Poetry Night: Ellen Waterston and Jeff Fearnside
Cozy up for a night of poetry as acclaimed writers Ellen Waterston and Jeff Fearnside share their latest collections. Completed while travelling the state during her first year as Oregon’s Poet Laureate, the poems in Waterston’s As Far as I Can Anthem enlist the people and places across Oregon to inform, challenge and inspire readers in vital and unexpected ways. Fearnside’s most recent book, Lake: Love Poems, is focused on the concept of place, specifically Central Asia, where he lived for four years, and Oregon, his home for the past 13 years. The poems are connected by the thread of his courtship with and marriage to the woman who has experienced these places with him, his life partner Valentina.
Consider This with Christian Wiman
Join us for a conversation about trust, faith, and beauty with Christian Wiman. In his poems and essays, Wiman explores religious and secular belief, hope and despair, sickness and memory. In all that he writes and does, Wiman asks what we can count on or believe in as we aim to live lives full of meaning and connection.
The conversation will take place at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland (3000 SE Alberta St.) at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, April 6, 2027. The event is part of our 2026–27 Consider This series, What Do We Trust?
Tickets are $15 at albertarosetheatre.com.
Poetry for the People Reading and Consider This Livestream
The Jacksonville Library will stream an Oregon Humanities conversation with the poet and novelist Naomi Shihab Nye, preceded by a live poetry reading featuring members of the Southern Oregon Poetry for the People group. In the live reading, poets preview their new anthology Poetry for the Planet. Then, in a livestream from Portland’s Alberta Theater, Shihab Nye will focus on how communities become what we hope them to be. How should we strive to live together in community?
Putting in Footings
A poem by Clemens Starck
Consider This with Naomi Shihab Nye
A conversation with the extraordinary poet and novelist Naomi Shihab Nye about nations and communities. What makes this nation, the United States, what it is? How do nations change over time, and what moves those changes? How do communities become what we hope them to be? How should we strive to live together in community?
Flowering in Tar
Daniela Naomi Molnar writes about learning to be sensorially aware amid climate chaos and socioecological crisis
Poem: My Children Are the Bright Flowers
A poem by Cecelia Hagen
Poem: Luck of the Divide
A poem by Ellen Waterston, Oregon's eleventh Poet Laureate
our farm
A poem by ramona hilaria
Collection
A poem by Dawn Diez Willis
Angier, NC
A poem by Eric Tran
Healing Gila
A poem by Lawson Fusao Inada
Lines for the Dead
Melissa Madenski on honoring those we loved and lost as the whole people they were.
Shab-e-Yalda
A poem by Anis Mojgani
The Rebirth of Wonder
Tricia Gates Brown on poetry, mortality, and the love you don't see coming
Resume of Failures—2011
Kim Stafford writes about the stories of struggle, insecurity, and loss behind his accomplishments in the 2011 “Fail” issue.