ŌDE WRITERS

Elizabeth Austen

Elizabeth Austen is a Seattle-based poet, performer and teacher. She served as the Washington State poet laureate for 2014-16, and as KUOW public radio's poetry commentator for nearly 20 years. Elizabeth tests the boundaries between the known and the unknowable in her debut poetry collection, Every Dress a Decision.

Photo credit: John Ulman

Samuel W. Gailey

Author, Samuel W. Gailey, was raised in a small town in northeast Pennsylvania (population 379). "The Guilt We Carry" is his second novel, following the critically acclaimed "Deep Winter". Gailey's novels are intriguing studies of human nature and portray how the simplest act of fate can alter and shatter lives.

Photo credit: Peter Lin Carrillo

Forest Eckley

Forest Eckley comes from a family of entrepreneurs and artists. He is also the co-owner of Glasswing, a community-based clothing and home goods shop that serves a local hype machine for the best in the Pacific Northwest.

Ayn Gailey

Ayn Gailey is an author and award-winning editor whose work has appeared on The NY Times Bestseller list, been adapted to film, and translated into numerous languages. She is a graduate of Harvard and UCLA and loves inspiring other artists, volunteering with arts and education non-profits, and mentoring teen writers.

photo credit: Amanda Demme

Jill McCabe Johnson

Jill McCabe Johnson is the author of Revolutions We'd Hoped We'd Outgrown and Diary of the One Swelling Sea, which was awarded the 2014 Silver Award in Poetry from Nautilus Book Awards. She is also the author of the nonfiction chapbook Borderlines. She serves as series editor for the “Being What Makes You” anthologies from the University of Nebraska Gender Programs and is the founding director of the nonprofit Artsmith, which provides artist residencies, a reading series, workshops, and other educational events. Jill is dedicated to protecting the beauty and riches of our planet for future generations. And eating good food. These endeavors are not mutually exclusive.

Kamand Kojouri

Kamand was born in Tehran, raised in Dubai and Toronto, and resides in Wales. The historical novel she wrote for her master's programme in London was shortlisted for the Peters Fraser and Dunlop (PFD) literary award. She is currently a Creative Writing doctoral candidate working on her second novel.

Toby Cooper

Toby brings a passion for recycling and an aversion to landfills and trash. His time in financial services led him to often support market-based and investor-led solutions to environmental change. He has years of environmental advocacy experience, including prior careers with the professional staffs of national wildlife and land conservation organizations. He currently serves as Chairman of the Mountain Lion Foundation, Sacramento, CA. He and his wife, Sarah, love their island home in the Rosario area of Orcas and enjoy exploring and boating the Pacific Northwest waters.

Jonathan White

Jonathan’s love for the sea is lifelong. He grew up on the beaches of southern California. He’s built and sailed many boats, logged more than a hundred thousand miles on the Pacific and Atlantic, and surfed all over the world. He has served on numerous conservation boards and committees, including the San Juan Preservation Trust, the San Juan County Marine Resources Committee, and the Northwest Straits Marine Conservation Initiative.

As founder and former director of the Resource Institute, a nonprofit educational organization based in Seattle, Washington, he spent eleven years building a seminar program aboard the schooner Crusader in the Pacific Northwest, from Puget Sound to Southeast Alaska. Resource Institute sponsored weeklong seminars aboard the sixty-five-foot schooner, with subjects ranging from navigation, anthropology, and whale research to poetry, writing, music, and photography.

Theresa Marl

Theresa Marl has been an entrepreneur and a teacher and is now a writer in the throes of completing her first memoir. She is a founding board member of the Orcas Island Literary Festival and her essays on creativity and family have appeared in ParentMap, Seattle’s Child, Red Tricycle, and elsewhere.

photo credit: Ilias Schneider

Laurel Rust

Laurel Rust is a Washington native. She graduated in English from the UW and was fortunate to take part in Nelson Bentley’s incredible poetry classes. She is the single mother of a now grown son and lives on Orcas Island. In 1998, Brooding Heron Press of Waldron Island, WA, published a chapbook of her work, What Is Given. She has self-published a number of hand bound, small edition chapbooks since then. Her work (stories, poems, and essays) has appeared in Fine Madness, Pandora, Faire, Calyx, Spindrift, Clover, Prune Alley, and Trivia: A Journal of Ideas.