Unsolicited Press Hosts a Reading with Shann Ray and Mike Dillon

Poet, short story writer, and novelist Shann Ray grew up in Montana and Alaska and spent part of his childhood on the Northern Cheyenne reservation.  His work has been featured in Poetry, Esquire, McSweeney's, Prairie Schooner, Big Sky Journal, Narrative, and Salon.  A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and winner of the American Book Award and the High Plains Book Award, he is the author of American Masculine, American Copper, Atomic Theory 432, Balefire, Sweetclover, and Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity.  A clinical psychologist specializing in the psychology of men, he teaches leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University.  Because of his wife and three daughters, he believes in love.

 Mike Dillon’s Bainbridge Island roots reach back four generations. He lives in Indianola, Washington, a small town on Puget Sound a few miles north of Bainbridge and twelve miles northwest of Seattle. Four books of his poetry have been published by Bellowing Ark Press, including “That Which We Have Named,” (2008). Red Moon Press has published three books of his haiku, including “The Road Behind” (2003). Several of his haiku were included in “Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years,” W.W. Norton (2013). He is a retired publisher of community newspapers, a field he entered inspired by the example of Walt and Milly Woodward, who defended their Japanese American neighbors in the pages of their newspaper, the Bainbridge Review, during World War II. In 2013 the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association recognized Dillon with its Master Editor/Publisher award.