The Authors of the OE
Joan Kent Kvitka, who holds two master’s degrees, is education director of the Portland Classical Chinese Garden. She has taken the Chinese Garden and culture into classrooms across Oregon’s rural and small-town communities and has developed an extensive multi-disciplinary K-12 curriculum on Chinese culture. Kvitka taught for twenty-eight years in the Portland Public Schools, during which time she developed an exchange program between Wilson High School and Suzhou High School. The Chinese Garden curriculum is found on the Portland Chinese Garden Web site.
Jeff LaLande graduated from Georgetown University in 1969. For over thirty years, he was archaeologist and historian for the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest. With a master’s degree in archaeology from Oregon State University and a Ph.D. in history from University of Oregon, Jeff has been an adjunct faculty member at Southern Oregon University for twenty years. The author of numerous articles and several books, he enjoys learning and writing about a wide range of Northwest history topics and is an active board member of several statewide and community organizations.
Larry Landis has been university archivist at Oregon State University since 1996 and is a recent recipient of the Oregon Heritage Excellence Award. He was instrumental in establishing the Oregon Multicultural Archives at OSU and the Northwest Digital Archives. As a native of Indiana, he sees some similarities between the two states—both have a strong agriculture and beautiful summers (though a bit more hot and humid in Indiana) and the Oregon constitution was based in part on Indiana's.
J. Carl Laney is professor of biblical literature at Western Seminary (Portland, OR), where he has served since 1977. He grew up in Eugene and graduated from the University of Oregon in 1970. He earned an M.Div. and Th.M. degrees at Western Seminary and completed doctoral studies at Dallas Theological Seminary in 1978. Carl has served as visiting professor in seminaries in the Philippines and in The Netherlands and has served as interim pastor in numerous churches. He is the author of fifteen books and numerous articles and regularly takes students to Israel to study.
Frank A. Lang is emeritus professor at Southern Oregon University, where he taught systematic botany, plant ecology, conservation of natural resources, and biological illustration. He holds degrees from Oregon State College (B.S.), University of Washington (M.S.), and University of British Columbia (Ph.D.). He is associate editor of Kalmiopsis, the journal of the Native Plant Society of Oregon, and studies the vegetation and flora of the Klamath Ecoregion. He serves on the Jackson County Natural Resources Advisory Committee, the Medford District Bureau of Land Management Natural Resources Advisory Committee, and the Board of the Crater Lake Natural History Association.
William L. Lang is professor of history at Portland State University and the founding director of the Center for Columbia River History. He is the author and editor of many books and articles on the Columbia River and the Pacific Northwest and is co-editor of The Oregon Encyclopedia.
Jewel Lansing, author of Portland: People, Politics, and Power, 1851-2001 published in 2003, is the author of two books about women and politics (now out-of-print) and one about growing-up in Montana (My Montana: A History and Memoir, 1930 to 1950, published 2007). She served twelve years as Portland's elected city and county auditor, where she pioneered performance auditing in Oregon local government. Jewel is currently co-authoring a book tentatively titled Multnomah Milestones, The County's First 150 Years, 1854-2004. She holds a BA degree in journalism, University of Montana, and an MA degree in counseling and guidance, Stanford University.
Ronald B. Lansing, emeritus professor at the Northwestern School of Law at Lewis & Clark College (1966-2008), is the founding editor-in-chief of the Willamette Law Journal (1959-1960). He was law clerk to Oregon Supreme Court Chief Justice William McAllister (1960-1061) and chair of the Torts Section of the American Association of Law Schools (1977). He is the author of Skylarks and Lecterns: A Law School Charter (1983), Juggernaut: The Whitman Massacre Trial (1993), and Nimrod: Courts, Claims, and Killing on the Oregon Frontier (2005). He is current writing the history of the Northwestern School of Law.
My name is Zeb Larson, and I am a recent graduate of Lewis & Clark College, where I majored in history. I've worked for the National Park Service, researching historic structures. I've had a strong interest in Oregon history for many years, and my senior thesis was written on the history of Silver Falls State Park.
Adair Law worked as an editor and later director of publications for the Oregon Historical Society for fifteen years. She currently writes and edits Northwest history-based projects. She is the author of The Spark and the Light: The Leo Adler Story and Abundantly Blessed, The John Elorriaga Story.
