On Monday, April 16, 2007, Poet and Oregon Book Award Winner Willa Schneberg will read from her new book of poetry “Storytelling in Cambodia” in Seaside at CCC’s South County Campus at 8am and in Astoria at Clatsop Community College’s Art Gallery at noon as part of Knutson’s students’ ( 338-2501) “ Brown Bag” series. All are welcome; no admission charge; bring your lunch.

Willa Schneberg was born in Brooklyn, New York. Her second collection In The Margins Of The World, Plain View Press, was awarded the 2002 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Garrison Keillor read “Biscuits” a poem from that volume, on the Nov. 20th, 2002 and 2003 Writer’s Almanac on National Public Radio in the U.S. Her first volume of poetry is entitled Box Poems, Alice James Books, She has won two Oregon Literary Arts Fellowships in poetry, and received a grant in poetry from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Among the journals in which her poems have appeared or will appear are: American Poetry Review, Tikkun, Salmagundi, Michigan Quarterly Review, Exquisite Corpse, Southern Poetry Review, Rosebud and Mudfish. Among the anthologies: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust; Northwest University Press; Claiming The Spirit Within: A Sourcebook of Women’s Poetry, Beacon Press; Point of Contact: Disability Art and Culture, University of Michigan Press; Knoxville Bound: A Collection of Literary Works Inspired by Knoxville, Tennessee, Metropulse Publishing; The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2006: Nineteenth Annual Collection, St. Martin’s Press. In a textbook entitled: Bearing Witness: Teaching About The Holocaust, Heinemann, her poetry is discussed along with the poetry of Carolyn Forche and Sharon Olds. Through Poetry-In-Motion, sponsored by the Poetry Society of America, an excerpt from one of her poems can be found on busses and commuter trains in Portland, She is the coordinator and originator of the annual Jewish Writers’ Reading at the Oregon Jewish Museum in Portland, now in its six season. She has been a poetry fellow at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico and the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annaghmakerrig, Ireland.

Willa is also a ceramic sculptor, photographer, and a clinical social worker in private practice in Portland, Oregon. She has facilitated visual and poetry workshops with the chronically mentally ill, the retarded, the aged, and with public school students through artists-in-the-schools programs in Massachusetts, Oregon, Tennessee and American military bases in the Far East. From 1992-1993, she worked with the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, first as a District Electoral Supervisor setting up registration sites in Phnom Penh, and then as a Medical Liaison Officer, providing counseling and arranging repatriation for UN volunteers from member countries. She judged the 15th Annual Reuben Rose International Poetry Competition for Poets who write in English sponsored by “Voices Israel,” and in Dec. 2004 spent a week in Israel, offering talks, readings, poetry workshops and presiding over the Awards Ceremony. She was guest poet at the 2005 Tucson, Arizona Poetry Festival the theme of which was visual art and poetry. She has been giving readings from her new collection Storytelling in Cambodia, Calyx Books, Corvallis, Oregon, throughout the U.S. at bookstores, literary clubs, universities, poetry festivals and Cambodian community centers, including KGB Bar in New York City and the Cambodian Community Assistance Association in Lowell, Massachusetts. In March, she spoke about “poetry of witness” at Lewis and Clark College in a symposium entitled “Millions of Intricate Moves”- Artistic and Spiritual Responses to War and Peace.”