Columbia Writers Series
Welcome to the 2026-2027 Season
All events are free, open to the public, and take place on Clark College's Main Campus at 1933 Fort Vancouver Way. We look forward to seeing you at the next event.
Ed Park
Thursday, November 5, 2026
11:00 a.m. to 12 (noon)
Penguin Union Building (PUB) 258 A-C
Ed Park is the author of the books Same Bed Different Dreams, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Personal Days, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award; and the story collection An Oral History of Atlantis. A founding editor of The Believer, Park currently teaches writing at Princeton University. His latest book is the memoir Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties. Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan
Debra Magpie Earling
Tuesday, February 2, 2026
1:00 to 2:00 p.m.
Penguin Union Building (PUB) 258 A-C
Debra Magpie Earling is the author of Perma Red and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, an award-winning novel that challenges dominant narratives of the life of Sacajewea. She has received both a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was the first Native American to serve as director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana, where she was recently awarded an honorary doctorate and where she currently serves as professor emeritus. Born in Spokane, WA, she is Bitterroot Salish.
Erica Berry
Wednesday, May 26, 2027
11:00 a.m. to 12 (noon)
Penguin Union Building (PUB) 258 A-B
Erica Berry is a writer and teacher based in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. Her essays, which are often about the confluence of emotions and the natural world, appear in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Emergence, The Yale Review, and Orion, where she is a contributing editor. She is the author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, which won the Oregon Book Award, and the forthcoming Bodies In Heat: Love in a Changing Climate. Winner of a James Beard Award, Oregon Career Fellowship, and a Spark Award from the Miller Foundation, she was a 2026 Mark and Melody Teppola Presidential Distinguished Visiting Professor at Willamette University. Photo credit: Andrea Lonas
About the Columbia Writers Series
The Columbia Writers Series has been a part of Clark College since 1988, bringing local, national, and international authors to the college throughout the year. Past and present directors have included Clark English professors Gerard Smith, Jim Finley, Alexis Nelson, and Dawn Knopf.
Past Speakers | English Department
"The Columbia Writers Series is designed to bring writers–whether they are fiction
or nonfiction writers, poets, playwrights, or screenwriters–to the college," said
Finley. "We not only bring diverse voices to campus, but we recognize the work of
Clark's own faculty authors as well."
"Having a strong writers' series enriches the life of any college," said Finley. "Part
of the mission of any college is to provide a culture where literature and the arts
have a place in our lives–and to recognize that it's not just ornamentation, but that
people make their living doing this work."
Writers who have visited Clark College through the series include Ursula Le Guin,
Donald Justice, Sherman Alexie, Marvin Bell, William Stafford, Jamaica Kincaid, Gerald
Stern, Carolyn Forchè, Natalie Diaz, Karen Russell, Jess Walter, Dana Spiotta, Mitchell
Jackson, and many others.