Wendy Willis and David Biespiel

Wendy Willis is a poet and essayist from Portland, Oregon. She is also the Founder and Director of Oregon’s Kitchen Table, a program of the National Policy Consensus Center (in the Hatfield School of Government) at Portland State University and the Executive Director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, a global network of organizations and leading scholars working in the field of deliberation and public engagement. Her next book of essays, These are Strange Times, My Dear, was released in February. Her last book of poems, A Long Late Pledge, is a finalist for the 2019 Oregon Book Award.

David Biespiel is the author of eleven books, including Republic Café, published in 2019, The Education of a Young Poet, which was selected a Best Books for Writers by Poets & Writers, A Long High Whistle, which received the Oregon Book Award for General Nonfiction, and The Book of Men and Women, which was chosen for Best Books of the Year by the Poetry Foundation and received the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Recipient of Lannan, National Endowment for the Arts, and Stegner fellowships, he’s been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Balakian Award. Biespiel is Poet-in-Residence at Oregon State University, a core faculty member in the Rainier Writers Workshop MFA Program, and founder of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters.