POETRY CONTEST JUDGES 2026, RAYMOND CARVER WRITING FESTIVAL
Armin Tolentino
Armin Tolentino is the author of the poetry collection We Meant to Bring It Home Alive (Alternating Current Press) and coauthor of the children’s book, Mythwakers: The Manananggal (Hope Well Books). He served as poet laureate for Clark County, WA from 2021-2023. He earned an MFA at Rutgers University-Newark and is a former Oregon Literary Arts Fellow, Carolyn Moore House Writer in Residency, and Atticus Hotel Artist in Residency. More info at www.armintolentino.com.
Cliff Taylor
Cliff Taylor is an enrolled member of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska. He is a writer, poet, speaker, and storyteller. His essays and poems have been published both online and in print. He is the author of two books, most recently a poetry collection, The Native Who Never Left. Learn more on his website, cliffponca.com.
Estrella M. Tamayo-Brown
Estrella was born in beautiful Hawaii surrounded by the scents of tropical flowers. She received her BA and M Ed from the University of Portland. Now, it is the beauty of Oregon that enthralls her. She was reading specialist for Portland Public Schools for three years and then an English teacher at Camas High School for 30 years. She and her husband have enjoyed the quietness of their Clatskanie farm for 19 years.
Dayle Olson
Dayle Olson is a Lower Columbia poet and a zealous Raymond Carver fan. She is a former first prize recipient in the Oregon Poetry Association annual competition, as well as a recent Northwest Voices featured writer at Lower Columbia College and Longview Public Library. Her poetry chapbook, From the Dead Letter Department, published by Moonstone Press in 2025, was awarded Honorable Mention in their annual contest. Dayle lives in Cathlamet with her husband, David.
Jason Arias
Jason Arias lives and writes on the Oregon coast. He is the author of the short story collection Momentary Illumination of Objects In Motion (Black Bomb Books, 2018), the poetry collection nostraDAMus 2032 (Broadstone Books, 2024), and the handstitched chapbook Patteran (2025). His writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.
Jaye Nasir
Jaye Nasir is a poet and fiction writer based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Buckmxn Journal, and Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry, and has been supported by the McCormack Writing Center, Sitka Center for Arts and Ecology, Hedgebrook and the Atticus Hotel. You can find her at jayenasir.weebly.com.
2026 PRESENTER BIOGRAPHIES, RAYMOND CARVER WRITING FESTIVAL
Alice Derry
Alice Derry has published six volumes of poetry and three chapbooks, most recently, Asking (MoonPath Press 2022). Her new manuscript is titled Embraces. During thirty years teaching at Peninsula College, she curated the Foothills Writers Series and helped initiate and host a writer-in-residence program. With artist Fred Sharpe, she has produced three volumes on native plants of the Olympic Peninsula. She and colleague Kate Reavey currently facilitate a workshop for Native writers on Zoom.
Craig Brandis
Craig Brandis’s poems and reviews have been published in Oxford Magazine, Palette Poetry, American Journal of Poetry, Poetry Quarterly and elsewhere. He co-won first place in the 2025 Raymond Carver Writing Festival contest for poetry. He was a semi-finalist for the 2022 Berkshire prize for a first book. His first collection of poems, Crying of Small Motors, was released in 2024 by Finishing Line Press. He teaches poetry at the Attic Institute for Literary Arts in Portland, Oregon.
Florence Sage
Biography coming soon
Gary Copeland Lilley
Gary Copeland Lilley, originally from North Carolina, now lives in the Pacific Northwest. He has published nine books of poetry, and has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. Lilley has received the Washington DC Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry and is a graduate of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He teaches in the Western Colorado University Creative Writing MFA program. Lilley serves as the Artistic Director of the Port Townsend Writers Conference and is a Cave Canem Fellow.
Janet Ebert
Janet Ebert RN, MN Emeritus. She has taught at OHSU, Concordia University, Mount Hood and Clatsop Community Colleges. She is a volunteer at the Astoria Middle School with the Creative Writing Club. Janet teaches privately in Astoria and Portland. A seasoned steward of narrative poetry. In 2026 Janet was the co-winner of Raymond Carver Writing Festival poetry contest. Janet hails from Multnomah Village. She enjoys cross country skiing and hiking in Sisters, Hood River and Mosier.
Jon Broderick
Jon Broderick is a founder of the FisherPoets Gathering, the annual creative celebration of commercial fishing the end of each February in Astoria. A former high school teacher, he’s been a commercial salmon fisherman for nearly 50 years, first in Kodiak, then in Southeast Alaska and mostly in Bristol Bay where he and his family run a salmon set gillnet outfit each summer. He and Doreen raised five children there and in Cannon Beach.
Marj Hogan
Marj Hogan lives in Portland, OR, and teaches Spanish at Union High School. She received the 2025 Astoria Writers’ Guild Writer-in-Residence to begin a series of poems about labor: what we do for work, how it shapes us, how it consumes and fails to define us. Her poems have appeared in various publications including Voicecatcher; 3Elements; Pretty Owl; High Shelf; Paperbark; Cold Mountain; and A Lantern, Radical Light/Linterna, Luz Radical, among others.
Robert Michael Pyle
Biography coming soon
Tess Gallagher
Tess Gallagher, author of eleven books of poetry, lives and writes in Port Angeles, Washington, and her cottage in County Sligo in the West of Ireland. Her most recent collection, Is, Is Not, was published in 2019 by Graywolf Press and documents political and meditational crosscurrents in her Irish and American Lives. In 2023, she was the first and only American author presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Rome.