About

This is the minimal web presence for Oregon-based writer Brett Campbell. I write frequently about music and other arts for Oregon ArtsWatch, The Wall Street Journal, Oregon Quarterly, Willamette Week, San Francisco Classical Voice, and Eugene Weekly..

My work has also appeared in dozens of other publications, including The Oregonian, Portland Monthly, Salon, Oregon Humanities, Musical America, The Grove Dictionary of American Music, The Progressive, Humanities, The Texas Observer, Utne Reader, and many more.

I teach journalism in the English department at Portland State University, and I’ve taught magazine writing and editing at the University of Oregon School of Journalism & Communication, where I also served several years as faculty adviser to the award-winning student magazine, Flux. I’ve been an editor at two fine magazines, Oregon Quarterly and The Texas Observer, and am a co-founder and contributing editor to Oregon ArtsWatch. I also do freelance story editing, copy editing, and proofreading.

Photo: Megan Nanna.

I’ve cut my freelance magazine writing back in recent years in order to concentrate on teaching and research on a new biography co-authored with Bill Alves that chronicles the colorful, creative life of the great American composer, Lou Harrison, published by Indiana University Press in 2017. And I play and sing Javanese classical music in Venerable Showers of Beauty gamelan, based at Portland’s Lewis & Clark College.

I’m honored to have been chosen to participate in the 2007 USC Annenberg / Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship Program in Los Angeles, the 2005 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Arts Journalism Institute in Classical Music and Opera at Columbia University in New York City, the 2010 EU/Northwest Journalist Fellowship from the University of Washington, and the 2016 Eugene O’Neill National Critics Institute.

Email me at brettwriter at gmail dot com.

Cherish, conserve, consider, create. — Lou Harrison