Teachers & Staff

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 ReviewParis ReviewThe New RepublicPoetryNarrativePloughsharesTin 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 ReviewDiode, 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

 

 

 

Emily Whitman

Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters

In Emily Whitman’s novels for kids and teens, myth and magic are part of everyday life. The Turning, a middle-grade novel based on Celtic folklore, won the 2019 Oregon Book Award for children's literature. Her YA novels are Radiant Darkness, number one on the IndieBound Kid’s Next List, and Wildwing, winner of an Oregon Book Award and a Bankstreet College Best Children’s Book. Emily grew up in Colorado and studied history at Harvard and UC Berkeley. She's worked in bookstores and behind library reference desks. Emily loves researching her books, whether by mining library treasures or learning to fly falcons. Come visit her at emilywhitman.com.

Wendy Willis

Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters

Wendy Willis is a poet and essayist living in Portland, Oregon. Her book of essays, These Are Strange Times, My Dear,  was published by Counterpoint Press in 2019. Her second book of poems, A Long Late Pledge, won the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize and was released by Bear Star Press in September 2017. Her first book of poems, Blood Sisters of the Republic, was published by Press 53 in 2012. Her last two books have been finalists for the Oregon Book Award.  Wendy is a faculty member in poetry and creative nonfiction at the Attic Institute in Portland, Oregon.

Wendy is the Executive Director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium and the founder and director of Oregon’s Kitchen Table. Wendy has served as a federal public defender and as the law clerk to Chief Justice Wallace P. Carson, Jr. of the Oregon Supreme Court. She graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown Law Center and holds a B.A. from Willamette University and an M.F.A. in poetry from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.

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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.