Poetry month: Oregon portraits

As the nation celebrates the art of language, K.B. Dixon photographs ten leading Oregon poets.

April 13, 2022

K.B. Dixon

Cultural Landscape, Culture, Language Arts, Photography

April is, among many other things (including the occasional delivery of surprise snowstorms), National Poetry Month, a celebration brought to life in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets and carried out with rhythmic regularity every year since. The occasion has prompted Portland photographer K.B. Dixon, a frequent ArtsWatch contributor and a portraitist of note, to search his files for previously unpublished studio photos of ten distinguished Oregon contemporary poets. See them here, then follow the links to discover these writers’ poetry:

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Kim Stafford, 2019

Oregon’s Poet Laureate 2018-20, and founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis &Clark College. His latest collection of poems is Singer Come From Afar.

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Susan Moore, 2022

Moore is a poet, editor, and Director of Programs for Writers at Literary Arts, and the winner of the Juniper Prize in Poetry for her full-length collection That Place Where You Opened Your Hands.

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Floyd Skloot, 2019

Poet, novelist, memoirist, and science writer. Far West is his latest book, and his ninth poetry collection.

Sponsor

Portland Playhouse A Christmas Carol Portland Oregon

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Samiya Bashir, 2019

Poet, professor, and founder of the advocacy group Fire & Ink. Her latest collection is Field Theories.

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David Biespiel, 2019

Poet, literary critic, memoirist, and founder of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters. Republic Cafe is his latest book of poetry.

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Zachary Schomburg, 2019

Poet, novelist, illustrator, publisher and editor of Octopus Books. His latest book of poetry is Fjords Vol.2.

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Sponsor

Janice Lee, 2021

Essayist, poet, and novelist. Her newest collection, Separation Anxiety, will be published in August 2022.

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Don Colburn, 2021

Journalist and poet, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. His latest book of poems is Mortality, with Pronoun Shifts.

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John Beer, 2021

An award-winning poet, Beer is the author of Lucinda and The Waste Land and Other Poems. He is the editor of Poems 1962–1997 by Robert Lax, a one-time theater critic, and the Director of Creative Writing at Portland State University.

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Anis Mojgani, 2019

Oregon’s current Poet Laureate; spoken-word artist, two-time National Poetry Slam Champion, winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam. His latest book of poems is In the Pockets of Small Gods.

Sponsor

K.B. Dixon

K.B. Dixon’s work has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and journals. His most recent collection of stories, Artifacts: Irregular Stories (Small, Medium, and Large), was published in Summer 2022. The recipient of an OAC Individual Artist Fellowship Award, he is the winner of both the Next Generation Indie Book Award and the Eric Hoffer Book Award. He is the author of seven novels: The Sum of His Syndromes, Andrew (A to Z), A Painter’s Life, The Ingram Interview, The Photo Album, Novel Ideas, and Notes as well as the essay collection Too True, Essays on Photography, and the short story collection, My Desk and I. Examples of his photographic work may be found in private collections, juried exhibitions, online galleries, and at K.B. Dixon Images.