Wordstock Festival 2011

Jerry Aronson is an independent filmmaker who, over the last three decades, has established his reputation as a producer, director and film instructor. His films include the 1978 Academy Award-nominated film, THE DIVIDED TRAIL, which follows the lives of four Native Americans who lived in the urban heart of Chicago. He also directed a six-hour documentary miniseries, AMERICA’S MUSIC: THE ROOTS OF COUNTRY, which examines the evolution of this American music form from its origins in Appalachia to its current state as a billion-dollar industry. Aronson first completed THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ALLE…

Carmen T. Bernier-Grand is the author of nine books for children and young adults. CESAR: YES, WE CAN!, ¡SÍ, SE PUEDE! and DIEGO: BIGGER THAN LIFE have been Oregon Book Award finalists. Those biographies and FRIDA: ¡VIVA LA VIDA! LONG LIVE LIFE have received Pura Belpré Author Honor Awards. In 2008, the Oregon Library Association‘s Children‘s Division gave her the Evelyn Sibley Lampman Award for her significant contributions to the children of Oregon in the field of children‘s literature. In 2010, she received an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship to research Picasso. PICASSO: I THE KING, YO EL R…

Clark Blaise, a dual citizen of Canada and the US, was born in North Dakota and raised everywhere on the continent. He has published 20 books, including 3 novels, 10 story collections and 7 works of nonfiction. He is a graduate of Denison University and the Iowa Writers Workshop, has taught in Canada and the US, and has been honored in both countries. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and the recipient of an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is married to the India-born American novelist, Bharati Mukherjee.

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Clark-Blai…

Matthew Dickman is the author of All-American Poem (American Poetry Review/ Copper Canyon Press, 2008). The recipient of The Honickman First Book Prize, The May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Kate Tufts Award from Claremont College, and the 2009 Oregon Book Award from Literary Arts of Oregon. His poems have appeared in Tin House Magazine, McSweeny’s, Ploughshares, The Believer, BOMB online, and The New Yorker among others. W.W. Norton & Co. will publish his second book in 2012. He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Steven Engelfried is the Youth Services Librarian at the Wilsonville Public Library.  He has been a librarian for 25 years and has just started his term as Chair of the 2013 Newbery Medal Committee.  He blogs about storytelling with puppets and props at http://btbstorytimes.blogspot.com/.

Lyndsay is the Program Director for PlayWrite, Inc., and has been coaching workshops around Oregon since PlayWrite's inception in 2003.

Brian Lindstrom’s documentary Alien BOY: THE DEATH AND LIFE OF JAMES CHASSE was recently completed and will be playing in a theater or on a computer screen near you soon.

To read Barry Lopez is to commune with a deep thinker. His writings have frequently been compared to those of Henry David Thoreau, as he brings a depth of erudition to the text by immersing himself in his surroundings, deftly integrating his environmental and humanitarian concerns. In his nonfiction, he often examines the relationship between human culture and physical landscape. In his fiction, he frequently addresses issues of intimacy, ethics, and identity. Barry Lopez is best known as the author of Arctic Dreams, for which he received the National Book Award. Among his other nonfiction boo…

Alexander MacLeod was born in Inverness, Cape Breton and raised in Windsor, Ontario. His first collection of short stories LIGHT LIFTING was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Story Award, the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Prize, two Atlantic Book Awards, and went on to become a national bestseller. Alexander holds degrees from the University of Windsor, the University of Notre Dame, and McGill. He currently lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and teaches at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.

Belinda McKeon was born in Longford, Ireland in 1979. She studied literature at Trinity College, Dublin and has an MFA from Columbia University. She is an arts journalist with the Irish Times. Her plays have been produced in Dublin and New York, and her debut novel, SOLACE, was published in 2011 by Scribner. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and in Ireland.