Teachers & Staff

Jon Raymond

Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters

Jon Raymond is the author of the novels Freebird, Rain Dragon and The Half-Life, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2004, and the short-story collection Livability, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and winner of the Oregon Book Award. He is also the screenwriter of the film Meek’s Cutoff and cowriter of the films Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, both based on his short fiction, and the film Night Moves. He also cowrote the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce, winner of five Emmy Awards. Raymond’s writing has appeared in Playboy, Zoetrope, Tin House, Bookforum, Artforum, and other publications. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

 

 

Joanna Rose

Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters

Joanna Rose is the author of the award-winning novel Little Miss Strange (Algonquin Books).  Other work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Story Magazine, Artisan Journal, Northern Lights, Oregon Humanities, High Desert Journal, VoiceCatcher, and Portland Review and the anthologies The Night and The Rain and The River and Brave on the Page  (Forest Avenue Press). Her poetry has appeared in Windfall,  Bellingham Review,  Cloudbank, and the on-line journals 2Grlz Review, and  Four and Twenty. Her essay, "That Thing With Feathers," was honored as Notable in 2015 Best American Essays. Her novel, A Small Crowd of Strangers, is forthcoming from Forest Avenue press in Fall 2020.

Ed Sage

Teaching Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters

Ed Sage teaches writing and literature. His poetry and creative nonfiction appear in ZYZZYVA, Verseweavers, The Portland Review, 4th Street Journal, The Ponder Review, Plainsongs, BULL Lit and The Passionfruit Review.

Natalie Serber

Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters

Natalie Serber is the author of a memoir, Community Chest, and the story collection, Shout Her Lovely Name, a New York Times Notable Book of 2012, a summer reading selection from O, the Oprah Magazine, and an Oregonian Top 10 Book of the Pacific Northwest. Her fiction has appeared in The Bellingham Review, Gulf Coast, Inkwell, and Hunger Mountain and is forth coming in Zyzzyva. Essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Huffington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Oregonian, The Rumpus, Salon, and Fourth Genre. Natalie has received the John Steinbeck Award, Tobias Wolff Award, and H.E. Francis Award, and has been short listed in Best American Short Stories. She teaches fiction and the personal essay in and around Portland, and at various conferences including Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Natalie received her MFA from Warren Wilson College.

Joel Shupack

Teaching Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters

Joel Shupack is an independent radio and podcast producer, sound designer and audio storyteller. He began telling stories in sound in 2013 with a project called CommonPlace - a podcast chronicle of a cross-country bike trip and the stories he came across. Later, he was lead writer with the Steam Radio Syndicate, helping to produce a live variety show inspired by American folk songs. He was also the audio editor for The River Signal, a serialized radio drama. He currently produces his own podcast called SquareMile where each episode is a poetic exploration of a different square mile of land. His work has also been featured on the Out There podcast and KNKX's Sound Effects.

Ed Skoog

Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters

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. 

Cheryl Strayed

Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters

Cheryl Strayed's memoir, Wild, was published by Knopf to great acclaim in 2012. Her novel, Torch, was published by Houghton Miflin in 2006 and was selected by the Oregonian as one of the top ten books of the year by writers living in the Pacific Northwest.

Cheryl's personal essays have appeared in The New York Times magazine, The Washington Post magazine, the Sun, Allure, Self, Brain, Child, and other places and have twice been included in the Best American Essays. 

On Valentine's Day in 2012, in San Franscisco, Cheryl announced that since 2010 she has been the anonymous writer, "Sugar," of the Dear Sugar advice column on the Rumpus. 

Paige Thomas

Teaching Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters

Paige Thomas is a writer and visual artist. She has been awarded the Hogue Family Centennial Literary Scholarship, the Leishman Reid English Award, and residencies through Spring Creek Project and Hypatia-in-the-Woods. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Oregon State University. Her work appears in New Delta Review, Diode, Columbia Journal, Playground Gallery’s Little Things, Big Thoughts Exhibition, and elsewhere.

 

Ashley Toliver

Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters

Ashley Toliver is the author of Spectra (Coffee House Press, 2018), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Oregon Book Award, and a chapbook, Ideal Machine (Poor Claudia, 2014). A poetry editor at Moss, her work has been supported by fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. She received her MFA from Brown University in 2013. 

Vanessa Veselka

Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters

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.

"Often, authors fall into two distinct camps: those who write gorgeous sentences, but who can’t spin conflict-driven yarns, direct storytelling taking a backseat to narrative navel-gazing; on the other side are the ones who emphasize plot, building much more filmic stories, yet those authors never take the time to make each sentence stand on their own as pieces of art. The lucky few are able to do both of these things simultaneously—think Denis Johnson, John Fante, Lynda Barry—and Veselka is one of thEM. —Joshua Mohr / The Rumpus

"Veselka's prose is chiseled and laced with arsenic observations."  — Publisher’s Weekly

 

 

 

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A Statement of Our Values

The Attic Institute of Arts and Letters opposes the legitimation of bigotry, hate, and misinformation. As a studio for writers, we do not tolerate harassment or discrimination of any kind. We embrace and celebrate our shared pursuit of literature and languages as essential to crossing the boundaries of difference. To that end, we seek to maintain a creative environment in which every employee, faculty member, and student feels safe, respected, and comfortable — even while acknowledging that poems, stories, and essays delve into uncomfortable subjects. We accept the workshop as a place to question ourselves and to empathize with complex identities. We understand that to know the world is to write the world. Therefore, we reaffirm our commitment to literary pursuits and shared understanding by affirming diversity and open inquiry.