EcoNvergence » Speakers

Jonathan Skinner

admin — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:34:40 +0000

Jonathan Skinner’s poetry collections include With Naked Foot (Little Scratch Pad Editions, 2009) and Political Cactus Poems (Palm Press, 2005). Skinner founded and edits the journal ecopoetics (vols. 1-7, 2001-2009), which features creative-critical intersections between writing and ecology. His essays on the poets Ronald Johnson and Lorine Niedecker appeared in 2008 in volumes published by the National Poetry Foundation and by University of Iowa Press, respectively. His current project is a hybrid text on the poetics of urban open space, written in and on the major Olmsted parks. Skinner teaches in the Environmental Studies Program at Bates College, in Central Maine, where he makes his home.

Andrea Murray

admin — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:28:42 +0000

Andrea Murray has been producing and hosting public radio programming for over 15 years. She began working in radio as host of a community radio public affairs program, then began announcing classical music in St. Louis. She also worked in the newsroom, where she specialized in cultural reporting. Prior to joining the All Classical staff, she spent 6 years as the arts reporter for WETA in Washington, where she produced and hosted a cultural magazine called “The Program.” She’s also done freelance work for several NPR magazine programs, including Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Studio 360.

Alicia Cohen

admin — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:28:03 +0000

Alicia Cohen is a poet, artist, and literary critic from the West Coast. Her work is informed by the expanse of the Pacific Ocean which she grew up looking at from her bedroom window and whose tide pools were her earliest teachers. In her adult life she has lived longest in Portland, Oregon where, surrounded by oceans of trees and several volcanoes, she lives, teaches, and writes. Debts and Obligations from O Books is her second collection of poems; her first, Bear, was published by Handwritten Press in 2000. She has also shown work in the visual and performance arts, including a gallery installation and “opera” entitled Northwest Inhabitation Log. She earned her Ph.D. in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo and has taught at Reed College and Portland State University.

Allison Cobb

admin — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:26:47 +0000

Allison Cobb is the author of the poetry collection Born 2 (Chax Press), which addresses the history of Los Alamos, New Mexico, her birthplace and that of the first atomic bombs. Her second collection, Green-Wood (forthcoming in 2010 from Factory School Books), examines the history of New York City’s famous nineteenth century garden cemetery. She worked for more than a decade for a national environmental nonprofit, and her writing confronts issues of landscape, ecology, and politics.

Jules Boykoff

admin — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:25:21 +0000

Jules Boykoff is the author of Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space (co-authored with Kaia Sand) (Palm Press, 2008), Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States (AK Press, 2007), and The Suppression of Dissent: How the State and Mass Media Squelch USAmerican Social Movements (Routledge, 2006). He has also penned two poetry collections: Hegemonic Love Potion (Factory School, 2009) and Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge (Edge Books, 2006). His writing has appeared recently in The Nation, The Guardian, New Political Science, The Oregonian, and Wheelhouse Magazine. He teaches politics and writing at Pacific University in Oregon, and lives in Portland where he curates the Tangent Reading Series with Rodney Koeneke and Kaia Sand.

Lauren C. Regan

admin — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:01:28 +0000

Lauren Regan is a public interest attorney specializing in civil rights, criminal defense, and environmental law. She is the founder and executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center, a nonprofit organization that strives to protect and educate the public as to their civil liberties and constitutional rights. She has successfully represented hundreds of political activists in both civil and criminal litigation. The Civil Liberties Defense Center assists communities in curtailing government encroachment upon their right to protest, defends activists in court, assists with political prisoner issues, and monitors current governmental attempts to restrict civil liberties and dissent. The CLDC also strives to educate the public, and particularly communities of color or other higher risk communities, by conducting “know your rights” trainings throughout the country. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, and is often found hiking Oregon’s forests and beaches with her constant canine companion, Nakaia the couch wolf.

Aaron Vidaver

admin — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:44:03 +0000

Aaron Vidaver is a writer and editor living on unceded Coast Salish territories in Vancouver (BC). He was a participant-observer in the direct action housing occupation known as The Woodwards Squat (2002) and subsequently edited Woodsquat, a collection of interviews and writing by squatters and supporters with photographs and primary materials pertaining to the action. He edits Documents in Poetics, Working Papers in Critical Practice and The Rain Review of Books and his writing has appeared in Parser, Anarcho-Modernism, Studies in Practical Negation, XCP, Counter-Interpellation and in two collaborative sequences, Field Guide To Feral Ornaments (with Roger Farr and Steven Ward) and Get Me Off This / S I T U A T I O N (with David Fujino). He serves on the board of the Pacific Institute for Language and Literacy Studies.

Brian Frank

admin — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 07:27:44 +0000

Brian Frank has been active in environmental and social justice causes for the past decade and is a founding member of Rising Tide North America. Before Rising Tide he spent 6 months in New Orleans doing volunteer relief work where he got a view of the damage climate change can do, and how poor people and people of color are affected by so-called “natural” disasters. He works for a feminist media organization, while volunteering a lot with Rising Tide. Brian believes that only by merging environmental and social justice movements into a common resistance movement against corporate power and resource colonialism can society be turned away from its catastrophic course.

Therese Saliba

admin — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:28:59 +0000

Therese Saliba is faculty of Third World feminist studies at The Evergreen State College, Washington, and former Fulbright scholar in Palestine (1995-96). She is co-editor of two collections, Gender, Politics, and Islam (Univ. Chicago Press, 2002) and Intersections: Gender, Nation, and Community in Arab Women’s Novels (Syracuse UP, 2002). Her essays on Arab and Palestinian feminisms, postcolonial literature, media representations, and Arab American experience have appeared in numerous journals and collections. She is also former associate editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and producer, with Tom Wright, of Checkpoint: The Palestinians after Oslo(1997). Saliba is currently associate editor of the online Brill Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, and a board member of The Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace & Justice.

Barbara Dudley

admin — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 04:58:47 +0000

Barbara Dudley started her legal career defending GIs in court martials in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. She then worked as an attorney with California Rural Legal Assistance and with the Agricultural Labor Relations Board. In the 1980s, she became the President and Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild, and then Director of the Veatch Program, a progressive foundation. In 1992, Barbara became the Executive Director of Greenpeace USA and then in 1998 was appointed Assistant Director for Strategic Campaigns of the national AFL-CIO. She now lives in Portland, is co-chair of the Oregon Working Families Party and a partner in Bethel Heights Vineyard which her family started in 1978.

Barbara has been an adjunct assistant professor at Portland State University’s Hatfield School of Government since 2000. She has taught courses in Political Science, Sociology and Public Administration, including courses on the World Trade Organization, History and Foundations of the Nonprofit Sector, Advocacy and Political Participation, Globalization of Civil Society, and Social Sustainability.