After an unprecedented delay, Governor Tina Kotek on August 15 named poet, nonfiction author and writing teacher Ellen Waterston of Bend as the 11th Oregon State Poet Laureate, filling a position that had been vacant for months.
A prolific writer and dedicated advocate for the literary arts in rural Oregon, Waterston is the fourth woman to receive this award statewide, the second person east of the Cascades and one of the few outside the Portland area to ever hold the honor.
“What a surprise!” Waterston says of the appointment. “Really and truly.” Speaking by phone from her home in Bend, she says she is overwhelmed by the opportunity this unexpected position presents. “You’ve given me an entire state to travel around for the next two years, waving the flag of poetry.”
Waterston can imagine using her office to create and distribute real banners. “Wouldn’t it be cool if all the pickup trucks had flags flying that said ‘Poetry’?” Perhaps more realistically, she’s already booked to read one of her poems at a gala that’s already planned on Saturday, Aug. 24, at the High Desert Museum in Bend. In the meantime, she says, her calendar is quickly filling up with other appointments.
Last week’s announcement followed closely on the heels of an announcement on July 25. Eugene Weekly Cover story with the headline “Roses are red, violets are blue. Governor Tina Kotek, can you name our new Poet Laureate?”
In the article, reporter Savannah Brown noted that Oregon hasn’t had an official poet laureate since May, when Portland spoken-word poet Anis Mojgani’s second two-year term in the office expired. After asking the public for nominations in late 2023, the Oregon Cultural Trust reviewed 71 possible candidates and referred two names to the governor’s office in February. What followed were months of silence.
This angered some poets across the state. “I just find it shocking that there’s this delay,” Eugene poet Cecelia Hagen told Brown. “It’s very disappointing.”
Oregon named its first poet laureate in 1923, handing the task over to an internationally known poet, Edwin Markham. Subsequent poet laureates included Ethel Romig Fuller, who was poetry editor at The Oregonian Newspaper; William Stafford, who had previously served as national poet laureate; and later his son Kim Stafford.
The part-time position pays $15,000 per year, with a travel budget of $10,000 for the two-year term. According to the Oregon Cultural Trust, the poet laureate travels throughout the state “promoting the art of poetry, encouraging literacy and learning, addressing key humanities and heritage issues, and reflecting on public life in Oregon.”
Every other poet laureate announcement over the past 50 years has been made between March and May, Brown noted in her article. The governor’s office offered no explanation for the unusual delay this time, but said that by law, the governor has a full year to name a new poet laureate when a vacancy occurs.
Waterston, who grew up in Massachusetts, earned her bachelor’s degree in film and photography from Harvard University in 1968 before marrying a range manager and becoming, she says, a ranch wife in Montana and later eastern Oregon. The marriage failed after two decades, but her love for the high desert country remained.
She is the author of four volumes of poetry, including a verse novel, as well as several non-fiction books, including At that time there was no mountaina memory of her years as a ranch woman. She turned her verse novel, Vía Láctea: A woman of a certain age walks the Caminointo the libretto of a full-length opera — Vía Láctea: A new opera in English — which was composed by Keizer musician Rebecca Oswald and produced by OperaBend with the Central Oregon Symphony in 2016. Soprano Emily Pulley sang the lead role. A performance by the Eugene Opera was planned for the 2017-2018 season, but was canceled due to the opera’s financial problems.
Waterston is a graduate of the low-residency MFA program at Oregon State University–Cascades in Bend, where she received an honorary doctorate for her support of the literary arts in Eastern Oregon.
Her book from 2020, Hiking in the High Desert: Encounters with rural America along the Oregon Desert Trail, has taken this blurb from Seattle author Timothy Egan: “There is no better guide to Oregon’s high desert than Ellen Waterston. Her sense of place, her lyrical love of this sometimes hard-to-love place, her balanced yet passionate analysis of the issues roiling the great land of junipers and open skies, are beautifully suited to her subject. Although the West is full of poets who love the land, few of them are as intellectually agile as Waterston.”
Waterston is the founder and president of the Waterston Desert Writing Prize, which is awarded annually to a nonfiction book proposal about the high desert, and founder of the Writing Ranch in Bend. Her brother Sam Waterston is an actor, best known for his role as District Attorney Jack McCoy in the law and order television franchise.
And one more thing: A few minutes after our interview ended, she sent a short email. “One thing I forgot to mention,” she wrote, “is my gratitude to Governor Tina Kotek for this opportunity.”
