Building 45

Literary/Arts Journal

Faculty Advisors

Justus Ballard

Justus Ballard

Justus Ballard is the Managing Editor of Building 45. He teaches composition, screenwriting, fiction writing, and film at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon. In 2004, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University; later that year, he received the Friends of Lake Oswego Library William Stafford Fellowship from Oregon's Literary Arts for a novel in progress that will forever remain in progress. His long short story "The Cubist Infant" was published in March 2005 by Cloverfield Press. He was the fiction editor of the Portland-based GLBTQA literary magazine Gertrude from 2005-2010. Here you see him pictured at home with his wife and their two cats.

Jeremy Trabue

Jeremy Trabue

Jeremy Trabue teaches creative writing, and intro to poetry—and occasionally classes on the Beats and The Lord of the Rings—at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon. He took an MA in English and an MA in Psychology from the University of West Georgia in 1999 and 2000, respectively, and was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Moldova, the saddest country in the world, from 2000-2002. He continues to write his own poetry in between grading papers and changing diapers, despite the indifference of the other poetry editors of the world, and is at work on his third book-length collection.

Jan VanStavern

Jan VanStavern teaches creative writing, composition, and literature at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon. She has also served as the coordinater for the Chemeketa Writes guest author program and Soapbox Poetry Reading series. Her MA and PhD in English are from University of California at Davis, and she was Chair of English at Dominican University of California from 2001-2006 before moving to Portland to write in the rain. Her writing and teaching experiences include being paid to impersonate a fictional nun, being nominated for a Seventeen Magazine Prize for teaching Chinese Poetry in translation, and winning the "who is the best liar" contest her first year at Chemeketa at a faculty retreat. Her published work includes Richard Ronan (1996), a poetic biography, The Long Birth (2009), a poetic memoir of Chinese adoption, and works and interviews in: Poets On Adoption, Runes: A Poetry Journal, The Pen Poetry Center Poetry Relay and elsewhere. She lives in Portland with her family and loves yoga more than weeding the garden. Okay, loves *everything* more than weeding the garden.

Michele Dishong McCormack

Michele Dishong McCormack teaches communication courses and serves as chair of the Communication and Performing Arts Program. She is the faculty adviser for Penned Thoughts, a student writers’ group inside the Oregon State Penitentiary that has published one collection of work and is working on a second. She is working on a chapbook of poems and a collection of essays.

Tammy Jabin

Teaches Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction