October 30 | 7pm start time, doors open at 6:30pm | Tickets Below
Started in 1999 and organized by writer Willa Schneberg, this annual event features readings by prominent Oregon Jewish poets and writers. The writers in the 2024 program span a range of genres, including fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and essays and will share selections from their work.
About The Speakers
David Axelrod is the author of ten collections of poems, most recently Skiing with Dostoyevsky: New & Selected Poems. His poems and essays appear in many journals, including: About Place, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Journal, Crazy Horse, Hotel Amerika, Kenyon Review, New Letters, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West and Verse Daily. He taught at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande from 1988 to 2020. He now teaches letterpress printing at the University of Montana on a 1935 Hacker Test Press and founded Bear Scratch Press, and lives in a former gravel pit where he tends a small native plants nursery.
Jan Baross is a novelist, documentary filmmaker, photographer, screenwriter, playwright, cartoonist, journalist, film critic and librettist. She has made more than thirty documentaries, some of which aired on A&E and OPB, and was a film critic for Oregon newspapers. One of her plays, Mata Hari, was turned into an award-winning opera, for which she wrote the libretto. Her debut novel, José Builds a Woman, was released in 2006 by Ooligan Press with blurbs by Ursula K. Le Guin and Molly Gloss. Her second novel, Bye-Bye Bakersfield, won first place in the San Miguel Writers Competition. Her many illustrated travel guides were published by MPOLO Press.
Marat Grinberg immigrated to the United States from Ukraine in 1993, and received a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago in 2006. A scholar of modern Jewish and Russian literature and culture, and of cinema, he is a Professor of Russian and humanities at Reed College. A prolific writer, Grinberg’s latest book, published by Brandeis University Press’s Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry, is the widely reviewed The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines. He is also the translator and editor of the just published Mikhail Goldis, Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine. His most recent essays have appeared in Tablet Magazine, Mosaic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Jewish Journal. He is currently writing a book about Jewishness and the Holocaust in Soviet and East European science fiction.
Willa Schneberg is a poet, multi-disciplinary artist, ceramicist, curator and psychotherapist in private practice, and has authored six poetry collections including, The Naked Room (2023), and Rending the Garment, about the lives of her parents, native Brooklynites. She has received the Oregon Book Award. During the pandemic, she presented a reading of her poetry and ceramic sculpture on Zoom, sponsored by the Israel Association of Writers in English. Her sculpture is in the permanent collection of OJMCHE and Havurah Shalom. Willa, along with former OJMCHE executive director, Judy Margles, founded “Oregon Jewish Voices,” which she still curates. This year, the annual series celebrates a quarter-century of showcasing Oregon Jewish writers.
Jodi Varon is the author of two memoirs in linked essays: Your Eyes Will Be My Window, published in September of 2023 by the University of Georgia Press and also Drawing to an Inside Straight: The Legacy of an Absent Father, a WILLA Award finalist from Women Writing the West. A translator of the Tang Dynasty Chinese poet Li He, Varon’s translation is entitled The Rock’s Cold Breath: Selected Poems of Li He. Jodi is a professor emeritus of English and Writing at Eastern Oregon University, a founding editor of basalt: a journal of fine and literary arts. She lives with her husband David Axelrod near Missoula, MT where they raise native plants.