Library of Congress hosts Portland poet Willa Schneberg

By Jewish Review

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Portland poet Willa Schneberg, winner of the Oregon Book Award and author of three poetry collections, will read her poems Oct. 9 at the Library of Congreges in Washington, D.C.
   
Schneberg, whose first collection, “Storytelling in Cambodia,” won critical acclaim, will join Adele Steiner and Nin Anderson in a presentation of poems on “Magic and Magicians” at a noontime program in the LOC’s Mary Pickford Theater. The event is sponsored by the LOC’s Poetry and Literature Center.
   
“Storytelling in Cambodia” is a moving and image-rich cycle of linked poems that journeys from Cambodia’s mythic times to the killing fields to the U.N. presence during the first free elections. It bears witness to the plight of the Cambodian people and to all who have endured genocide. It has been called a beautiful and heart-wrenching collection.

   
Schneberg’s second collection “In the Margins of the World,” Plain View Press, was awarded the 2002 Oregon Book Award for Poetry.
   
She has won two Oregon Literary Arts Fellowships in poetry and received a poetry grant from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.
   
Her poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Tikkun, Michigan Quarterly Review, Southern Poetry Review, among others.
   
Her work also has been included in a number of anthologies and in a textbook, titled “Bearing Witness: Teaching About the Holocaust,” where her poetry is discussed along with the that of Carolyn Forche and Sharon Olds.
   
She has been a poetry fellow at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland.