2013-2014 Delve Program Guides

Lucas Bernhardt

Lucas Bernhardt holds MAs in English and in Writing from Portland State University, as well as an MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He teaches writing at Portland State University and is managing editor of Propeller Quarterly, a literature and art magazine.

John Brehm

John Brehm is the author of two books of poems, Help Is On the Way and Sea of Faith, both from the University of Wisconsin Press, and the associate editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. A past recipient of a Fellowship from Literary Arts, he has an MFA from Cornell University and has taught at Cornell, Emerson College, and Portland State University.

Sara Guest

Sara Guest is a literature editor/producer and poet. Previous jobs have included editor for Encyclopaedia Britannica, producer for Harpo Studios (Oprah’s Book Club) and program coordinator for Write Around Portland. She is currently a visiting writer at Pacific Northwest College of Art and an author coordinator for Wordstock. Sara has an MA in English from Case Western Reserve University with a focus in the late-Victorian and early-Modern periods.

John Isaacson

John Isaacson is a writer and artist who teaches comics at the Independent Publishing Resources Center, Marylhurst University. and Portland Community College. His comics and writing have appeared in the Willamette Week, Teachers and Writers magazine, Propeller, and The Santa Barbara Independent. His first graphic novel, Do It Yourself Screenprinting was published by Microcosm in 2007. He continues to self-publish the mini-comics, Feedback, Pyromania, and Grumpy McBumbles.

Ramiza Koya

Ramiza Koya’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in publications such as Washington Square Review, Lumina, and Catamaran, and she has been a fellow at both MacDowell Colony and Blue Mountain Center. She has both a BA and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and has taught in Spain, the Czech Republic, and Morocco. In addition to teaching writing, she also works as a freelance writer and editor.

Christopher Lord

Christopher Lord was born in Astoria, Oregon, near the heart of Dickens Junction, the location for his cozy mystery series featuring bookstore owner Simon Alastair. Author of The Christmas Carol Murders (2012) and The Edwin Drood Murders (September, 2013) Lord has had a lifelong interest in Dickens and classic detective fiction. He is a featured speaker at Dickens Universe in 2013 on Dickensian elements in his mystery fiction. He is a previous Delve guide (A Tale of Two Cities, Our Mutual Friend), and a past recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship from Literary Arts. Look for the third Dickens Junction mystery, The Our Mutual Friend Murders, in fall 2014.

Ivonne Saed

Graphic designer, photographer, and writer, Ivonne Saed has extensively explored the crossroads between the visual and the textual within the Humanities, both in her own professional creation as well as in teaching. She published the novel Triple crónica de un nombre (Triple Chronicle of a Name)—Juan Rulfo National Award for First Novel in Mexico, and the non-fiction book Sobre Paul Auster: Autoría, distopía y textualidad (On Paul Auster: Authorship, Dystopia and Textuality). She has co-authored other fiction and non-fiction books and has published book reviews, photos and stories in newspapers and magazines, like Reforma and Crónica, in Mexico, and Literal Magazine, in the US. Ivonne’s photographs have been shown in galleries in the United States, Mexico, and Turkey. Her first documentary Naïve premiered in March 2011 as part of Object Stories, a Portland Art Museum project. She came to Oregon in 2003 as a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence and has taught graphic design, literature, and interdisciplinary courses widely at Universidad Iberoamericana, Chemeketa Community College, and Marylhurst University, among other institutions.

 Bruce Suttmeier

Bruce Suttmeier is Associate Professor of Japanese and Chair of the Foreign Languages and Literatures Department at Lewis & Clark College.  He researches and writes on Japan in the 1960s, and his current project / obsession involves the changes in public space in Olympic-era Tokyo. He recently won a Mellon Foundation Grant to develop a course on World Literatures for the College, which he taught in Spring 2013.

Judith Stone

Judith Stone studied French literature at New York University and earned a doctorate from the State University of NY in modern French history.  She is the author of two books, The Search for Social Peace and Sons of the Revolution. Republicanism, religion and gender have been the focus of her research. She regularly incorporates literature into her publications and teaching.  She is an emerita professor from Western Michigan University and currently teaches as an adjunct at Portland State University.

Pauls Toutonghi

Pauls Toutonghi is Assistant Professor of English at Lewis & Clark College where he teaches fiction writing and English and American literature coursework.  His work has appeared in The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, GRANTA, Zoetrope:  All-Story, One Story Magazine, The Boston Review, The Yemen Observer, Glimmer Train, The Burnside Review, and other periodicals.  He received a Pushcart Prize for his short story, Regeneration, which appeared in The Boston Review in 2000, when Pauls was twenty-three. His first novel, Red Weather, was published by Random House in 2006. His second novel, Evel Knievel Days, was published by Random House/Crown in 2012.

Cindy Williams Gutiérrez

Poet-dramatist Cindy Williams Gutiérrez collaborates with artists in theatre, music, and visual art. Her collection the small claim of bones is forthcoming from Bilingual Press (Arizona State University). Poems and reviews have appeared in Calyx, Harvard’s Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, UNAM’s Periódico de poesía, Portland Review, Quiddity, Rain Taxi, Windfall, and ZYZZYVA, among others. Her play A Dialogue of Flower & Song was featured as part of the Miracle Theatre’s La Luna Nueva festival and the 2012 GEMELA Conference (Group of Spanish and Latin American Women’s Studies) co-sponsored by the University of Portland and Portland State University. In collaboration with los Porteños, Cindy is currently creating an original theatrical work for the William Stafford Centennial in the fall of 2014. Cindy earned an MFA from the University of Southern Maine Stonecoast Program. She has taught poetry and playwriting to adults through Annie Bloom’s Books, the Attic, the Oregon Poetry Association, and Stonecoast, as well as to youth through the Bernstein Artful Learning Model, the Portland Art Museum, the Right Brain Initiative, Wordstock, and Writers in the Schools. In 2009, she developed a high school curriculum based on the William Stafford digital archives at Lewis & Clark College as part of Kim Stafford’s House of Words project.

Rishona Zimring

Rishona Zimring is Associate Professor of English at Lewis and Clark College, where she has taught modernist and postcolonial literature since 1995. She grew up in Chicago and went on to attend college and graduate school at Yale University, where she received her PhD in Comparative Literature. She has published essays on 20^th century and contemporary fiction, poetry, visual art, and film, as well as a book: Social Dance and the Modernist Imagination in Interwar Britain. A longstanding interest in the philosophical, cultural, and artistic promises of cosmopolitanism influences her past and present work on Rushdie and other late 20^th century and contemporary writers. A past chair of Lewis & Clark’s English department, a past organizer of the annual international conference on Virginia Woolf, and a past and present participant in seminars run by the National Endowment for the Humanities, she brings to the Delve program an abiding delight in fostering intellectual communities in a variety of settings.

Christopher Zinn

Christopher Zinn grew up in Pine City, NY, and was educated at Georgetown and at New York University, where he received his Ph.D. in English and American Literature. He taught Humanities and American literature at Reed College, directed the college’s American Studies program, and was Fulbright Senior lecturer in Turkey in 1993-94. In May 1997, he was appointed Executive Director of the Oregon Council for the Humanities, and continued in that position until 2006. He has also taught cultural history at the Oregon College of Art and Craft and lectures and writes frequently on American literature and culture. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Federation of State Humanities Councils, and serves on the Oregon 150 Commission, the National Advisory Board of Imagining America, and the Multnomah County Cultural Coalition. Christopher currently teaches humanities at the Portland Waldorf High School.