First Wednesday

The readers/performers for January 7 are Mindie Kniss, Ellen Michaelson, Jason Sandefur and Beth Russell.

Native to the woods of Whidbey Island, Washington, Beth Russell has studied at Whitman College, St. Andrews University, Oregon State University and--most recently--at Pacific University in Forest Grove. She holds a Bachelors in English, a Masters in Teaching, and an MFA in Creative Writing. Currently, she gardens, writes, and teaches in Corvallis, Oregon, where she lives with her husband, her son, a dog, two cats, seven hens, three roosters, and a large, inscrutable frog.

J. Paul Sandefur began his writing career publishing essays and stories in local newspapers in Virginia, where he grew up. After earning his bachelor's at the University of Montana, he taught middle school in Colorado before becoming a journalist. He is currently studying fiction in the Master of Fine Arts program at Pacific University in Forest Grove, OR.

Mindie Kniss is currently pursuing an MFA in nonfiction from Pacific University. In 2006, she was awarded a Global Health Fellowship to live and work in Nairobi, Kenya, where much of her forthcoming memoir takes place.
Originally from Chicago, Mindie recently relocated to Portland, OR to reestablish her holistic coaching practice, Awaken Consciousness. Her work appears in the new book, Wake Up Women: Be Happy, Healthy & Wealthy. Mindie holds degrees in theology and metaphysics.

Ellen Michaelson was born in Portland, Maine and moved to Portland, Oregon to work with novelist, Tom Spanbauer. She is currently a student in the MFA program at Pacific University.

She has published non-fiction in Portland Monthly, Literature and Medicine, and Women and Solititude(ed. Delese Weir), and an excerpt of her novel in Fetishes.

Before moving from NYC to Oregon, she was a semi-finalist for the Heekin Foundation Awards and a finalist for the New Voice Awards(Writers Community, NYC) and Rocky Mt Women Writers Institute. Ellen is a physician and a cyclist. Her novel-in-progress is about outsiderness as seen through the eyes of a young Polish Jewish immigrant, the only white orderly in an inner city New York hospital.