Sharon Doubiago

Sharon Doubiago is a native of Los Angeles, has a Master’s Degree in English from California State University at Los Angeles and considers home anywhere along the Pacific Coast.

She teaches workshops and has been a resident instructor in numerous writing programs throughout the country, including at the Ph.D. program at the University of Denver, the Masters Poetics Program at the Naropa Institute, the Napa Poetry Festival, Warren Wilson College, The University of California at Santa Cruz Writers’ Pool, the University of Minnesota’s Split Rock Arts Program, France’s Loire Valley Writers’ Retreat, Ashland Oregon’s Writers Conference, the Art Institute of Antigua, Guatemala, and at the University of Wyoming. She has been leading "The Autobiography of the Soul," her signature writing workshop, throughout the Northwest and world for the past fourteen years.

Sharon’s most recent published book is The Husband Arcane. The Arcane of O, from Gorda Press, a book length poem and interview provoked by the issues of gender, race, domestic violence, poetics and America raised during the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Other published works include two epic poems: Hard Country (1982) which will be reprinted in 1999 by East End Press, and South American Mi Hija (University of Pittsburgh, 1992). Her two collections of short stories are El Nino, published by Lost Roads in 1989, and The Book of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, published by Graywolf in 1988, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards. Her collection of poems, Psyche Drives the Coast, won the Hazel Hall Oregon Book Award in 1991.

Sharon received two Pushcart Awards for both poetry and fiction. She also won the Woman Writer Genius Award, Gloria Steinem’s Woman Writer Award and the Oregon Book Award. Sharon recently returned to the Oregon coast after a stint as Visiting Writer for the University of Wyoming. On November 13 she will begin teaching "Creative Writing/Voice of the Soul" at a week long Writing Workshop in Guatemala. She will read tonight from her newest poetry manuscript Body and Soul.

M.K. Wren

M.K. WREN arrived in Oregon in 1963 and tried to make her living as a painter. Her training, from the age of 10, was in art and her degree from the University of Oklahoma is a Bachelor of Fine Arts. She studied professional writing at Oklahoma, but it wasn’t until 1970 that she decided to get serious about writing.

She began with a mystery novel, Curiosity Didn’t Kill The Cat, published in hardbound in 1973 by Doubleday, the first publisher she sent it to. The book marked the debut of Conan Joseph Flagg, Oregon’s first resident series-character detective. Doubleday went on to published five more Conan Flagg mysteries which all became Detective Book Club selections, reprinted by Ballantine Books. Ballantine also published her seventh Conan Flagg mystery, Dead Matter, and her eighth, King of the Mountain. Berkley published Wren’s three-volume, 500,000-word science fiction novel, The Phoenix Legacy as a paperback original.

M.K. has taught writing classes accredited by Linn-Benton Community College, conducted workshops and served on panels at Willamette Writers summer conferences, Oregon Science Fiction Conventions, Writers of the Pacific Northwest and Oregon Writers Colony conferences, the Yachats Literary Festival, Portland State University/Salem campus, at Portland State University’s "Haystack" Summer Sessions at Cannon Beach, and at Sitka Center for Art & Ecology.

http://mkwren.com