Featured on April 17, 2004

More than twenty-five years have passed since CALYX Journal was founded.   The mission of the journal was in part to address the huge disparity in the ratio of women's poetry published at the time, a scant seven percent nationwide. Since that time the publishing enterprise has published the work of more than 3500 women authors, winnowed from over 100,000 submissions.   The 2002 anthology, A Fierce Brightness, features 101 poets from past editions.   CALYX has seen many of their writers go on to national and international recognition, and not surprisingly, many of them have appeared at the many venues of the Nye Beach Writer's Series, including Judith Arcana, Alice Derry and Sharon Olds.

Tonight we have with us four CALYX writers, including founding editors Margarita Donnelly and Elizabeth McLaglan, as well as poetry editor Donna Henderson.   Poet Janice Gould will also read from her work.

CALYX co-founding editor Margarita Donnelly is an American Book Award winner for editing, a recipient of the Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Award, the OSU Friends of the Library Award and several other honors.   She is the recipient of a Fishtrap Gathering Fellowship for her writing.   She has lectured and conducted workshops around the country and in Australia.

Janice Gould is a Native American poet with three books of poetry, Beneath My Heart, Earthquake Weather, and Alphabet. Her newest book, Speak to my Words, Essays on American Indian Poetry, was published by University of Arizona Press.   Janice is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and others.   She teaches Imaginative Writing and Native American Literature at Willamette University.

Donna Henderson's poems have appeared in Fireweed, First Things, Room of One's Own, and of course, CALYX Journal, among others.   She has published two chapbooks, Transparent Woman and Gazpacho.

She is a teaching member of the Institute for Family-Centered Therapy in Portland.

CALYX co-founding editor Elizabeth Mclaglan has been a gardener, bookkeeper, housecleaner, and teacher, and the recipient of an MFA from Eastern Washington University.   Her work has appeared in American Literary Review, Poetry Northwest and other distinguished journals.   She has won awards for her poetry from Cream City Review, Clark College and the Oregon State Poetry Society.   Nonfiction publications include A Peculiar Paradise: A History of Blacks in Oregon, and Notes Toward a Biography: The Papers of John Hiram Jackson.   A full-length manuscript, Visitations in the Form of a Blue Feather, is currently in search of a publisher.