Show and Tell Gallery

Pamela Steele

Pamela Steele is a Fishtrap Fellow who recently completed her MFA from Spalding University of Louisville, Kentucky. While in the writing program there, she was honored with the Jim Wayne Miller Poetry Prize from the Kentucky Writers Coalition. A turning point in her career came halfway through the MFA Program when two mentors, separately on the same day, told her it was time she got honest and stopped writing around what she wanted to say. Paper Bird is her first full-length book of poetry, though she previously published a chapbook of poems (Other Rivers, Distant Song, Spring Tree Press, 1997).

Kirsten Rian

Kirsten Rian is a poet, musician, painter, and installation artist based in Portland, Oregon. Her poetry has appeared in international literary journals and anthologies, including Not A Muse; Rhino; and Upstreet; and was recently nominated for inclusion in the Best New Poets anthology. She co-authored the anthology, Walking Bridges Using Poetry as a Compass. Her anthology of Sierra Leonean poetry, Kalashnikov in the Sun, from Pika Press will be released in 2010. She has been awarded an Artists for the Arts grant, Catalyst Fund grant, and Soapstone residency. An arts educator, she teaches in the visual arts as well as poetry field. She is a poet-in-residence teaching creative writing throughout Portland high schools through Literary Arts and Multnomah County Library. She teaches poetry and creative writing workshops around the world, including recently in Finland and post-war Sierra Leone. She spent 16 years as Executive Director of a non-profit photography center, and is now an independent photography curator and arts writer in the documentary and fine art photography world. She has coordinated more than 375 exhibitions, and 65 books and catalogues. She divides her time working as a painter, poet, independent photography curator, arts writer, and musician. She teaches voice privately and at a local music school. She recently completed her 7th record, a jazz ensemble project, to be released winter, 2010.

Matt Love

Frustrated with life, teaching, and the inability to become a writer, Matt Love escaped Portland in 1997 at 33 years of age and moved to the Oregon Coast. A year later he became caretaker of the 600-acre Nestucca Bay National Wildlife Refuge. During his decade (1998-2008) as caretaker, he helped restore the grounds to fuller ecology, discovered a love for teaching, and reinvented himself as a writer and historian who established Nestucca Spit Press and eventually won the 2009 Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award from Oregon Literary Arts.