To view or print a one-sheet summary of the Confluence schedule, use the link below. The full schedule, with complete program descriptions and participant bios, follows.
Friday, October 2
7:30 pm
Confluence Featured Reading
North Studio
Emily Kendal Frey, Jennifer (JP) Perrine, Joan Naviyuk Kane
Saturday, October 3
9:00 am – 6:00 pm
Book Fair
Lobby
10:00 am – 11:15 am
Spare Room
A Reading of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, and the latest issue of Noise Coffee No Poetry
South Studio
The Spare Room reading series has a long-running tradition of marathon readings, presenting longer works aloud in many voices. For the occasion of the Confluence, Spare Room is collaborating with the participants of the monthly Chatauqua poetry gathering to read Muriel Rukeyser’s 1938 poem sequence The Book of the Dead. This lyric and documentary work was written in response to the 1931 Hawk’s Nest Tunnel mining disaster. Participants will also read from the most recent issue of Noise Coffee No Poetry, an anonymously authored poetry zine produced at the Chatauqua. Copies of the zine will be available to take.
Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) was an American poet of lasting importance. Her 1938 poetic sequence The Book of the Dead was a response to a 1931 incident in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, in which hundreds of mostly Black mining workers contracted fatal silicosis. The work incorporates congressional testimony, interviews, and reportage, and is often cited as a precursor to contemporary documentary poetics.
Spare Room is a shifting collective of poets who have organized over 300 readings in Portland in the past 25 years, at a variety of locations. Passages Bookshop has been its most frequent haunt in the past decade. The Chatauqua is a monthly gathering of poets and readers who meet at Word Virus Books, read selected works, and collate issues of an anonymously authored zine called Noise Coffee No Poetry. Four or five issues have appeared thus far.
10:00 am – 11:15 am
Literary Portland for Palestine
Writing in the Hour of Genocide: A conversation between Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and Omar El Akkad
North Studio
In the spirit of Palestinian poet Fargo Tbakhi’s essay “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide,” poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and prose-writer Omar El Akkad will speak about the role of the writer, and the powers and limitations of the tools within their respective genres when writing about and against the unfolding genocide. Each of them National Book Award winners for their most recent books, both of which address the genocide in Gaza, we look at questions of audience and address, silence and silencing, narratives and counternarratives, and more. This conversation will be moderated by the host of the Between the Covers podcast, David Naimon.
11:30 am – 12:45 pm
Fonograf Editions
Beyond Print: Hybrid small press publishing
South Studio
As the relevance of physical books as artifact, object, and source of edification and entertainment shifts in contemporary culture, non-traditional avenues of publishing have blossomed. Publishing houses big and small now put out “books” exclusively online, or in non-traditional formats, from vinyl records to one-of-a-kind zines. This panel will feature three notable small press publishers discussing the nature of releasing non-traditional literary artifacts, talking through how and where their current publishing practices stay faithful to and/or diverge from traditional publishing. Featuring folks from Antiquated Future, Buckman, and Fonograf Editions.
11:30 am – 12:45 pm
Graft Union
Graft Union presents: Echidna 3
North Studio
Graft Union presents the third installment of its generative workshop series: ECHIDNA! For this workshop, we will be blending puppetry and poetry and explore possible junctions of the two forms.
LUNCH BREAK
2:15 pm – 3:30 pm
Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC)
Foldable Forms
South Studio
Explore the interplay of form and content in this 75 minute workshop. We’ll move from a generative writing prompt based on 1-3 poems, to a tutorial of several single-sheet and folded zines / bookforms. Participants will have the opportunity to draft a new poem, and explore how to translate their writing into a zine that can be easily reproduced and distributed.
2:15 pm – 3:30 pm
De-Canon
Field of Animacies
North Studio
De-Canon presents four hybrid works spanning poetry, video, music, and movement that explore mythopoetic and diasporic meditations on embodiment and ecological kinship. Recurring across the presentation are encounters with rivers, birds, and other animate presences that invite us into deeper relationship (and imagination) with the places (inner and outer) that we inhabit. What forms of language, listening, and embodied attention allow us to enter these relationships? How do we activate and animate that which beckons from other realms, other fields of knowledge—as mythopoetic strands, as ineffable currents? Presenters include: Intisar Abioto, Consuelo Wise, Stephanie Adams-Santos, Luciana Proaño, Dao Strom. This event is a fundraiser for families in Gaza. Suggested donation of 10, but nobody turned away for lack of funds.
3:45 pm – 5:00 pm
Corporeal Writing
Generative Writing Workshop w/ the Corporeal Writing Oracles Deck
South Studio
A creative lab with guided generative writing portals, divination, and discussion utilizing Corporeal Writing’s own Oracles Deck. With Lidia Yuknavitch, Janice Lee & Corporeal Writing Squad members.
3:45 pm – 5:00 pm
Outer Voice
Works from Outer Voice
North Studio
Outer Voice is a Portland, OR alliance of time-based artists, offering a stipended nine-month local residency program. This is a screening of Outer Voice artists’ work, as well as works from artists they have chosen to invite. It’s an approximately 60 minute program of short video works, each strongly linked, in its own way, with poetry.
DINNER BREAK
7:30 pm
Confluence Featured Reading
North Studio
Charles Valle, Charity E. Yoro, Cedar Sigo
Sunday, October 4
10:00 am – 1:30 pm
Book Fair
Lobby
10:30 am – 11:45 am
Old Pal
Laboring to Write
South Studio
Through a panel presentation and audience discussion, Old Pal’s founding editors will explore the inspiration behind our newest issue: the work of writers whose day jobs support their art. Ryan will discuss worker/job-conscious poetry, and bringing work into the poem. Alex’s focus considers the separation, inherent influence, and invisible nature of exterior employment on the interiors of writing. Karolinn will examine the complexities of work-induced artistic hiatus and how a poet’s poetry can mature, even through long periods of dormancy.
10:30 am – 11:45 am
Incite
Incite: Queer Poets Read
North Studio
Incite: Queer Writers Read is a curated, bimonthly series showcasing Queer writers, each reading on a common theme. Our Confluence event features three LGBTQ+ poets–Jzl Jmz, Jae Nichelle, and Christopher Rose–and the theme is “Festivity.” The reading will be followed by a community discussion inspired by the theme. Join us for community and connection centered around Queer voices. Hosted by Jennifer (JP) Perrine and Vinnie Kinsella.
12:00 pm – 1:15 pm
Street Roots
Poems First! Notes from a Workshop for Portland’s Street Poets
South Studio
Street Roots is in its third year of running a weekly workshop for unhoused writers. Facilitator Katy Rossing will share notes on building a workshop that bucks the service-oriented model and puts poems and their writers before prescribed outcomes, followed by a reading and panel discussion with Street Roots poets Bronwyn Carver, Hymn, George McCarthy, and Ricky Duane Wagner.
12:00 pm – 1:15 pm
Wave
Wave Books in Portland
North Studio
The folks at Wave Books will present an interactive installation of film, audio and ephemera from the 2006 Poetry Bus tour. Stopping in 50 cities in 50 days, with more than 300 poets reading across the United States and Canada, this tour generated hundreds of hours of documentation. Featuring projected video and listening stations, this preview of raw footage and collected printed materials will offer participants a look into the project as a whole and will have a particular focus on the Bus’s visit to Portland.
Program Partners
Corporeal Writing is a micro-arts organization founded by Lidia Yuknavitch that specializes in body-centered creative labs and workshops that look at storytelling in all forms and genres. Corporeal Writing will be closing in December 2026 to make way for new galaxies.
De-Canon is a literary social practice art project that centers the works and voices of writers and artists of color. Founded in 2017 as a “pop-up library” installation, with a mission to challenge and unsettle notions of the (Western) literary canon while also questioning precepts of canonization itself, De-Canon encourages new paradigms of writing and reading.
Established in 2016, Fonograf Editions is a nonprofit press and literary record label based in Portland, OR. Their books and records have been featured, reviewed, and called best of the year at outlets such as The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, Harper’s, and The London Review of Books.
Graft Union Reading Series is a community-driven collective for students and emergent writers in Portland with an emphasis on celebrating new voices. A “graft union” is the junction between the rootstock and the scion of a grafted plant—where two different plants fuse and unify into one. Likewise, the Graft Union Reading Series envisions itself as a locality of interconnectivity and new growth.
Incite: Queer Writers Read is a bimonthly reading series featuring Queer writers in Portland, OR.
The Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC) is a nonprofit community organization and print shop that supports writers and artists by providing access to a shared studio space equipped with publishing tools and printmaking resources suited for the creation of short-run publications.
Literary Portland for Palestine is a collective of writers and literary arts organizations committed to Palestinian liberation, amplifying Palestinian voices, and holding local power to account.
Old Pal is a literary and arts magazine featuring works by established and emerging artists from our home base of Portland, Oregon and across the world.
Outer Voice is an artists’ alliance started in 2023. Our mission is to provide Oregon Time-Based Artists space, support, and opportunity. Outer Voice helps build relationships that rely on a grounded, informed, and supportive critical dialogue. Artists can practice, exhibit, celebrate, and program in community, sharing resources, forming artistic and personal bonds, and linking with a broader network of artists, art organizations, and community members.
Spare Room, a rotating collective of poets interested in experimental work, has organized nearly three hundred readings in Portland over the past two-plus decades.
Founded in 1999, Street Roots is a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization in Portland, Oregon, that publishes a weekly investigative newspaper sold by people experiencing homelessness and poverty to earn an income.
Wave Books is an independent poetry press based in Seattle, Washington, dedicated to publishing poetry and books by poets.
Participant Bios
Intisar Abioto (b. Memphis, TN. 1986) is an explorer-artist working in dance, writing, photography, and curation.
Kalimah Abioto (she/her) is a filmmaker, writer and new media artist working between Portland, OR and New Orleans, LA. She is the recipient of multiple grants, artist residencies and awards through organizations such as Open Signal Media, The Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC), Community Lift, The Kresge Foundation and The Southern Documentary Fund, among others. Kalimah continues to expand and grow as a human being, a Black Woman and Artist. There is no telling where her imagination will take her next…
Stephanie Adams-Santos is a multidisciplinary poet and artist raised between Oregon and Guatemala. She is the author of Dream of Xibalba, winner of the Orison Poetry Prize. Their work is rooted in ancestral memory, dreams, and the more-than-human world. Stephanie has also written for television, radio, and film, and created Ojo de la Selva: Arcana Azul, a forthcoming Major Arcana tarot deck.
Jeff Alessandrelli is a writer/editor living in Portland, Oregon. He founded Fonograf Editions in 2016.
Joshua James Amberson is a Portland, Oregon-based writer and creative writing instructor. He’s the author of Staring Contest: Essays About Eyes (Perfect Day Publishing) and How to Forget Almost Everything (Korza Books), among others. Since 2008, he’s co-run the Antiquated Future zine distro, online variety shop, and record label.
Roland Dahwen (he/him) is a filmmaker and writer. Lately he has been working on a documentary about blind soccer players in Colombia and Argentina.
Alex Dannemiller originated from Cincinnati, OH. His work appeared in The Gravity of the Thing, Literary Orphans, and Propeller. He obtained an MFA from Portland State University, and MA from Ohio University. He co-edits Old Pal and works remotely as a QDRO Drafting Consultant for QDRO Group in Ohio.
Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He is the author of two novels and one book of nonfiction. His most recent book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, won the Palestine Book Award and the National Book Award.
Bronwyn Fiona Carver is a published poet, writer of fiction, photographer, an artist, companion to two cats and all around good human being. You can find her poetry often in Street Roots, The Orion, Write Around Portland, and her self-stapled chapbook, “Reflections of Me in Piece(s).” Bronwyn was also homeless for nine years. Now housed for two and a half years, she continues to write poetry and her memoir, “Nine Years of Being No One,” which has excerpts printed in the Street Roots Summer Zine and an upcoming issue of Buckman Journal.
Karolinn Fiscaletti is a system administrator at a global communications agency, a PPC organizer, and a founding member of Belmont Art Collective, where she teaches seminars and workshops. She co-founded and edits Old Pal, and her writing appears in Lana Turner, The Gravity of the Thing, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere.
Marcus Fischer (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist and musician based in Portland, Oregon. A first-generation American artist that explores the possibilities of sound to convey ideas and information. He contributed two sound works and two performances to the 2019 Whitney Biennial and is a Hallie Ford Fellow in the Visual Arts. Further information at MAPMAP.CH
Abel Valladares Flores is a poet. Through writing he explores love, immigration law, Mexican history, ancestry, and folklore. He is interested in manifesting emotion through traditional magic in physical form: cartoneria, love letters, blood, wood, tears, and legal documents.
Adia Gibbs (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Portland, Oregon, working across assemblage, sculpture, installation, performance, and moving image. Her research-driven practice explores memory, identity, labor, and ancestral narratives through material investigation, creating works that invite reflection on personal and collective histories.
Emmi Greer (any/all) is a writer, educator, and artist based in Portland, Oregon where they curate and edit Buckman Journal and books of all genres. Emmi’s own work uses poetics of montage and glitch to investigate the nature of consciousness as a language-based being. She will probably see you at a reading soon.
Aspen Hansen is a poet, fiber artist, and aspiring puppeteer. Her current manuscript is a maze of monkeys, gardens, mothers, myths, thread, circuses, and daughters. Aspen is interested in the intersection of lesbianism, grief, written text, and puppetry.
Bridgette Hickey (she/they). Bridgette Hickey’s practice includes growing plants, archiving through prose, immersive installations, earth ceremony, quilting as a form of prayer, botanical dyeing, and facilitating story and grief circles in community. Hickey’s practice is how she listens back to time, her body, and the many others here with her.
Leslie Hickey (she/her) is a visual artist working in years-long series. She collects photographs that form a universe unto themselves, composed of objects and chance encounters. Her recent book, The Most Strange Telephone, and Other Memories, combined memories solicited from family, friends, and fellow artists with images from her archive.
Jzl Jmz (juh-zell jaym-s) is a writer, artist, nightlife fixture, & digital degenerette whose award-winning books are taught & sold globally. Born in Los Angeles, now based in the PNW, she’s been a writing instructor & creative mentor for over a decade. Her focuses include imaginations of Trans identity, Femme interrogations, & Black futures.
Emily Kendal Frey is the author of several chapbooks and chapbook collaborations, including The Grief Performance and Sorrow Arrow (which won the Oregon Book Award). Her latest collection, Lovability, is out from Fonograf Editions. She is a practicing psychotherapist.
Vinnie Kinsella’s life revolves around stories. In addition to his work in book publishing, he is a writer, live storyteller, and workshop presenter. He is the cohost of Incite: Queer Writers Read, and the editor of Fashionably Late: Gay, Bi, and Trans Men Who Came Out Later in Life.
Janice Lee is a queer, Korean American writer, teacher, and spiritual scholar. She is the author of 8 books, most recently Imagine a Death (2021) and Separation Anxiety (2022). She currently lives in Portland, OR and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University.
tom manzanarez (they/them) is a queer gender non-conforming artist and educator often exploring themes criticizing social constructs of gender, sexuality, whitewashing, erasure, heritage reformation, and queer love. They received their MFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, OR. Currently, they work and reside in Seattle, WA.
Ryan Mills is a letter carrier for the USPS, the recording secretary of local NALC Branch 82, and a shop steward at Holladay Park Post Office. Ryan’s poetry has appeared in the B-Mike, Heavy Feather Review, Gramma Poetry, 1001 Journal, etc. and he is a co-founding editor of Old Pal Mag.
Eileen Myles (they/them) is a poet, novelist, and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation. They live in New York & in Marfa, TX. (Marcus Fischer’s work in this screening includes documentation of a collaborative performance with Eileen Myles.)
David Naimon is a writer and host of the literary podcast Between the Covers. With Ursula K. Le Guin, he is the co-author of Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing, winner of the 2019 Locus Award in nonfiction.
Louisiana-born Jae Nichelle is the author of Grownfolk Blues, God Themselves, and The Porch (As Sanctuary). A 2026 Oregon Literary Fellow and a graduate fellow of The Watering Hole, she won the inaugural John Lewis Writing Award and was a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship finalist.
Nadia Niva is a poet and childcare worker from the Pacific Northwest. Her recent work can be found in Michigan City Review of Books, b l u s h, and scaffold. Her collaborative chapbook with Judy Thorn: Index Letters, was published June 2026 by Maywall Press.
Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) & Qawiaraq (Mary’s Igloo). Her books include The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, Hyperboreal, Milk Black Carbon, Dark Traffic, & with snow pouring southward past the window, & several chapbooks. She co-edited the Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology & Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic. Forthcoming work includes the co-edited Colonialism and the Environment: Pasts, Presents, Futures, and & all the ones who chose to leave her. The recipient of the 2026 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, she is a Guggenheim, Radcliffe, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist, & United States Artists Fellow, raising her children in Oregon, where she is Chair and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Reed College.
Jennifer (JP) Perrine is the author of five books of poetry: Beautiful Outlaw, Again, The Body Is No Machine, In the Human Zoo, and No Confession, No Mass. JP cohosts Portland’s Incite: Queer Writers Read series, guides forest therapy retreats, and manages a state equity and environmental justice program.
Harper Quinn is a poet who works in collage, print, and bookforms. She is the author of New Nudes (forthcoming from Fonograf Editions), Coolth (Big Lucks Books, 2018), and several chapbooks. They live in Portland, Ore., where they are part of the staff leadership collective at the IPRC, and create short-run print projects under Twin Window Editions.
Anne Greenwood Rioseco (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores themes of time, spirituality, and the transcendent genius of the natural world. Collaboration, vibrant color, and fostering relationships are the common threads in her art practice that spans textiles, plants, and poetry.
Ellen Robinette (she/her) is an artist & designer with an affinity for patterns, material textures, and color combinations. She utilizes analog techniques and multiple mediums in both her personal practice and design work. She makes sure things look good at Buckman through visual curation and design of books, journals, & other ephemera. She spends her time thinking about the constructs of time and the cyclical nature of things
Christopher Rose is a Black-Filipino writer originally from Seattle and now living in Hillsboro, Oregon. He previously taught composition, literature, and poetry at Portland Community College and has received grants from the Oregon Arts Commission, Jade District/Midway Artist Placemakers Project, and the Regional Arts and Culture Council.
Katy Rossing is a writer and teacher in Portland, Oregon, where she runs the Street Roots poetry workshop. She studied and taught poetry at the University of Michigan and the University of Alabama. She’s very interested in distraction, particularly its capacity for reading poetry, and anti-efficiency in general.
Sarah Rushford (she/her) is a video artist and writer living with her husband and young daughter in Portland, OR. She has exhibited time-based art widely since 1993; most recently, her work was included in the 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial and Portland Panorama 2025. She is the founder and a co-director of Outer Voice Time-Based Artists Alliance.
Cedar Sigo is a poet and member of the Suquamish Nation. He studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the author of endless books and pamphlets of poetry, including All This Time (Wave Books, 2021), Stranger in Town (City Lights, 2010), Expensive Magic (House Press, 2008), two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003 and 2005) and most recently Siren of Atlantis (Wave Books, 2025). In 2022 he received a grants to artists award from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He has taught all over the country including The University of Washington, Bard College, Washington University, Naropa University and The Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Lofall, Washington.
Adie B. Steckel is a Portland-based writer whose poetry and criticism appears in Action, Spectacle, A Dozen Nothing, Afternoon Visitor, Annulet: A Journal of Poetics, Full Stop, Tagvverk, Variable West, and elsewhere. They work for an HIV/AIDS and LGBTQ+ healthcare and social services nonprofit.
Ash Stone (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist, photographer, and educator based in Portland, Oregon. Her work, driven by play and humor, serves as a reclamation of agency, a healing ritual, and a study of domestic dysfunction.
Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. Her most recent hybrid project is Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs, a song-cycle and set of 4 chapbooks. daostrom.com / IG: @herandthesea
Carolyn Supinka (she/her) is a writer and visual artist based in Portland, OR. She is a member of the Belmont Art Collective and her first full-length book of poetry and poetry comics, Metamorphic Door, was published in 2024 from Buckman Publishing.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is the author of three award-winning books of poetry, most recently Something About Living, winner of the 2024 National Book Award, and an Arab American Book Award. Tuffaha is also an essayist and translator and curated the poetry translation series Poetry from Palestine at the Baffler magazine.
Todd Umhoefer (he/him) is a multi-instrumentalist composer, currently using a looped EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument) to create cinematic avant-classical atmospheres with spiritual undertones. Orchestral voices such as woodwinds, percussion, and strings are layered, crescendo, and fade throughout semi-improvisational explorations.
Charles Valle’s Proof of Stake: An Elegy was published by Fonograf Editions in 2021. He lives in Portland, OR.
Ricky Duane Wagner was raised in Wichita, Kansas. He went to Wichita State University for medical technology and graduated in 1985, then joined the Army for 20 years. He got out of the service and found himself homeless. He was introduced to Street Roots and found a purpose in life selling the paper. He has been an active vendor for 22 years. He is a member of the VFW, American Legion and Knights of Columbus. He is active in his Sunday School and church. Ricky likes to fish, hunt, and collect baseball cards in his spare time.
Sophie Wright (she/her) is a British artist, filmmaker and writer based in Amsterdam. Her practice grows out of a murky crevice that exists somewhere between photography, text and cinema. Most recently, her projects have cross-pollinated human and non-human perspectives to explore our rapidly changing landscape and touch on themes of grief, place and time.
Charity E. Yoro (she/her) is a writer and poet whose work has appeared on The Rumpus, poets.org, Tupelo Press Quarterly, and elsewhere, and has received support from Kundiman, McCormack Writing Center (formerly Tin House), and Sustainable Arts Foundation, along with residencies at Small Press Traffic and Mineral School. Her debut poetry collection ten-cent flower & other territories (First Matter Press) won the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry of the 2025 Oregon Book Awards. Born, raised, and educated on the east side of O‘ahu, she currently lives west of Denver with her wild, loving family.
Lidia Yuknavitch is a Portland writer and arts advocate. She is a very good swimmer.