Clackamas Community College to host free creative writing event April 08 2021 Calling all writers and lovers of the written word. Explore the practices and professions of creative writing and publishing at Clackamas Community College's annual Compose Creative Writing Conference on Saturday, May 15. This year's event will once again be virtual and free to the public. Join poet and essayist Wendy Willis as she delivers the keynote address. Her book of essays, "These Are Strange Times, My Dear," was published in 2019. Her second book of poems, "A Long Late Pledge," won the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize and was released in 2017. Her first book of poems, "Blood Sisters of the Republic," was published in 2012. Her last two books were finalists for the Oregon Book Award. Willis is a faculty member in poetry and creative nonfiction at the Attic Institute in Portland, and she is also the executive director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium and the founder and director of Oregon's Kitchen Table in the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University.