Novelist, Short Story Writer, and Poet Jack Driscoll

Jack Driscoll is the author of four books of poems, a collection of short stories, and four novels. In addition, he is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, the NEH Independent Study Grant, Pushcart and Best American Short Story citations, the PEN/Nelson Algren Fiction Award, the Associated Writing Programs Short Fiction Award, and seven PEN Syndicated Project Short Fiction Awards.

His stories have been read frequently over NPR’s “The Sound of Writing,” and his work has appeared nationally in magazines, literary journals, and newspapers such as Chicago Tribune, Kansas City Star, Civilization, Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, and Ploughshares.

His novel Lucky Man, Lucky Woman received the 1998 Pushcart Editors’ Book Award, the Barnes and Noble Discovery of Great New Writers Award, and the 1999 Independent Book Publishers Award for Fiction. Stardog, his third novel, appeared in 2000, and How Like an Angel, a University of Michigan Press Sweetwater release, appeared in May, 2005.

Outdoor Writer Paul McHugh                   

Paul McHugh, recently retired from a 22-year career as Outdoor Editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, is author of The Search for Goodbye to Rains (Island Press) and Wild Places (Foghorn Books).  Adventurer, novelist, journalist, and poet, McHugh will read from a selection of works both past and present.

As outdoor writer for the Chronicle, he undertook numerous adventures and explorations.  His epic 2005 sea kayak journey from the Winchuk River in Oregon to San Francisco Bay was covered in 36 print stories in the Chronicle. 

The reading starts at 7:30 pm with an open mic for local poets starting at 6:30.  Sign ups for open mic will begin at 6:15.  Tickets are $10 and are available at the door.  McHugh will also be reading on March 28 at 10 AM in the Black Box Theatre at College of the Siskiyous.  This event is part of the Poets and Writers, Inc.  Readings/Workshop Program.

Jerry and Clem have been involved in the Mt. Shasta Writers Series programs since its inception in 2003.

Winner of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry and the William Stafford Memorial Poetry Award, Clemens Starck's work is about things he's actually done. Starck has written Journeyman's Wages and China Basin.

Jerry Martien, a community activist, professor at Humboldt State University, carpenter and poet has written a collection of poetry, Pieces in Place.

"Lyrics, philosophy, regional politics, ecstatic understated invocations! Finding where we stand. All with a sardonic but compassionate eye. I am deeply pleased that the poetry of Jerry Martien - I have admired it for years - is now available." Gary Snyder

"I'm not alone in particularly cherishing poems by people who work with their hands. Carpenters, printers and factory workers are a fresh and vital antidote to the myriad of academic poets. Cheers for Clem!" Carolyn Kizer

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Linda Hussa & Charles Goodrich

Charles Goodrich is the author of the poetry collection The Insects of South Corvalis and the essay collection The Practice of Home. His work has appeared in the magazines Orion and The Sun. A number of his poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on the NPR program, "The Writer's Almanac." For twenty-five years Goodrich worked as a professional gardener. He is presently an instructor for the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word at Oregon State University, a program that brings together creative writers, philosophers and environmental scientists.


"His seemingly casual poems have the artful simplicity of Japanese flower arrangement. Each one is a little object to behold and ponder. Basho would have liked them." Clem Starck

Writer and rancher in the Great Basin, Linda Hussa has three poetry collections and three books of non-fiction. The themes of her work are drawn from the isolated nature of ranching and her commitment to the health of rural communities. Blood Sister, I Am to These Fields, her latest collection of poetry was the winner of three national awards in 2002: including The Spur award given by the Western Writers of America and the Willa given by Women Writing the West. She is the recipient of the 1999 Nevada Writers' Silver Pen Award.


"Blood Sister, I Am to These Fields assures us that blood is not blood is not necessarily thicker than water, that the earth is, in fact, our own flesh and blood. Linda Hussa, like Julia `Butterfly' Hill, writes from a high vantage point - the cowboy west is her Luna." Paul Zarzysk

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Paul Hunter

Paul Hunter's most recent collection is Breaking Ground. Paul has made his living has poet, teacher, musician, instrument-maker, artist, editor and publisher. For the last nine years he has produced beautiful letterpress books under the imprint of Wood Works.

"Breaking Ground is the finest poetic treatment of farming and farmers I have read...When Paul Hunter describes a brilliant midnight from the open door of an outhouse, the scene is drawn beautifully from undeniable recollection." David Lee

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Jim Dodge
Author of "Fup" and "Rain on the River, Selected Poems and Prose"


Jim Dodge is internationally known for his fiction, including the now infamous Fup. However, Dodge's first and abiding passion is his poetry, which he has been publishing anonymously and in small chapbooks since the late sixties. In 2002 Rain on the River, Selected Poems and Prose was released. Jim Dodge is a professor at Humboldt State University and lives in the Klamath Mountains.

"Contains lyric epigrams that go straight to the non-dualist bedrock, backwoods workers' dharma-combat humor, loving poems for wife and son, several high-spirited and near-transcendent poems of truth, sex and insight..." Gary Snyder

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Brian Turner & Tony Barnstone


Brian Turner is a soldier-poet whose debut book of poems, Here, Bullet, won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award and the New York Times "Editor's Choice" selection. Turner served seven years in the US Army, including one year as an infantry team leader in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team. Turner's poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review and other journals, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology, published in conjunction with the feature-length documentary film of the same name.

Tony Barnstone is Professor of English at Whittier College and has published his poetry, fiction, essays and translations in dozens of major American journals. His books include Sad Jazz: Sonnets, Impure: Poems by Tony Barnstone, The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry, and Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry.

"The relationship Turner establishes with the reader is not dialogue but a tidal insistence on reflection, that if there is meaning in loss, there must be meaning in what precedes loss, in what is related to loss." -The Franklin Journal

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Pam Houston

Siskiyou County residents enjoyed a reading by Pam Houston www.pamhouston.net - author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness, which was the winner of the 1993 Western States Book Award and has been translated into nine languages, and Waltzing the Cat which won the Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction.

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Susan Woolridge

On September 27th, 2007, poet Susan Woolridge appeared at the Stage Door Cabaret in Mt. Shasta. Susan Woolridge is the author of poemcrazy: freeing your life with words (in a 20th printing from Three Rivers, Random House) and a new book Foolsgold: Making Something from Nothing (and freeing your creative process). (Harmony Books, Random House, 2007.) Poemcrazy was a long-running Quality Paperback Book Club Selection and Foolgold is now featured in One Spirit catalog.

Susan also has a chapbook of poems, Bathing with Ants (Bear Star Press). She conducts workshops on writing and creativity throughout the U.S. She has two grown children and lives in a co-housing village in Chico, California and sometimes on a houseboat in Sausalito.

Susan is now completing a book on writing and collage.