Wednesday, November 5 | 7pm
Started in 1999 and organized by writer Willa Schneberg, this annual event features readings by prominent Oregon Jewish poets and writers. The writers in the 2025 program span a range of genres, including fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and essays and will share selections from their work.
About the Speakers
- Bonnie Comfort is a psychologist, speaker, and author. As an expert on marital therapy, she appears frequently on podcasts. She is on a mission to embolden women to advocate more clearly for themselves. Her recently released memoir, Staying Married Is the Hardest Part (Simon & Schuster), examines the question of whether a loving marriage can survive career setbacks, infidelity and mismatched sexual desires. Her first book, Denial, a psychological thriller from Simon & Schuster, was well-reviewed and published in eight countries. Learn more at BonnieComfort.com.
- Dorice Horenstein was born and raised in Israel and came to the United States with $600, one suitcase, and no coat—landing in Portland, Oregon. For 30 years, she served as a Jewish education leader. She is known as the “Oy to Joy Champion Catalyst,” and author of Moments of the Heart. Choose to Be Your Own Champion was just released. Drawing from Jewish wisdom, lived experience, and successful strategies to promote mental health, Horenstein empowers individuals and organizations to transform stress into resilience, setbacks into growth, disconnection into engagement.
- Daniela Naomi Molnar is a poet, artist, and writer who creates with color, water, language, and place. Her latest collection, Protocols: An Erasure (Ayin Press, 2025), transforms the world’s most influential antisemitic document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into a poem that explores questions of power, history and language. Her debut book, CHORUS, won the 2024 Oregon Book Award. Forthcoming books include Memory of a Larger Mind (Omnidawn, 2026), and Light/Remains (Bored Wolves Press, 2028). Molnar lives in Portland and in the high deserts of the North American West.
- Brian Rohr is a poet, writer, and performative storyteller based in Beaverton, OR. He’s the founder and director of The Stafford Challenge, an international poetry project which has encouraged over a thousand participants to write a poem every day for a year, inspired by the legendary William Stafford. His debut collection, Shaken to My Bones: A Poetic Midrash on the Torah, was published by Ben Yehuda Press in 2024 as part of their Jewish Poetry Project series. His work explores mythology, mysticism, ecology, and the transformative power of story. Learn more at brianrohr.com and staffordchallenge.com.
- Willa Schneberg is a poet, ceramic sculptor, and curator. The Naked Room, her latest, and sixth poetry collection, is a true synthesis of her life as a psychotherapist, and as a poet. Among her honors are the Oregon Book Award in Poetry, residencies in Kathmandu, Yaddo, MacDowell, Essere, Tuscany (2026), publication in American Poetry Review, Salmagundi, and poems on the Writer’s Almanac. This is the twenty-sixth year she has curated “Oregon Jewish Voices.” Presently, she and Jim Lommasson are working on a Poetry/Photography project with elder poets entitled “What We Hold & Leave Behind.”