo is a bookseller and the event host at Annie Bloom’s Books. 

Kate Carroll de Gutes

Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters

Kate Carroll de Gutes is a wry observer and writer who started her career as a journalist and then got excited by new journalism which became creative nonfiction and is now called essay (personal, lyric, and otherwise). Kate's book, Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, won the 2016 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and a 2016 Lambda Literary Award in Memoir. Kate writes on a wide range of topics, but her obsession is to focus on sexuality and gender presentation, and living an authentic life. Learn more at katecarrolldegutes.com.

 

Susan DeFreitas

Writing Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters

Susan DeFreitas’s work has appeared in The Utne Reader, The Nervous Breakdown, Story Magazine, Southwestern American Literature, and Weber—The Contemporary West, along with more than twenty other magazines, journals, and anthologies. She is the author of the novel, Hot Season, and the chapbook Pyrophitic, as well as a regular contributor at Litreactor.com. She holds an MFA from Pacific University and lives in Portland, Oregon, where she serves as a collaborative editor with Indigo Editing & Publications.

Matthew Dickman

Senior Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters

Matthew Dickman is the author of HusbandryWonderlandMayakovsky’s Revolver, and All-American Poem, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. His other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Sarton Award for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Michael Dickman

Visiting Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters

Michael Dickman’s most recent book of poems is Pacific Power & Light (Knopf, 2024). His other books include Days & Days (Knopf, 2019); Green Migraine (Copper Canyon, 2016); 50 American Plays (Copper Canyon, 2012), co-authored with his twin brother, the poet Matthew Dickman; Flies (Copper Canyon, 2011), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and The End of the West (Copper Canyon, 2009) His many grants, fellowships, and residencies include honors from organizations such as the Michener Center for Writers, the Vermont Studio Center, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Lannan Foundation. He was awarded the Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University for 2009-2010.

Merridawn Duckler

Senior Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters

A prose writer, playwright, poet, and artist, Merridawn Duckler is a senior fellow at the Attic Institute, a member of the Atheneum faculty, and a leader of the Individual Consult Group. Her recent work appears in: TAB: Journal of Poetry and Poetics, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Blast Furnace, Zone 3, The Psychoanalytic Review, The Offing, The Meadow, Rivet, Really SystemPoetica and Defenestration. She was a finalist for the 2016 Sozoplo Fiction Fellowship. Her work has been performed at Red Cat at Disney Hall, as well as in other venues in Arizona, California, New York, Oregon, Washington and Valdez Alaska. Her verse play appeared in the Emerging Female Playwright Festival Manhattan Shakespeare Project. She is a member of the Blackfish Gallery collective. Fellowships and awards include Best Creative Non-Fiction Anthology and Pushcart nomination, winner Writers@Work, Yaddo, Squaw Valley, NEA, SLS in St. Petersburg, Russia, Southampton Poetry Conference with Billy Collins, and others. She is an editor at Narrative and the international philosophy journal Evental Aesthetics

Patrick Dundon

Teaching Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters

Patrick Dundon is the author of the chapbook The Conspirators of Pleasure (Sixth Finch Books). He’s a graduate of the MFA program at Syracuse University where he served as Editor-in-Chief for Salt Hill Journal. His work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, BOAAT, Cosmonauts Avenue, DIAGRAM, HobartThe JournalVinyl and elsewhere.

Omar El Akkad

Writing Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters

Omar El Akkad's debut novel, American War, received the 2018 Oregon Book Award for fiction. Omar was born in Cairo, Egypt and grew up in the Middle East before moving to Canada. In a ten-year career as a reporter, he covered stories across the planet — from the war in Afghanistan to the military trials in Guantanamo Bay, the Arab Spring revolutions in the Middle East and the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. Omar is a recipient of the National Newspaper Award for investigative reporting for his coverage of the “Toronto 18” terrorism arrests. He has also won the Edward Goff Penny Memorial Prize for young Canadian journalists, and has been nominated for several National Magazine Awards. He is a graduate of Queen's University.

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