US at a Loss for Words
Join Oregon Poet Laureate Ellen Waterston in exploring the origin, sound, color, meaning and power of words…while reckoning what their ongoing loss portends about our capacity for relationship to place and one another. Generative writing prompts and supplementary readings will guide workshop participants in recruiting words that honor unique American regional dialects and languages and as interpreters of wildlife and landscape. Established and emerging poets can count on returning to the page with renewed commitment and inspiration as writers and as custodians of language.
Poet, author and columnist Ellen Waterston has dedicated herself to writing and advocating for the literary arts in the high desert region of Oregon, all the while continuing to write poetry and nonfiction works that have evolved into essential reading about Oregon and the West. In 2024 Waterston received Soapstone’s Bread and Roses Award, Literary Arts’ Stewart H Holbrook Award, and was named to a two-year term as the eleventh Poet Laureate of Oregon. She is now in the second year of that term and, in that capacity, has so far visited 22 of Oregon’s 36 counties. (Ask her about the two initiatives she is spearheading as poet laureate.) Released in January of this year, her chapbook As Far as I Can Anthem, (2026) is her fifth poetry title. She has published four literary nonfiction titles, including, most recently, We Could Die Doing This (2024) and Walking the High Desert (2020). Waterston is the founder of the Writing Ranch and of the annual Waterston Desert Writing Prize. For more information visit www.writingranch.com
