Wade Nkrumah of the Oregonian reports that Viola M. Gale, a poet and owner of Prescott Street Press, has died at age 90. A funeral will be 11 a.m. tomorrow in Gateway Little Chapel of the Chimes. Remembrances to the Clatskanie Library District.

Gale, known as Vi, founded the publishing company in 1974. She was active in the business until her health began failing about three years ago. She died Saturday, March 31, 2007.

In 1989, she was honored with the C.E.S. Wood Retrospective Award by the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts, now Literary Arts Inc.

John Laursen, owner of Press-22 Book Design and Production in Southeast Portland, said Gale approached her work as "a labor of love."

"She cared about poetry, and she cared about the writers she was publishing," Laursen said. "She really wanted to bring their work to a wider audience."

Viola Hokenson was born Feb. 24, 1917, in Dalarna, Sweden. At age 6, she moved with her family to the Clatskanie area. Gale graduated from Clatskanie High School and took college extension courses.

She moved to Portland in 1938 and in 1942 married James C. Gale. She began writing and publishing poetry in the 1950s. Gale also taught creative writing at community colleges and for 10 years at the Young Women's Christian Association.

"She was diligent about nurturing other writers. That's the reason she was a publisher," Laursen said.

"She was making a kind of connection between poetry and art and supporting poetry and the arts and doing it in a really selfless way. Any kind of small press books are really difficult to have make money. . . . For people who are publishing small presses, publishing books of poetry, it's a much more challenging thing."

Gale is survived by her husband.

Read the rest of Nkrumah's piece here.

Source: Oregonian

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