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Cozy up for a night of poetry as acclaimed writers Ellen Waterston and Jeff Fearnside share their latest collections. Completed while travelling the state during her first year as Oregon’s Poet Laureate, the poems in Waterston’s As Far as I Can Anthem enlist the people and places across Oregon to inform, challenge and inspire readers in vital and unexpected ways. Fearnside’s most recent book, Lake: Love Poems, is focused on the concept of place, specifically Central Asia, where he lived for four years, and Oregon, his home for the past 13 years. The poems are connected by the thread of his courtship with and marriage to the woman who has experienced these places with him, his life partner Valentina.​

Ellen Waterston is an award-winning author and columnist who has dedicated herself to writing and advocating for the literary arts in the high desert region of Oregon, all the while continuing to write poetry and nonfiction works that have evolved into essential reading about Oregon and the West. She has published five poetry and four literary nonfiction titles, including We Could Die Doing This and Walking the High Desert. In 2024, Waterston was named to a two-year term as the 11th Poet Laureate of Oregon and received both the Soapstone Bread and Roses Award and the Stewart H. Holbrook Award. Waterston is the founder of the Writing Ranch and the annual Waterston Desert Writing Prize.​

Jeff Fearnside is the author of three full-length books and two chapbooks of poetry and prose, including the essay collection Ships in the Desert, which won a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award and the Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Book Award in Prose from the Arkansas Writers MFA Workshop. His story collection A Husband and Wife Are One Satan won the Orison Chapbook Prize.

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Discussions about housing and homelessness tend to focus on a few key cities such as San Francisco, Austin, and Seattle. Can studies from those places explain what we experience in college towns, small cities, and rural areas? With an issue so intimately connected to place, shouldn’t we focus on the nuances of location? Sociologist Leontina Hormel, in conversation with Oregon Humanities’ Adam Davis, will explore the challenges of housing and the experience of homelessness outside urban areas.

Leontina Hormel is professor of sociology at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho. Her research focuses on how community members find ways to make ends meet and to support one another in the face of societal turmoil. Her community engaged research has earned awards in the American Sociological Association, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Pacific Sociological Association. She has conducted community research in Ukraine, Russia, and throughout the state of Idaho. Her most recent research follows the struggles of residents living in manufactured home communities in north central Idaho as they experience corporate ownership schemes, landlord neglect, and impending park closure. One case of landlord abuse and neglect, and the ways community members fought for recognition and dignity, is detailed in Leontina Hormel’s 2024 book, Trailer Park America: Reimagining Working-Class Communities.

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