OPA Conferences
- Our annual spring conference is always held the 3rd weekend in April
- Our annual fall conference is always held the weekend closest to October 16
Our Spring 2012 conference, April 20-22nd, 2012, will be in Portland and our theme will be "Collaboration."
What can you expect this spring? Ingrid Wendt will be giving a key note speech. Portland poets David Abel and Carl Adamshick will be our Guest speakers and will be giving workshops. We’ll be holding our annual member meeting and electing new board members. Colette Tennant, the Contest Chair, will award the OPA Spring 2012 contest winners. Constance Hall and Steve Williams, our Portland Unit Chairs, who ran a local contest to choose 4 line poems that will be displayed with accompanying art work in the elevator lobby at 7 different locations inside the new Kaiser Hospital are putting together a slide show as well as a presentation and reading. We are in the process of inviting local small presses to join us on a panel to discuss publication of books/chapbooks.
If you are planning to stay overnight we are in the process of negotiating an OPA room rate at the Oxford Suites.
Look for a special OPA Spring Conference 2012 Newsletter in early March. This newsletter will include additional conference information, registration forms for both the conference and book room and hotel booking information.Once the schedule of events is finalized it will be updated on this website.
About our Presenters:
Ingrid Wendt’s books of poems have won the Oregon Book Award ,( Singing the Mozart Requiem), the Yellowglen Award, ( The Angle of Sharpest Ascending), and the Editions Prize, ( Surgeonfish). Her first book, Moving the House, was chosen for BOA Editions by William Stafford, who also wrote the introduction. Her recent book, Evensong, appeared in 2011 from Truman State University Press. Wendt is the co-editor of, From Here We Speak: An Anthology of Oregon Poetry, and In Her Own Image: Women Working in the Arts. Her teaching guide, Starting with Little Things: A Guide to Writing Poetry in the Classroom, is in its sixth printing. She lives with her husband, poet and writer Ralph Salisbury in Eugene, Oregon.
David Abel is a poet, editor, and teacher, and the proprietor of Passages Bookshop (passagesbookshop.com). His recent publications include the chapbooks Commonly (Airfoil) and Black Valentine (Chax), and the collaborative artist’s books While You Were In and Let Us Repair (disposable books, with Leo & Anna Daedalus); Float, a collection of collage texts, is forthcoming in spring 2012 from Chax, and new chapbooks of poems and visual work are due around the same time from Barebone Books and c_L.
With Sam Lohmann, he publishes the Airfoil chapbook series (airfoilchapbooks.blogspot.com), and since 2002 he has published the free broadside series Envelope, with 22 issues to date. As an interdisciplinary artist, he has devised numerous performance, film, theater, and intermedia projects, both solo and with a wide range of collaborators. A founding member of the Spare Room reading series, now in its tenth year (flim.com/spareroom), he also teaches writing, most recently at the Multnomah Arts Center, where he has since 2009 been the coordinator of the Literary Arts program.
A Research Fellow of the Center for Art + Environment of the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno (nevadaart.org/ae/center), he recently curated the exhibition Object Poems for 23 Sandy Gallery (23sandy.com/objectpoems/catalog.html), and is co-administering 13 Hats, an ongoing platform for collaborative work by a dozen visual artists and writers. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
More info soon!
