As with the portraits in the previous installments of this series I have focused on the talented, dedicated, and creative people who have made significant contributions to the art, character, and culture of this city and state—in this case a journalist, a photographer, a publisher, a poet, and a multi-media artist/gallery owner.
While I have used a couple of different approaches to the portrait here, my aspirations have remained the same: to document the contemporary cultural landscape and to produce a decent photograph—a photograph that acknowledges the medium's allegiance to reality and that preserves for myself and others a unique and honest sense of the subject.
Rebecca Clarren
Rebecca Clarren is a novelist and an award-winning journalist. She has been writing about the American West for more than 25 years. Her journalism—for which she has won the Hillman Prize, an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, and 10 grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism—has appeared in such publications as MotherJones, High Country News, The Nation, and Indian Country Today.
Her debut novel, Kickdown, was shortlisted for the PEN/Bellwether Prize. Her poetry has appeared in such publications as Poetry Northwest, North American Review, Catamaran, and Cutbank. Clarren's latest book, The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance — a blend of history, journalism, and memoir — was the winner of a Whiting Nonfiction Grant and was named a Best Book of 2023 by Kirkus Books, The Forward, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Tribal College Journal.
Aaron Wessling
Aaron Wessling is a photographer. In 2017 he co-founded The Portland Darkroom, an analog collective and community darkroom that provides a working space for local photographers. He is also the owner of Single File Studio, a service that provides high-quality photographic art-documentation services to fine-art collectors, galleries, and working artists. His work has been displayed at the International Center of Photography, Blue Sky Gallery, Newspace Center for Photography, and LightBox Photographic Gallery.
Laura Stanfill
Laura Stanfill is the publisher of Forest Avenue Press and the author of the novel Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary. Her short-form work has appeared in Shondaland, The Rumpus, Catapult, The Vincent Brothers Review, Santa Fe Writers Project, and several print anthologies. Prior to starting Forest Avenue Press, she was a reporter, editor, managing editor, and freelance writer for various community newspapers and magazines in Virginia, New York, and Oregon.
John Sibley Williams
John Sibley Williams is a poet, editor, and educator. He is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019); Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019); Disinheritance; and Controlled Hallucinations. His book Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming in translation from the Portuguese press do lado esquerdo.
In addition to being a Pushcart nominee thirty-five times, Williams serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review, as poetry editor at Kelson Books, and as founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. Previous publishing credits include The Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Review, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and various anthologies.
Daria Loi
Daria Loi is an Italian-born mixed-media artist known for her “PhD-in-a-suitcase†project and for exploring themes of immigration, patriarchy, and workplace experience. A former high-tech executive, she served as a Principal Engineer at Intel and Head of Design and People Experiences at Mozilla.
She is the founder/curator of the art and design gallery Imperfecta, a gallery focused on women artists and underrepresented creatives. She is an Arts Commissioner for Oregon City, a mentor for emerging artists, and a writer for ACM Interactions.
