Jacob Aiello - Editor

Jacob Aiello is a writer and tutor whose stories have previously been published in Ooligan Press, The Portland Review, and The Wordstock Festival’s “Wordstock Ten.” He has been a member of The Portland Fiction Project since 2007 and is a frequent contributor to the 1,000 Words Reading Series. He is now hard at work amassing a collection of short fiction consisting of far too many pronouns. He grew up in a small town in Northern California and experimented with Texas, but now happily resides in Portland, Oregon, where he plans to stay.

Doug Dean - Founding/Managing Editor

Doug divides his time between writing, occasionally performing improvised theater around town, working with the writers of The Portland Fiction Project, singing at Chopsticks II and elaborate delusions of grandeur. For eight years, he hosted the earliest Christmas party on Long Island (until a broken window in his mother’s house created the need for a new venue).

A mysterious yet self-effusing type, he can be found as well as lost, present in any given moment.

Jacob Aiello

Jacob Aiello is a writer and tutor whose stories have previously been published in Ooligan Press, The Portland Review, and The Wordstock Festival’s “Wordstock Ten.” He has been a member of The Portland Fiction Project since 2007 and is a frequent contributor to the 1,000 Words Reading Series. He is now hard at work amassing a collection of short fiction consisting of far too many pronouns. He grew up in a small town in Northern California and experimented with Texas, but now happily resides in Portland, Oregon, where he plans to stay.

Jeremy Benjamin

Sunny Bleckinger

Doug Dean

Doug divides his time between writing, occasionally performing improvised theater around town, working with the writers of The Portland Fiction Project, singing at Chopsticks II and elaborate delusions of grandeur. For eight years, he hosted the earliest Christmas party on Long Island (until a broken window in his mother’s house created the need for a new venue).

A mysterious yet self-effusing type, he can be found as well as lost, present in any given moment.

Joe Pitkin

Joe Pitkin writes poetry, fiction, and nerdy pop songs. He is a regular reader and sometime host for the 1,000 Words series, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review, North American Review, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and elsewhere. He teaches English at Clark College, plays bass for The Gravitropes, and studies primary succession on the pumice plain of Mt. St. Helens.

Alice Clark

Alice Clark is the pseudomnym of a Portland writer who prefers to remain anonymous.

Geneva Chao

Geneva Chao is a poet, translator, and fiction writer. She has a chapbook forthcoming from Oakland’s Taxt Press. She teaches writing at Clark College.

Joe Pitkin

Joe Pitkin writes poetry, fiction, and nerdy pop songs. He is a regular reader and sometime host for the 1,000 Words series, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review, North American Review, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and elsewhere. He teaches English at Clark College, plays bass for The Gravitropes, and studies primary succession on the pumice plain of Mt. St. Helens.

Shanna Seesz

Shanna Seesz is a writer, wedding singer, tutor, and student currently residing in Portland, Oregon. She maintains a busy schedule, fueled by cheap wine or coffee, depending on the time of day. She especially enjoys it when people use the word bologna(!) to express anger and strongly encourages replacing all profanity with names of processed lunch meat.

Scott Warfe

Scott Warfe comes to Portland from Los Angeles by way of Sacramento. He writes, professes, and makes light of serious situations. He prefers small, manageable adventures to large, life-changing ones. He has an M.A. in English, somewhere. He is influenced by Kurt Vonnegut, Nicole Krauss, J.D. Salinger, and Paramahansa Yogananda. If he wants to be known for anything, it would be his capacity for love, and also his karaoke skills, but mostly just love.

Alice Clark

Alice Clark is the pseudomnym of a Portland writer who prefers to remain anonymous.

Geneva Chao

Geneva Chao is a poet, translator, and fiction writer. She has a chapbook forthcoming from Oakland’s Taxt Press. She teaches writing at Clark College.

George Rachel

George Rachel is a writer, print artist, and student of literature at Marylhurst University. Centered around her personal narrative, and balanced on the tenuous line between fiction and non-fiction, her writing explores themes of motherhood, domestic trauma, and the consequences of a fluctuating self-identity. She is the recipient of the Jackie Mosier Emerging Writer Award, and her most recent work can be viewed in the forthcoming literary journal Habit, as well as the online journal M Review.

Shanna Seesz

Shanna Seesz is a writer, wedding singer, tutor, and student currently residing in Portland, Oregon. She maintains a busy schedule, fueled by cheap wine or coffee, depending on the time of day. She especially enjoys it when people use the word bologna(!) to express anger and strongly encourages replacing all profanity with names of processed lunch meat.

Scott Warfe

Scott Warfe comes to Portland from Los Angeles by way of Sacramento. He writes, professes, and makes light of serious situations. He prefers small, manageable adventures to large, life-changing ones. He has an M.A. in English, somewhere. He is influenced by Kurt Vonnegut, Nicole Krauss, J.D. Salinger, and Paramahansa Yogananda. If he wants to be known for anything, it would be his capacity for love, and also his karaoke skills, but mostly just love.

Alice Clark

Alice Clark is the pseudomnym of a Portland writer who prefers to remain anonymous.

Tim Josephs - Founding Writer

Tim Josephs is proud to have been a part of the Portland Fiction Project from its inception. Stories he created with the PFP have appeared in literary journals in Oregon, North Carolina, and New York, and in his own collection of short fiction entitled A Camouflaged Fragrance of Decency. Currently Tim lives in Asheville, NC, but vows to one day return to Portland.

Leah Wade - Founding Writer

Leah is older than she likes to admit. She likes to think she is funny. She doesn’t know where her mentally unstable characters come from—they just seem to come out when her fingers hit the keyboard. She is proud of her racing trophies, her bar membership, and that she changed her own water pump last fall. She isn’t sure about her writing, but she is sure where she learned to love words—from her mom and Paige Elliot—her elementary school librarian. And she would be fully remiss if she failed to mention her editor extraordinaire Jacinta Kilber—who reminds Leah that you can’t write a murderer without a murder.

Liz Varley - Founding Writer

Liz lives and works in Portland, where she spends most of her free time writing, reading and trying to come to grips with the modern world. She loves cheap wine, Italian food, snowstorms and orange cats. Somehow or another, she would like to one day write a novel, sell millions of copies and retire in Paris.

Lukas Sherman

Lukas Sherman was born in West Linn, Oregon and began his (over) education at Wheaton College in Illinois. He later attended Boston University and Concordia University (Portland), the latter of which was the dreariest academic experience of his life. Lukas has worked in various capacities, including crossing guard, at several schools, clerked at a book store, imprinted bibles, was a counselor at zoo camp, roofed for a summer, did groundskeeping at a golf course, and was a janitor. In his free time, Lukas enjoys books, music, film, hiking, drinking, creative facial hair, and church. He lives in S.E. Portland.

Lisa Burstein

Lisa Burstein received her MFA in Fiction from the Inland Northwest Center for Writers. She has attended workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her novel “Novocaine Princess” is currently being shopped around while she works on her as-yet-untitled second novel. She enjoys fantasizing about becoming a publishing novelist, pretending she is a publishing novelist, and throwing spitballs at real published novelists.

Matthew David Deschaine

Matthew David Deschaine was born and raised in a sleepy mill-town in northern New England. As a recent transplant to Portland, Oregon, he enjoys getting lost while looking at buildings, meeting lots of nice dogs and pretending to be a local. Matt’s writing has appeared in regional newspapers, architectural magazines, and creative journals.

Jim McCollum

Favorite Hammer: Sledge
Sign of the Zodiac: Scorpio
Birthstone: I wish it was Jet
Cat vs. Dog Preference: Dog
Even or Odd Preference: Even
Symmetry or Asymmetry Preference: Asymmetrical
Number of white t-shirts: roughly 35
Clean to dirty white t-shirt ratio: 12/35
Waffle Preference: Belgian
Favorite meal of the day: Lunch
Favorite Box Fan Setting: 3
Analog vs. Digital Preference: Analog
Espresso Delivery Method Preference: Latte

Karina Sanchez

Karina grew-up in Santa Cruz, California and moved to Portland six years ago with her husband. She has always had a love of words and she can’t remember a time when she didn’t want to be a writer. She is, of course, also a voracious reader. Her favorites include most dead Russian authors and British science fiction writers. You can normally find her sitting in a coffee shop day-dreaming about the end of the world and hoping that she will be there to write about it.

Jason Moore

Rose Klammer

Rose Klammer grew up in Vancouver, WA though she is currently in denial of once residing in this suburban hell hole. She eventually moved to Portland and attended Portland State University where she received her Miss America degree in Communications, however she was able to keep her sanity by writing and occasionally leaving the country.

Kate Dillon

Kate Dillon fled to Portland in 2006 after graduating with a B.A. in English from the University of Michigan. She is now a student at Portland State University, where she is working on her second B.A. in Spanish and planning to pursue her M.A. in teaching. Since her time with the Portland Fiction Project Kate has continued to write fiction and nonfiction in English and, occasionally, Spanish, with high hopes of entertaining someone, be it only herself.

Spencer Cushing

Spencer Cushing—grew up in the flat, empty expanses of Wyoming and believes this caused his obsession with apocalyptic narratives. After a brief and unsuccessful tenure as a wannabe super-villain, he retired his Furby army and left high school and found his way to the NW. He studied writing, literature, and Shakespearian sex jokes at the University of Puget Sound. He believes the short story can make a bigger comeback than the Roller Derby and hopes that his own stories will one day waddle into the homes of millions like a corpulent kitty-cat to lay its fuzzy body into the laps of readers everywhere.

Jeremy Benjamin

Matthew Corum

Kate Nordbye

Marian English

Alice Clark

Alice Clark is the pseudomnym of a Portland writer who prefers to remain anonymous.

Nicole Krueger

Nicole Krueger has devoted her life to abusing the written word. When she’s not recklessly pursuing the Next Great Metaphor, she pretends to eke out a living as a book publicist and freelance writer. She is also a blogger, web copywriter, bibliophile, and experimental time traveler. The stories she has posted here, while written twenty years in the future, were not first published until 1100 B.C.