The Street Books Team
Staff • Board Members • Emeritus
Staff
Austin Allstadt
Office Manager/Bookkeeper
Austin is the office manager and bookkeeper at Street Books. They also serve as a representative payee at Multnomah County where they get to help vulnerable individuals manage their money and navigate financial systems. In their spare time Austin plays soccer and cuddles their cat, Sticky Rice.
austin@streetbooks.org
Monica Beemer
Co-Director
Monica Beemer, MSW, was Executive Director of Sisters of the Road, a nonprofit cafe and community for people experiencing houselessness in Portland, Oregon from 2001 to 2013. She served as Station Co-Manager of KBOO Community Radio from 2014-2017 with community leader and cultural educator, Mic Crenshaw. She joined the Street Books team in February, 2022 as an Interim Coordinator to help with development and staff expansion. She also serves on the board of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, where she has helped in a variety of roles for over 10 years. During COVID she built 45, 30-gallon handwashing stations and organized an army of good people to maintain them with delicious soap, water and goodwill. She is from both rural (Newport) and urban (Portland) Oregon and is passionate about community organizing and individual and systems change for the good of all. monica@streetbooks.org
morgan grant
Street Librarian
morgan is a student and facilitator with a deep love for books, plants, community, jazz, and most recently, birdwatching. She is devoted to the lifelong journey of co-creating a world rooted in dignity & care for all.
Jon Hallman
Street Librarian
Jon Hallman has been a lover of books since his first stack of comics he got when he was seven. When not working with Street Books, he sells groceries and he also writes and creates zines and independent comics and is a member of Helioscope Studios in PDX. If you see him out and about, please tell him what you're reading right now.
Josh Pollock
Co-Director
Josh is a poet and a malcontent. He translated José Vicente Anaya’s Híkuri (Peyote), (The Operating System, 2020) and Salvador Elizondo’s The Secret Crypt (Dalkey Archive, 2022). His poems have been in jubilat, Diagram, FE, and other magazines. He lives with his partner and two kids in Portland, OR, where he likes to take walks and talk to people about books and psychedelic plants.
joshua@streetbooks.org
Rob G
Street Librarian
Rob G is a PDX local and longtime lover of books, adventure, and possibilities. They are interested in mutual aid, minimalism, and maximizing human freedom and agency, especially for those who are most vulnerable.
Kerry Robison
Street Librarian
Kerry Robison came to Portland in 2009. She loves to read and lives in N. Portland with her husband and their dog Charlie. She spent many years on the streets of Portland until moving in to permanent housing last year. You can find her running a Street Books library shift on Fridays at The People's Depot under the Morrison bridge with her book wagon, a smile, and usually a story or two!
Diana Rempe
Community Outreach Director & Librarian
Diana never met a person she didn’t want to talk with. A Texan by birth, a community psychologist by training and a street librarian by choice, she spends most of her time with her family, riding her bike, walking her dog, and reading poetry, fiction, and memoir. Diana believes everyone deserves a safe, stable place to live and is absolutely convinced that in a country and city with so much wealth, this is entirely possible.
diana@streetbooks.org
Squier Squier
Street Librarian
Squier is an artist, non-musician, Clinical Hypnotist and community advocate. They live in Portland with their best friend/little brother and their two dogs, Nino and Baby Kira. They are deeply devoted to their neighborhood birds and growing medicine for friends and family. Squier is a harm reduction first human and believes that kindness and care can change the world.
Board Members
Leah Benson
Board Member
Leah Benson (she/her) was born and raised in rural Wisconsin, but has called Portland home for the past fifteen years. In her professional life, she runs a small consulting practice providing nonprofit and small business strategy, organizational development, and facilitation services. In previous lives she's been the founder and owner of a local bike shop (Gladys Bikes in NE Portland), a community organizer for Oregon Tradeswomen, a volunteer coordinator at IRCO, an event planner, and a HIV counselor. Interwoven with her paid and volunteer work, you can find Leah watching 35mm films at the Hollywood Theater, birding at Whitaker Ponds, riding her bike to the top of every peak in the city limits, and coaching and performing at community storytelling events.
Ed Edmo
Board Member
Ed Edmo is a Shoshone-Bannock poet, playwright, performer, traditional storyteller, tour guide and lecturer on Northwest tribal culture. He offers guided tours to the She Who Watches petroglyphs on the Columbia Gorge, as well as to the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in central Oregon’s high desert country. He conducts workshops, traditional storytelling performances, dramatic monologues, and lectures on such issues as cultural understanding and awareness, drug and alcohol abuse, and mental health. He enjoys working with both children and adults in educational and other settings. He serves as a consultant to the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Carol, his son, John, and his daughter, Se-ah-dum and her daughter.
Ben Hodgson
Board Member, Inventory Specialist
Ben Hodgson, (he/him), was a computer technician in the air force and worked as a cab driver for many years. He is the co-author with Laura Moulton of Loaners: The Making of a Street Library. He is currently a board member of Street Books and has worked as a street librarian, speaker and inventory specialist.
Betsy Holzgraf
Board Secretary
Betsy Holzgraf, Board Secretary (she/her), is a retired elementary school librarian and classroom teacher who has more interests than she has time. Outdoors she skis, rides her bike, golfs, hikes and takes urban walks around Portland. Indoors she enjoys various crafts, especially quilting and making greeting cards from photos, and of course, she is never without a book. A lifelong book lover, she has books in every room of her house. Betsy has lived in Buffalo, NY, the Portland area, Corvallis, Lake Tahoe and San Diego and back to the Portland area where she and her husband raised their two sons and have been in their house for 36 years.
Michelle Lin
Board Treasurer
Michelle Lin (they/she) is a queer child of immigrants who grew up in the deep south. Their embodiment of these identities, their intersections, and all their complexities inspires them to cultivate intentional community, facilitate healing spaces, and move towards collective liberation. Michelle guides outdoor trips for Wild Diversity and works at the Oregon Food Bank to support statewide partners to address the root causes of hunger.
Pati Morán
Board Member
Pati Morán (she/ella) is a longtime Street Books board member and Spanish bilingual Librarian serving humans ages 0- 100 since 2011. She has worked with public libraries in Oxnard, Oakland, Hillsboro, and currently with Multnomah County Library. Prior to joining Street Books, Pati lived by Peter Golkin's quote: “My two favorite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything. The perfect day: riding a bike to the library." Street Books showed her that by merging the two a bicycle library can lift up an entire community.
Robin Schauffler
Board President
Robin Schauffler, Board Chair (she/her), is a writer, retired teacher, watercolor artist, hiker/camper/ backpacker, avid reader—and when there isn’t a global pandemic, a lover of travel. She has written extensively about the three years she and her husband Peter lived and worked in Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico. You can read some of her stuff in Cargo Literary, Hawaii Pacific Review, Whistling Shade, The Fourth River, and Street Roots, among other places. She remembers first serving a meal at Blanchet House in about 1963, and has spent the past few decades connecting high school and middle school students with social service work, especially in issues of housing justice and outdoor stewardship.
robin@streetbooks.org
Paul Susi
Board Member
Paul Susi (he/him) is a writer, an educator, a social services professional, a theater artist and a community activist. Paul served as a Shelter Manager for Transition Projects, leading 6 different emergency homeless shelter programs in 5 years. As an actor, Paul toured an adaptation of The Iliad to 25+ prisons, schools, community centers and theaters. His writing has appeared in the Oregon Humanities Magazine and The Sunny Pages. He currently facilitates a mutual aid network replacing lost ID documents, and a volunteer prison pen pal program. He is the proud son of immigrants, a person of color, and he never went to college. He is proud and honored to serve on the Street Books Board of Directors.
Karen Russell
Board Member
Karen Russell is the author of three story collections, the novella Sleep Donation, and the novel, Swamplandia! She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim
Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, and a Shirley Jackson Award. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in SE Portland with her husband, son and daughter, and Gerald Bubbles, an enigmatic sky-blue beta fish. They are all huge readers (except for Gerald) and proud members of the Street Books family. Loaners is one of Russell's all-time favorite books.
Street Books Emeritus
Laura Moulton
Founder, Executive Director & Street Librarian 2011-2025
Laura is a writer and artist living in Portland, Oregon. She founded Street Books in 2011, and co-author of the book Loaners: The Making of a Street Library, with Ben Hodgson. She has taught writing in public schools, prisons, and teen shelters. She is an adjunct professor at Lewis & Clark College, and leads writing and art residencies in Portland high schools for Literary Arts.
Street Books Supporters
