MFA Event: Oregon Poet Laureate Ellen Waterston: Never Say "Whoa" in a Horse Race

This event is hosted by the OSU-Cascades MFA in Writing as part of the program's 2025 spring residency.

In contemplating what to title her presentation, Oregon Poet Laureate Ellen Waterston said she could as easily have called it “There Has To Be An Easier Way” or “Metaphormosis” (stet) or “Enough With The Grist”. She will touch on these possibilities and more while reflecting on her writing life in Oregon’s high desert.

Award-winning poet, author, and columnist Ellen Waterston has dedicated herself to writing and advocating for the literary arts in the high desert region of Oregon, all the while continuing to write poetry and nonfiction works that have evolved into essential reading about Oregon and the West. She has published four poetry and five literary nonfiction titles, including, most recently, We Could Die Doing This (2024) and Walking the High Desert(2020). Waterston is the author of “Sharing Common Ground,” an ongoing Oregon Desert Land Trust interview project conducted in in southeastern Oregon, and of “The Third Act”, a monthly column in The Source Weekly.She is the founder of the Writing Ranch which, since 2000, has conducted workshops for established and emerging writers, and of the annual Waterston Desert Writing Prize, established in 2015 and adopted in 2019 as a program of the High Desert Museum. 2024 was a banner year for Waterston who, that year, received Soapstone’s Bread and Roses Award, Literary Arts’ Stewart H Holbrook Award, and was named the eleventh Poet Laureate of Oregon. For more information visit www.writingranch.com

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Jenna Goldsmith

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