The Authors of the OE
John Witte is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Second Nature (University of Washington Press, 2008), and the editor of The Collected Poems of Hazel Hall (Oregon State University Press, 2000). He teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Oregon, where he has edited Northwest Review for thirty years.
Vincent Wixon co-produced the video Lawson Fusao Inada: What It Means To Be Free.
Craig Wollner is the associate dean of the College of Urban and Public Affairs at Portland State University. He is the author, co-author, or editor of six books on the economic, business, and labor history of the Pacific Northwest, including Electrifying Eden: Portland General Electric, 1889-1965; The City Builders: One Hundred Years of Union Carpentry in Portland, Oregon, and, with Gordon B. Dodds, The Silicon Forest.
Barbara Yasui is a third generation Japanese American whose family has lived in Oregon for over a century. Yasui received her B.A. from Stanford University and M.Ed. from the University of Washington. When she was an undergraduate, she spent one summer doing research on people of Japanese ancestry who lived in Oregon prior to World War II, which led to the publication of an article in the Oregon Historical Quarterly. Yasui currently lives in Seattle and teaches at Shoreline Community College.
Homer Yasui was born in Hood River in 1924 and lived there for seventeen years. He attended the University of Denver and Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia. Homer married Miyuki Yabe in 1950, and moved to Oregon a year later, where he served three years in a surgical residency at Emanuel Hospital in Portland. In 1954, he joined the U.S. Navy and spent eighteen months at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Iwakuni, Japan. He served another eighteen months in a general surgical residency at the old St. Vincent's Hospital in Portland, then opened a general surgical practice in Milwaukie. He retired in 1987.
Jason T. Younker, PhD, Anthropology (U Oregon, 2003) is an Associate Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY. He grew up on South Slough of Coos Bay and wrote his dissertation entitled Coquille/Kō´Kwell, A Southern Oregon Coast Indian Tribe: Revisiting History, Ingenuity, and Identity. He is a member of the Coquille Indian Tribe.
Pat Zagelow has been involved in arts administration since 1989, including managing the Oregon Repertory Singers, the Florestan Trio, Portland Piano International, and Friends of Chamber Music. She was one of the two initial recipients of a B.A. in Music Performance (piano) at Portland State University in 1991.
Henry Zenk is currently a consulting linguist with the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community. He was first exposed to Chinook Jargon thirty years ago, when he began studying the language as spoken by some of that community’s last fluent speakers.
Jennifer Zika graduated from Bowling Green State University with a Bachelor of Arts degree and minors in photography, art history and business. She has shown her own black-and-white photographs at various venues in the Midwest, in San Francisco, and in Portland. After living in San Francisco for nine years and volunteering at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the photography department, Jennifer moved to Portland in 1998. She is the director for the Portland Art Museum’s Rental Sales Gallery.
Nancy Ward Zopf grew up on a ranch near Boyd, Oregon, on land settled by the Wards in 1859. She returned to Wasco County in 1996 and began writing. Her books include A Road, a Railroad, and a Country Store: The Story of Boyd, Oregon (2001), Damascus, Oregon: The Place of a New Beginning (2003), God's Footstool: Dufur, Oregon (2005), Dallesport, Washington: The Paris of the West (2006), and Hospitals of The Dalles (2009). The Wards have been active in the Wasco County Pioneer Association since 1922. Nancy wrote a history of that organization and is its historian.
