Twenty literary and media artists in Oregon will receive $25,000 each to continue their careers courtesy of the Spark Award for Oregon Artists, sponsored by the Portland-based James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation.

The Foundation’s Board of Directors announced the awards on Nov. 12. They are the second round of a three-year pilot project that first awarded identical grants to 20 performing artists in 2024. The third round will support 20 visual artists next year.

The recipients were selected from a pool of 293 applicants by a panel of 24 national and Oregon-based literary and media arts professionals selected for their expertise within their disciplines. The list of panelists is available in the awards announcement here.

“The panelists were moved by the imagination, talent, and community spirit of the 2025 Spark Awardees. These artists bring a unique perspective and deep commitment to their work, and we’re grateful for the chance to help them keep creating and connecting through their art,” said Carrie Hoops, the Foundation’s Executive Director.

The Foundation was created by investor and philanthropist James Miller in 2002 to honor his late wife, Marion, and continue their longtime support for the arts and education in Oregon. It operates several programs that contribute to nonprofit organizations and schools. The Spark Award for Oregon Artists was created to contribute $1.5 million directly to individual artists determined to be in the middle of their careers to continue their work. In addition to the awardees’ skill and original creative output, panelists evaluated their midcareer stage (on a spectrum of early midcareer to advanced midcareer) and their investment in Oregon’s audiences.

“Each of the 2025 Spark Awardees brings a powerful creative voice that strengthens and celebrates Oregon’s rich cultural life. On behalf of the board, I’m proud that the Miller Foundation can support their continued contributions to our state’s vibrant arts community, said Peter Koehler, the Foundation Board President.

2025 Spark Award literary and media artists

The 2025 Spark Award recipients and their brief biographies as identified in the announcement are:

Stephanie Adams-Santos

(Interdisciplinary – Literary/Media). Adams-Santos is a multidisciplinary artist working in poetry, screenwriting, and illustration. Their work drifts through the green, shadowed corridors of memory, myth, and dream, shaped by ’80s dark fantasy, ghost stories, and a childhood spent between Oregon and Guatemala.

They are the author of Dream of Xibalba (winner of the Orison Poetry Prize, selected by Jericho Brown, and finalist for a 2024 Lambda Literary Award) and Swarm Queen’s Crown, and co-editor of Passport of Witness, an artist book anthology and mutual aid project supporting families and aid organizations in Gaza.

They have written for film, radio, and television, including Nocturno, a Latinx horror podcast hosted by Danny Trejo, and are currently developing Ojo de la Selva—an animist tarot deck attuned to ancestral and ecological memory.

On faculty at Willamette University/PNCA’s low-residency Creative Writing program, Adams-Santos cultivates creative spaces rooted in dreamwork, spirit, and care—that is, the tireless, luminous work of freeing the imagination from oppression, both within ourselves and in the world.

Robert Arellano

(Interdisciplinary – Literary/Media). A pioneering literary artist at the frontier of fiction, and digital innovation and Founding Director of the Center for Emerging Media & Digital Arts.

His work creates interactive storyworlds that challenge traditional boundaries between reader and participant, transforming passive audiences into active co-creators through nonlinear narrative environments and immersive installations.

He created the web’s first hypertext novel, Sunshine ’69, and the internet’s earliest interactive ‘zine, Albert Hofmann’s Strange Mistake. Six traditional novels, published by Akashic Books and Soft Skull/Counterpoint, use experimental techniques to explore the nature of memory, identity and the immigrant experience.

Erica Berry

(Literary). A writer based in her hometown of Portland. Her essays, which are often about the intersection of inner worlds and outer environments, appear or are forthcoming in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Emergence, The Yale Review, and Orion, where she is a contributing editor.

She is the author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear (Flatiron/Macmillan, 2023), which won the 2024 Oregon Book Award, and Bodies In Heat: Love in a Changing Climate, forthcoming from Flatiron (US) and Faber (UK).

Winner of a 2025 Oregon Career Fellowship, she is a 2025 Visiting Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington and a 2026 Teppola Presidential Distinguished Visiting Professor at Willamette University. 

Jesse Blanchard

(Media). A Portland-based filmmaker and practical effects artist known for his genre-defying, puppet-driven feature film Frank & Zed.

A champion of independent filmmaking, Blanchard has spent more than a decade handcrafting a cinematic world where every set, prop, and character is built by hand — a testament to the enduring power of storytelling through physical materials.

Rooted in Portland for more than 20 years, Blanchard’s work embodies the city’s spirit of experimentation and creative grit. 

Devon Fredericksen

(Literary). Author, essayist, and nature writer. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, High Country News, bioGraphic, Yes!, Switchyard, Guernica, and Sonora Review, among other publications.

Her books include How to Camp in the Woods and 50 Classic Day Hikes of the Eastern Sierra. Her writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference and highlighted twice in the Longreads Top 5 list. Her bioGraphic article “The Eider Keepers” was a notable selection in the 2025 edition of Best American Science and Nature Writing.

Her book Only the Birds Know: A Love Story Between a People, a Place, and a Remarkable Duck is forthcoming from Pegasus in 2027. She writes the Substack newsletter Bitten Fruit and lives in Portland.

Masami Kawai

(Media). A Los Angeles-born filmmaker, Kawai lives in Eugene. She’s of Ryukyuan descent from the island of Amami. Her work integrates issues of race, Indigeneity, class, gender, and what it means to be an immigrant/settler in the United States.

Kawai’s work has screened at various venues, including the Rotterdam Film Festival, LACMA, and Indie Memphis. Her film TIDES won Best Narrative Short at the Northwest Film Forum’s Film Festival and the Eastern Oregon Film Festival. Her film ZONA won Best Narrative Short at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival.

She’s an Assistant Professor of Film Production at the University of Oregon, where she teaches Film Production and Screenwriting. 

Lydia Kiesling

(Literary). Kiesling is a novelist and culture writer.

Her first novel, The Golden State, was a 2018 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.

Her second novel, Mobility, a national bestseller, was named a best book of 2023 by Vulture, Time, and NPR, among others. It was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Her essays and nonfiction have been published in outlets including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Cut, and The Nation.

She is a parent of two and lives in Southeast Portland with her family.

Karina Lomelin Ripper

(Media). Ripper is a Mexican-American writer and director whose films focus on the rebels, misfits, and rule-breakers who push against society and institutions to achieve self-preservation and liberation.

At the AFI Directing Workshop for Women+ class of 2025 she directed her coming-of-age short, There’s a Devil Inside Me, which won for Best U.S. Latina Director at its world premiere at LALIFF 2025.

Her previous short, a gothic horror film, Chispa, was supported by Fujifilm and won the Audience Award at the Rise Showcase and Best Oregon Filmmaker at the McMinnville Film Fest.

She is in development on a feature film, Silver Blankets, which was a finalist for the inaugural Sundance Cultural Impact Residency 2025 and a fellow in the 2025 BendFilm: Basecamp workshop. And she was selected for the 2026 Netflix / Latino Film Institute’s Inclusion Fellowship. In the program, ishe will make a short, Silver Blankets, which will film in Portland in 2026.

Jacy Mairs

(Media). Mairs is a filmmaker who grew up in a trailer park on the outskirts of a rich town, feeling like an outcast sort of comes with the territory. 

“Back then I didn’t understand status, I just knew that my world looked nothing like my friends and had the looming suspicion that my house, my clothes, and the way that I spoke were communicating something that I didn’t want to say,” she writes.

“I became a filmmaker because I know what it’s like to feel unseen, and the difference it makes to finally be reflected. I’m passionate about telling stories that celebrate those often left socially unclaimed, because as an artist, there’d be no greater honor than giving back the gift that was once given to me, exactly when I needed it most.”

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Ernesto Javier Martínez

(Media). Martínez is a queer Chicano/Puerto Rican writer, educator, and filmmaker. He was born in Oakland, California, raised bi-nationally between Mexico and the United States, and currently lives in Eugene.

He studied literature at Stanford and Cornell, becoming a university professor at the age of 28. He pivoted toward artistic work when he collaborated with illustrator Maya Gonzalez, authoring When We Love Someone, We Sing to Them, the first award-winning bilingual children’s book published in North America about a boy who loves a boy.

He began working as a screenwriter and filmmaker when he collaborated with director Adelina Anthony, writing and producing his first short film, La Serenata, winner of 11 best film awards and distributed by HBO Max.

His work has earned him the Lambda Literary Award, Imagen Award, HBO Latinx Film Competition Award, and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and NALIP. He is currently working with Adelina Anthony on his first indie feature film, which is in postproduction. 

Shay Mirk

(Literary). Mirk is a graphic journalist, editor, and teacher who has lived in Portland since 2008. They are the co-founder of Crucial Comix, a teaching press devoted to publishing narrative nonfiction comics and building comics communities.

Their newest book, Making Nonfiction Comics: A Field Guide to Graphic Journalism, debuted from Abrams ComicsArts in November 2025.

They are the author of five other books, including Guantanamo Voices: True Stories from the World’s Most Infamous Prison, an illustrated oral history of Guantanamo Bay. They started their career as a journalist for independent media outlets, including working as a reporter for the Portland Mercury and as the online editor for Bitch Media. For six years, Mirk was a contributing editor at comics publication The Nib, where projects they worked on won both Eisner and Ignatz awards.

From 2019 to 2023, they worked as a digital engagement producer at Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, co-writing the investigative comics series In/Vulnerable, which won an RFK Human Rights Award for Journalism in 2021. They are also a prolific zine-maker who runs a zine of the month club and loves giving zines away for free.

Daniela Naomi Molnar

(Interdisciplinary – Literary/Media). Molnar is a poet and artist who creates with color, water, language, and place. Her art centers on memory — planetary, cultural, familial, and personal.

She works with pigments she makes from plants, bones, stones, and specific waters such as rainwater and glacial melt. Poems and essays are created alongside the visual art; the practices overlap and influence each other.

Her debut book CHORUS won the 2024 Oregon Book Award for Poetry, followed by PROTOCOLS: An Erasure in 2025. Forthcoming books include Memory of a Larger Mind, a book written with glaciers (Omnidawn, 2026), Light / Remains, a book of visual art, poems, and essays, and The World is Full, a book considering love as apolitical, relational, and internal force. 

Susan Leslie Moore

(Literary). Moore is a poet whose work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Iowa Review, The New York Times Magazine, New York Quarterly, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Willow Springs, and elsewhere.

She was born in California, grew up in Corvallis, attended the University of Oregon in Eugene, and has spent most of her life in Oregon. She has a Masters in Writing from Portland State University and is the director of programs for writers at Literary Arts.

She is the author of two chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press, She Preferred to Read the Knives and How to Live Forever. Susan edited the online magazine Caffeine Destiny for 13 years and is one of the editors of the anthology Alive At The Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest, published by Ooligan Press.  She is the author of That Place Where You Opened Your Hands, winner of the Juniper Prize from University of Massachusetts Press.

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Michelle Ruiz Keil

(Literary). A playwright and author, her critically acclaimed debut novel All Of Us With Wings was called “a transcendent journey” by The New York Times Book Review, and was a Book of The Month Club selection.

Her second novel, Summer In The City of Roses, was a finalist for the Ursula K. Le. Guin Fiction Prize. Her short fiction has been most recently published by the Buckman Journal and the anthology Dispatches from Anarres.

She is a 2021 Tin House Scholar and the recipient of residencies from Hedgebrook, The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and the Bloedel Reserve. She serves on the Le Guin Prize Reading Committee and the advisory board of the Bay Area Book Festival, and was recently an instructor at the Tin House YA Workshop.

Born and raised bookish in the San Francisco Bay Area, she has lived with her family in Portland for many years in an overgrown cottage where the forest meets the city. 

Sophia Shalmiyev

(Literary). Shalmiyev is a feminist author, educator, activist, and painter emigrated from Leningrad to New York City in 1990 and now living in Portland with her two children.

She holds an MFA in writing from Portland State University with a second master’s degree in creative arts therapy from the School of Visual Arts.

Shalmiyev’s work has appeared in The Believer, Epiphany, Literary Hub, Tin House, Guernica, Electric Lit, LARB, The Rumpus, The Poetry Project, Vela, Portland Review, and other publications. She has taught creative writing at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland Community College, and Portland State University.

Her first book, Mother Winter (Simon& Schuster, 2019), which Eileen Myles called “vividly awesome and truly great,” is out in paperback. She recently finished her first novel, I Married The Butcher To Get To The Bone, and is at work on the followup novel, Grace By Fall If By Sea, as her career pivots to fiction writing.

Dao Strom

(Interdisciplinary – Literary/Media). Strom is a Portlnd artist born in Vietnam who works in three “voices” — written, sung, visual — to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories.

She is the author/composer of several hybrid works, most recently the music/poetry project Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs (2025), and the poetry-art collection, Instrument (2020), which won the 2022 Oregon Book Award for Poetry, with its musical companion of song-poems, Traveler’s Ode.

She co-curated and co-edited the hybrid-literary anthology and exhibition A Mouth Holds Many Things (2024), and released an album of ambient folk songs, Redux (2022). She is also the author of a bilingual poetry-art collection You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else; a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, with song-cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction.

She has presented performance and installation works at the Time Based Art Festival (PICA), and other venues. She is the co-founder of two collaborative art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), a collective of Vietnamese women writers and artists making polyvocal poetry-art works; and De-Canon, a literary social art project centering BIPOC writers.

Kevin Truong

(Media). Truong is a Sundance-supported filmmaker with a background in photography and journalism. Born in a refugee camp for Vietnamese Boat People in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, he was raised in Oregon and has a strong connection to the Pacific Northwest. 

As a filmmaker, he has received fellowships from the Center for Asian American Media and BAVC Media, and his work has received support and funding from the Sundance Institute, MacArthur Foundation, A-Doc, California Film Institute, SFFilm, Regional Arts and Culture Council, Portland Events and Film Office, and others.

He is a 2025 Oregon Humanities Storytelling fellow. As a journalist, he has written stories for NBC News and Motherboard Tech by VICE, and has worked as a producer with Student Reporting Labs at the PBS NewsHour. He earned his B.S. in economics from Portland State University, his B.F.A. in photography from Pratt Institute and his M.A. in journalism with a specialization in documentary filmmaking from the City University of New York. He is currently working on his debut feature-length documentary, MAI AMERICAN, which celebrates the story of his mother and his family’s immigrant roots. 

Gabriel Urza

(Literary). Urza is a Hood River writer and director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Portland State University.

He is the author of the novels The Silver State (Algonquin, 2025) and All That Followed (Henry Holt & Co., 2015), as well as the novellas The Last Supper (Center for Basque Studies Press, 2021) and The White Death: An Illusion (Nouvella, 2019).

His fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, The London Guardian, Salon, Politico, Slice Magazine, Guernica, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from Literary Arts, the Kellogg Foundation, and the Black Mountain Institute, and he was a 2022 Fulbright Scholar to Peru.

David F. Walker

(Literary). Walker is a part-time teacher at Portland State University, a comic-book writer, filmmaker, and journalist. His work includes the Eisner Award-winning graphic novel The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History (Ten Speed Press), the Eisner Award and Ringo Award-winning series Bitter Root (Image Comics), the NAACP Image Award-nominated Big Jim and the White Boy, and the Eisner Award-nominated series Naomi (DC Comics).

He has written for Marvel Comics (Luke Cage, Occupy Avengers, Power Man and Iron Fist, Nighthawk, Fury, Deadpool, Planet of the Apes) and DC Comics (Cyborg, Young Justice). His debut YA novel, The Second Chance of Darius Logan, was published by Scholastic in 2024.

A respected scholar in the study of African American representation in film, Walker wrote, produced, and directed the documentary film Macked, Hammered, Slaughtered, & Shafted, examining the history of blaxploitation films of the 1970s, as well as writing the upcoming book Black Film: A History of Black Representation and Participation in the Movies. 

Claire Willett

(Literary). Willett is an award-winning Portland novelist, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, nonprofit grantwriter, fan fiction author, former Catholic youth minister, and niche internet microcelebrity.

Her largest current project is a science fiction trilogy in which the agents of a 22nd-century time travel bureau explore key events of the 1960s and ’70s in a way that illuminates the struggles of our lives today.

The first installment centers on Nixon’s White House and the Watergate scandal. It was published in September 2015 by Retrofit (now Axiomatic Publishing) in Los Angeles, under the title The Rewind Files, and revised in 2025 for re-publication under the title Chronomaly with two forthcoming sequels.

Other recent works range from The Broken Heart Spread — a 2021 film about a modern witch using tarot to help her clients navigate messy romantic entanglements — to How Can I Keep From Singing, exploring the intersection of faith and queerness on a Catholic college campus, which was the University of Portland’s first-ever commissioned original play in 2022.

Claire is well known across the internet for her queer feminist commentary on politics and pop culture, which has appeared in many online media outlets, podcasts, and a large audience on Bluesky and Twitter. In spring 2025 Oregon ArtsWatch created a new investigative and analytical reporting position for her to cover arts philanthropy, including the Trump administration’s dismantling of federal arts funding.

More on the James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation

James Francis “Jim” Miller was born in Linnton, Oregon, in 1905. He grew up poor but was always a good student who liked to read and had an interest in the arts. After graduating from Lincoln High School in downtown Portland in 1921, he took an office job and eventually became a successful self-taught securities salesman, financial advisor and investor.

Jim married Marion Look in 1929, and the couple prospered in Portland in the 1930s and 1940s. He was made Senior Vice President of Blyth and Co. in 1958, prompting the couple to move to New York, where they enjoyed and supported its cultural scene. After Marion died in 1958, Jim moved back to Portland, where he began to contribute to arts and education nonprofits throughout the state of Oregon, ultimately creating the James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation.

Although Jim died in 2024, the Foundation has continued to fulfill his vision through its Board of Directors. The mission statement on its website reads, “The James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation was founded with the mission to enhance the quality of life of Oregonians through the support of classroom education and the performing, visual, and literary arts.”

Over the years, the Foundation has created and funded programs to support the arts. Among other things, since 2008, it has approved unrestricted multi-year general operating support grants to the five large arts organizations in the Portland Metro area: Oregon Ballet Theatre, Oregon Symphony, Portland Center Stage, Portland Art Museum and Portland Opera. Since its inception the Foundation has also supported small and medium organizations with multi-year operating support. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it partnered with other organizations to support the Oregon Arts and Culture Recovery Fund, the Artists Relief Program, and the Artists Resilience Program.

The Foundation has already created and funded pre-K education and K-12 education initiatives. They include Black Student Success, which supports the convening of up to 28 organizations providing services to Black students statewide; and the BUILD Early Childhood Network, which has supported a statewide Early Learning System Plan, Raise Up Oregon, through the Early Learning Division at the Oregon Department of Education, since 2018.

More information on the James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation and the 2025 Spark Awards can be found at millerfound.org.