Leanne Grabel's Portland Critique Group

LEANNE GRABEL recently began teaching poetry to at risk teenagers in a summer camp, spreading the liberating qualities of poetry to the battered youth of modern American. She’s working with teenagers as a means of violence prevention and has been holding poetry writing classes in the juvenile prisons and Portland public schools.

Leanne was co-owner, with her husband Steve Sander, of Café Lena, where Portland’s Beat underground thrived in the presence of great food and great talk.

PATRICIA BOLLEN works for the Housing Authority of Portland. She's been writing poetry for six years, studying under Judith Barrington and Paulann Peterson.

CASSANDRA SAGAN BELL is a poet and singer/songwriter who has been earning her living as a Poet In The Classroom since 1984. She was a recent winner of the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Poetry of the Jewish Experience, and was nominated in 1997 for a Pushcart Prize.

WILLA SCHNEBERG worked for the United Nations Transitional Authority in Phnom Penh from July 1992 to June 1993 and served as a District Electoral Supervisor for Cambodia_s first "free and fair" elections, since the time of the French colonial period.

Her photos have appeared in the pages of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and have been exhibited at Sacred Circle Gallery, House of Asia and the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center.

Her first book was Box Poems published by Alice James Books. Her second collection of poetry is In The Margins Of The World.

She has received two Literary Arts Fellowships for her poetry. Andrei Codrescu has said of her work, "These are the poems of a traveler and a lover who feels both the terror of time passing and the consolation of eternity. From such tension spring lovely poetic objects."

Willa Schneberg is a licensed clinical social worker in private practice in the Pearl District. She received an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship in Poetry in 1994 and 1999.

KAREN BRAUCHER grew up in Massachusetts and has worked as a high-tech manager, consultant, business writer and teacher. She received a Masters of Fine Arts in Writing from Vermont College, a Masters of Business Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a Masters of Education from Lesley College. And Braucher is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder where she studied with the late poet Richard Hugo. Her poetry won the Worcester Poetry Prize, the Grolier Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize. She was awarded a 1996 Oregon Literary Fellowship for her poetry. Her first book, Heaven's Net was the winner of the 4th Annual Bacchae Press Chapbook Contest.