Who could be a-verse to this?
Oregon Poet Laureate Ellen Waterston
Poetry will ring out in Newport this Friday and Saturday, Oct. 4 and 5, when the Oregon Poetry Association holds its annual conference at the Best Western Agate Beach. Oregon’s newly appointed poet laureate Ellen Waterston, slam champion Marcus Lattimore and poet Annie Lighthart will share their work, and poets will be inspired by eight different workshops on all aspects of writing, reading and publishing poetry.
This first in-person gathering of the association since the COVID pandemic will also be available via Zoom for those who can’t attend in person.
Waterston is a poet, educator and speaker living in Bend. Her books include “Walking the High Desert,” “Encounters with Rural America along the Oregon Desert Trail,” the essay collection “Where the Crooked River Rises,” the memoir “Then There Was No Mountain” and four poetry titles.
In addition to her work as an author, she founded the for-profit Writing Ranch, offering retreats and workshops for established and emerging writers, and the Bend-based literary arts nonprofit, The Nature of Words, which she directed for more than a decade. She subsequently founded the Waterston Desert Writing Prize, annually recognizing a nonfiction book proposal that examines the role of deserts in the human narrative, now a program of The High Desert Museum. She teaches in the OSU Cascades Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing program.
Lattimore is a former professional athlete turned writer. To reinvent himself after his career in football, he moved to Portland in 2020, where writing and hiking became daily rituals. Since then, he has performed in local theater and won Slamlandia’s 2024 Grand Slam Poetry contest. He represented OPA at the National Blackberry Peach slam competition in Georgia. Marcus and his wife co-founded the business ZENMNM which hosts creative wellness workshops across Portland.
Lighthart is a poet and teacher who started writing poetry after her first visit to an Oregon old-growth forest. She has taught at Boston College and with writers of all ages. Poems from her books “Pax” and “Iron String” have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and in various anthologies, including “Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems” and “How to Love the World.” Her poems have been turned into music, used in meditation and healing projects in Ireland, England and New Zealand, and have traveled farther than she has.
This year's workshop presenters are Emmett Wheatfall, Collette Tennant, Lisa Kagan, Tiel Aisha Ansari, Nicole Zdeb, Eva Sheehan, Renee Roman Nose and Dale Champlin.
The fee to attend is $225 for non-members, $175 for members, $99 for online guests and $60 for students. The Best Western Agate Beach hotel is located at 3019 Hwy. 101 in Newport. For more information, go to oregonpoets.org.