Peter Quinn

Born in Astoria, Oregon, of a seafaring family, Peter Quinn is a graduate of Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. He studied with poets Vern Rutsala, Tony Ostroff, and William Stafford. His relationship with Stafford began when Peter was sixteen and crashed Stafford’s class at Clatsop Community College in Astoria. His sixteen straight terms of poetry writing with Vern is a Lewis and Clark record.

In 1976, he and John Willson shared an Academy of American Poets Award. For several years following, John and Peter convened a poetry group called Moonphases in Portland.

In 2008, Peter and his wife, author Anna Quinn, founded Writers’ Workshoppe and took the helm of Imprint Books in Port Townsend, Washington. They sold it in 2019 to focus solely on their writing.

Prior to a thread I didn’t know I was hanging by, Peter published Painting Circles on Straight Highways (Irenicon Press, 2012) and small things (Turning Point Press, 2023). He has published in Salish Sea Magazine, Mississippi Mud, Foxfire, the Portland Oregonian, Pacific Northwest Magazine, Tidepools, Northwind Anthology, and the Port Townsend Leader.

His work also appears in A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford (Woodley Press) and Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19 (Central Avenue Press), a winner of the 2020 Washington State Book Award.

Peter hopes his first novel, Lady, Lucifer and Coward, a story set during World War I and the influenza pandemic, perhaps the most important decades in history, will find a willing publisher in 2026.