Playa is proud to announce 22 writers and artists have been awarded one-month stays as Fellowship Residents. The Fall session, which begins September 24 and concludes December 14, is Playa’s fourth session of residencies.
Thomas Bosket studied painting at Parsons School of Design and received his M.F.A. from Yale University in 1995. As an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of General Studio and Graphic Design in the AAS program at Parsons School of Design he has developed the Color Theory and Drawing curricula. Thomas is showing his paintings nationally at various galleries and arts organizations and received the honor of Distinguished Faculty Member of the Year at Parsons in 2002. He specializes in raw materials, anatomy, and color usage for artists and designers. He is available for consultation and workshops.
Katie Chase’s short fiction has been selected for Best American Short Stories and a Pushcart Prize, as well as appearing in such journals as Narrative, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and Zyzzyva. Her honors include fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, San José State University’s Steinbeck Center, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received her MFA. Originally from a suburb of Detroit, she now lives in Portland, Oregon, where she began the novel she’ll be working on at Playa.
Sarah Rabkin is a writer, visual artist, and perpetual student of natural history. She studied biology at Harvard and science communication at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she has taught expository writing, science journalism, and environmental literature courses for three decades. She has worked as a high school teacher, a syndicated Q&A columnist, an oral history interviewer, and a leader of writing and art workshops. Her book What I Learned at Bug Camp: Essays on Finding a Home in the World was published in 2011 by Juniper Lake Press. She lives on California’s central coast with her husband, poet Charles Atkinson.
Naomi Lore is a Brooklyn-based writer, musician, and photographer. She is building a travelogue based on the universal aspects of disparate places, as well as the effect of travel on our personal histories and national and ethnic identities. Her writing has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, LUMINA, and Naugatuck River Review, among other publications and anthologies, and she was a recent writer-in-residence at Kimmel Harding Nelson Arts Center. She is a family member of the Intangible Collective and an alumnus of SUNY New Paltz, where she was the Tomaselli award winner for Poetry and the Outstanding Graduate of the Anthropology department.
Andrew Duclos has been drawing since childhood and has graphite works in many of private collections. He began painting in August 2009, when he attended a plein air painting workshop at the suggestion of a fellow artist. The workshop set Duclos on a new journey into color and light and painting the changing seasons in oils. He believes that successful art is an emotional experience, both for the artist and the viewer. It is not his goal simply to create a realistic likeness, but rather to share with the viewer a sense of “being there” as a reminder of our collective connection to the earth and its other inhabitants.
José McCarthy was born in 1938 in France. She went to medical school in Paris and practiced as a GP, then as a research statistician. She married an American in 1969 and moved to Topeka, Kansas, where her three children were born. There she completed a psychiatric residency, then worked in a hospital. Attracted by its beauty, she and her husband moved to Oregon in 1980, and she opened a solo practice in Eugene. McCarthy has remained in Eugene after retirement, among friends and family, and values the freedom to do creative work. She recently published a memoir describing family life during the long illness then death of one daughter.
Eliot Treichel is the author of the story collection Close Is Fine, which will be published by Ooligan Press in November 2012. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Narrative, Beloit Fiction Journal, CutBank, Passages North, as well as Canoe & Kayak, Paddler, and Eugene Magazine. His short story “Stargazer” was nominated for the 2012 New Stories from the Midwest anthology. A native of Wisconsin, Eliot now lives in Eugene, Oregon, where he teaches writing at Lane Community College. Visit him at www.eliottreichel.com.
J. Susie Hwang lives and works in New York. She is an adjunct professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She holds an MFA in Digital + Media and Post Baccalaureate in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a dual BFA in Film & Television and Studio Art from New York University. She has shown in New York, Rhode Island, and Florida, and recently curated a show at the Cohen Gallery of Brown University. Her work often bridges the tangible with the digital, combining the hand-wrought craft influence with video and/or performance.
Rich Bergeman, a native of Ohio and an Oregonian since 1976, has been a writer, editor, and educator during his career and a fine art photographer for the past 30 years. Much of that time has been devoted to chronicling the disappearing traces of Oregon’s bygone days on both sides of the Cascades. Bergeman uses large-format film cameras as well as digital cameras and makes prints in both archival digital media and the traditional platinum process. Lately, he’s been having fun making pictures with a cigar box he turned into a pinhole camera. He exhibits work throughout the Northwest; it can be seen at richbergeman.zenfolio.com.
Amanda Clark Taylor uses beads to complement nature in mixed media sculptures. She stitches tiny glass seed beads around rocks, sticks, and shells that she has lovingly brought home. Amanda believes that Mother Nature bakes the cake, while she just puts on the icing. Having spent her youth in Massachusetts, Amanda has now lived as many years in California, and keeps a large part of her heart in Iowa.
Melissa Madenski learned about the rivers, creeks, and lakes of Oregon by driving NW backroads with her father, a traveling salesman. She has published two books for children, and her poems and essays have appeared in magazines, newspapers, and anthologies. She has taught throughout the Northwest in public and private schools and institutions, most recently coordinating programs for Multnomah County Library to assist patrons pursuing personal goals in literacy. She raised her two children on the Oregon coast across from Neskowin Creek, which runs through the Siuslaw Forest.
Madonna Moss says: As an anthropological archaeologist, I study the long term history of Native Americans and First Nations of the Northwest Coast of North America, with a special focus on Tlingit and Haida and their ancestors. My 2011 book Northwest Coast: Archaeology as Deep History moves beyond standard culture historical treatments to re-evaluate new archaeological data within their larger socio-political contexts. My current research in Alaska concerns how use of animal resources is foundational to the cultural identity and heritage of indigenous groups, and how zooarchaeology can contribute knowledge to improve fish and wildlife management and simultaneously support Alaska Natives in their contemporary subsistence practices. Madonna Moss is a Professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Oregon.
John Daniel’s latest book, Of Earth: New and Selected Poems, will be published in September by Lost Horse Press. He worked on many of the new poems and revised some of the old ones while in residence at Playa in the spring of 2011. A three-time winner of the Oregon Book Award in Literary Nonfiction, Daniel has also received a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. 
His books include Rogue River Journal, Looking After: A Son’s Memoir, and Winter Creek: One Writer’s Natural History. John Daniel lives north of Noti, Oregon.
Sue Hall grew up in Central California watching her grandmother paint watercolors “plein air” in Carmel Village, the Big Sur Coast, and the Sierra Nevada. She began painting early in her teens. She studied art and science at Gavilan and Mt. Hood Community Colleges and the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. She has worked as a park ranger, wilderness guard, biological technician, and educator in California, the Pacific Northwest, and Arctic Alaska. Her natural history illustrations have appeared in Orion and her photojournalism has appeared in Alaska Magazine, the North Slope Sentinel, and Northland News of Fairbanks, Alaska.
Liz Roth is a painter who depicts social concerns in a humorous way. Her installation America 101 took her to all 50 states to create scenes emphasizing environmental losses as a result of consumerism. She has been awarded painting grants from the Wisconsin Arts Board, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition. She has been an artist in residence in multiple locations in Japan and in the US. Her works have been acquired by national and international collections, including the Walker Museum of Art, the Museu del Joguet in Spain, and the Museum of Awa Japanese Paper.
Sheri Davenport graduated with a degree in English from the University of Iowa. During her years as a freelance writer she has been the creative force behind dozens of videos/films, live productions, speeches, and advertising for major corporations across the country. She’s written two plays, written, directed, and produced videos for non-profit organizations, and co-authored a published novel, On The Way To Woodstock. She has optioned four screenplays and her scripts have placed first, second, and reached finalist and semi-finalist status in a number of competitions. In December 2011, her screenplay Lucky Christmas was a featured TV movie on the Hallmark Channel.
Shawn Demarest is a painter living in Portland, Oregon. Her work explores the streets in her SE Portland neighborhood. Demarest’s paintings often capture nature’s interaction with the city presented through a pedestrian, driver, or bicyclist’s viewpoint. The views she paints are mostly mundane, yet become elevated by the play of light, rain, snow, or sun. In 2012 Demarest received a Regional Arts and Culture Council project grant to complete a suite of studio paintings titled “You are Here.” The exhibit will be presented at Portland’s Annie Meyer Artwork Gallery in November 2012. www.shawndemarest.com
Melissa Hacker is a film and video maker who works with themes of memory, history, family, and loss. Melissa made her directing debut with the documentary film My Knees Were Jumping; Remembering the Kindertransports, which was short-listed for Academy Award nomination, screened in film festivals internationally, and aired on PBS, the Film Four Channel in the UK, and the Sundance Channel. Letters Home, a short 3-channel video, is currently screening at film festivals, and her video Venus was featured in the 2011 group exhibition “Objects of Devotion and Desire: Medieval Relic to Contemporary Art,” in New York. Melissa is currently working on Ex Libris, an animated documentary: http://exlibrismovie.com/
Susan Glassow, a memoirist, has written her world since a Bend, Oregon, childhood, framed by mountains and infused with scents of sage and Ponderosa Pine. A feminist and a feminist scholar, she’s explored the lives and work of women in the U.S. and abroad. She founded Lane Community College’s film program in 1973 and, as co-director of Ariadne Institute, assisted theologian Carol Christ on archaeological goddess pilgrimages in Crete. A health activist, she is surviving breast cancer and learning to dance with Parkinson’s. She celebrates the solstices in her McKenzie River home with her chemical engineer/poet husband and their families and friends, including her two beloved daughters.
John-Erik Jordan is an artist and writer from Los Angeles, CA. He received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2006 and has since worked as a collaborative sculptor and storyteller, set designer, video editor, and educator. His fiction ponders nature, evolution, consciousness, and the future. He currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Heather Lea Heppner is a work in progress. Currently, she is writing a tale of frog migration and coming of age on the road. In 2011, Heather attended the Oxford American Summit for Ambitious Writers in her home state, where she’d studied English at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. In 2007, she co-founded WritingHighway395.com with “Crazy Child” Clive Matson’s writing workshop in Oakland, CA. For over 20 years, she has tended rehabilitation construction projects for Chinatown Community Development Center in San Francisco. Heather plays guitar and sings with Dish Pan Hands.
Ellen Waterston’s Cold Snap, a chapbook of poetry and short-form prose, was released by Fishtrap in 2011. Where the Crooked River Rises, a collection of award-winning essays about Central Oregon’s high desert, was published by OSU Press fall 2010. Her memoir, Then There Was No Mountain, was rated one of the top ten books by the Oregonian in 2003 and earned her an appearance on Good Morning America. Poetry awards include the WILLA Award, the Obsidian Prize, an Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship, a Literary Arts Fellowship, and Fishtrap’s Werner Fellowship. She is the founder of The Nature of Words and served as director for ten years before passing the baton in 2012. The president of the Writing Ranch, Waterston lives in Bend, Oregon. For more information, visit www.writingranch.com.