Poetry Night: Ellen Waterston and Jeff Fearnside

December 3, 2026 | 5:30 p.m. | PRAx 470 SW 15th Street, Corvallis OR 97331 Cozy up for a night of poetry as acclaimed writers Ellen Waterston and Jeff Fearnside share their latest collections. Completed while travelling the state during her first year as Oregon’s Poet Laureate, the poems in Waterston’s As Far as I Can Anthem enlist the people and places across Oregon to inform, challenge and inspire readers in vital and unexpected ways. Fearnside’s most recent book, Lake: Love Poems, is focused on the concept of place, specifically Central Asia, where he lived for four years, and Oregon, his home for the past 13 years. The poems are connected by the thread of his courtship with and marriage to the woman who has experienced these places with him, his life partner Valentina. Ellen Waterston is an award-winning author and columnist who 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. She has published five poetry and four literary nonfiction titles, including We Could Die Doing This and Walking the High Desert. In 2024, Waterston was named to a two-year term as the 11th Poet Laureate of Oregon and received both the Soapstone Bread and Roses Award and the Stewart H. Holbrook Award. Waterston is the founder of the Writing Ranch and the annual Waterston Desert Writing Prize. Jeff Fearnside is the author of three full-length books and two chapbooks of poetry and prose, including the essay collection Ships in the Desert, which won a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award and the Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Book Award in Prose from the Arkansas Writers MFA Workshop. His story collection A Husband and Wife Are One Satan won the Orison Chapbook Prize. Free tickets are available here. Patricia Valian Reser Center for Creative Arts (PRAx)