Team Lilla

Coordinators & Hosts

Virginia Bellis Brandabur

Virginia is a novelist and editor of fiction. She holds an MFA from University of Boulder, Colorado. Her work won The Center of the American West prize for Best Fiction 2003, and can be read in Square One and Mason’s Road. Her current writing project is a literary novel set in historic Wyoming.

Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet

Lisa is the author of The Greenhouse (Frost Place Chapbook Prize) and Tulips, Water, Ash (Morse Poetry Prize). She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, where she was a Javits Fellow. Her poems have appeared in journals including Plume, Zyzzyva, The Collagist, Blackbird, and Kenyon Review. She lives in Portland, where she’s working on her third manuscript, Annihilation.

Team Lilla Volunteers

Amy Jo Woodruff (book wrangler, cookie goddess) oversees author book sales and keeps everything running smoothly at Lilla events. An editor, writer, curator, storyteller, cracker of whips, and lover of all things print, she holds a BS from Lewis & Clark College and an MA from Portland State University. Amy lives on Portland’s Mt. Tabor with her son.

Matt Brandabur (audio, bar, raconteur) is a musician, writer, and change management specialist. He holds an MA in poetry from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Miriam Zellnik (front desk, mystery maven) is the author of the Libby Seale mysteries Murder at the Portland Variety and A Death at the Rose Paperworks. Her fiction and essays have been published in Portland Monthly, BUST, Marie Claire, and other magazines and journals. She lives in Portland, and is currently at work on a novel based on the life of Yukon showgirl Klondike Kate.

Leach Botanical Garden

Team Lilla could not function without the generous support we receive from the Leach Botanical Garden, and its staff and volunteers.