Martha Gies

Martha Gies began publishing nonfiction in the mid-seventies and later studied fiction with Raymond Carver at two Port Townsend workshops. Her short stories and literary essays appear widely in literary quarterlies, including Orion, The Sun, and Zyzzyva, and in various anthologies. In 2004, Oregon State University Press published Up All Night, her portrait of Portland told through the stories of twenty-three people who work graveyard shift. She teaches at Traveler’s Mind, an annual writing workshop abroad. She first began interviewing Portland Black Panthers in 2004.

Author's Entries

  • Black Panthers in Portland

    The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) was founded in October 1966 in Oakland, California, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, two young Black men who met at Merritt Junior College. The party was their response to centuries of disenfranchisement of American Blacks and routine police violence in local Black …

    Oregon Encyclopedia

  • Raymond Carver (1938-1988)

    Raymond Carver was America’s preeminent short story-writer during the 1970s and 1980s, a time that witnessed a great renaissance of the art of the story. In his stories, and also his poems and essays, Carver recorded with poignancy and humor the financial and emotional bankruptcies that beset the working poor. …

    Oregon Encyclopedia