Portland has earned four consecutive national gold medals as the finest small-circulation university magazine in the United States, and won the 2005 Sibley Award from Newsweek magazine as the finest university magazine, bar none.

      "A great magazine, the finest spiritual magazine in the United States," Annie Dillard has said of it, without prompting or remuneration (yet) by the editor.

      Fiiiiine woman, Annie Dillard.

      God is Love, an anthology of the best spiritual essays and poems from Portland Magazine, was published in 2003 by Augsburg Fortress Press in Minnesota.

Brian Doyle is the author of six books:

• The Wet Engine (Paraclete Press, 2005), "a headlong heartfelt chant and song and expedition to the seat of the soul, the pumping station of the body, the power house, headquarters, headwater, fuse-box, crossroads, the crucial battery, the mysterious extraordinary moist relentless fragile holy human heart; and notes on how it works and doesn't work, and what it means, and how we use it so easily and casually as a metaphor for the extraordinary loves and pains that course through us like muscular rivers; and explorations of doctors and nurses and surgeries and the hearts of hummingbirds and whales and worms; and agony and atresia and courage and cardiology and blood and pulse and ebb and flow and prayer and people and the pain and poetry of the chambered muscle that drives us humming and weeping and hopeless and hopeful through the intricate countries of our days."
   
• Spirited Men (Cowley Publications, 2004), a collection of eleven long essays about literary and musical storytellers from William Blake to Robert Louis Stevenson to Van Morrison;
   
• Leaping: Revelations & Epiphanies (Loyola Press, 2003), a collection of essays in what Cynthia Ozick calls "the jubilantly idiosyncratic and laughing language of love";
   
• Saints Passionate & Peculiar (St. Mary's Press, 2002), a collection of "brief excitable headlong essays" for teenagers about saints;
   
• Credo, a collection of essays about believing in many things (Saint Mary's Press, 1999); and
   
• Two Voices (with his father, Jim Doyle), a collection of their essays (Liguori Publications, 1996).

Spirited Men is a finalist for the 2005 Oregon Book award in creative nonfiction, Leaping was a finalist for the 2004 Oregon Book award in creative nonfiction, Two Voices won a Christopher Award and a Catholic Press Association Book Award, and Credo was listed, by Joyce Carol Oates, as one of the "notable books of the twentieth century," which is rather a startling phrase.

      Fiiine woman, Joyce Carol Oates.

Doyle's next book will be printed in the spring of 2006 by Oregon State University Press: The Grail: a year ambling & shambling through an Oregon vineyard in pursuit of the best pinot noir in the whole wild world, about, well, a year in the life of Lange Winery in Dundee, Oregon. An entertaining book, with a subtitle that clearly is a candidate for the Longest Subtitle Ever Award.

Doyle's essays and poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The American Scholar, Orion, Commonweal, and The Georgia Review, among other magazines and journals, and in The Times of London, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Kansas City Star, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Ottawa Citizen, and Newsday, among other newspapers. He is a book reviewer for The Oregonian and a contributing essayist to both Eureka Street magazine and The Age newspaper in Melbourne, Australia.
 
Doyle's essays have also been reprinted in:

• the Best American Essays anthologies of 1998, 1999, 2003, and 2005;
• in Best Spiritual Writing 1999, 2001, 2002, and 2005; and
• in Best Essays Northwest (2003);
• and in a dozen other anthologies and writing textbooks.

As for awards and honors, he has three startling children, an incomprehensible and fascinating marriage, and he was named to the 1983 Newton (Massachusetts) Men's Basketball League all-star team, and that was a really tough league.

Doyle has delivered many dozens of peculiar and muttered speeches and lectures and rants about writing and stuttering grace at a variety of venues, among them Australian Catholic University and Xavier College (both in Melbourne, Australia), Aquinas Academy (in Sydney, Australia); Washington State, Seattle Pacific, Oregon, Utah State, Concordia, and Marylhurst universities; Boston, Lewis & Clark, and Linfield colleges; the universities of Utah, Oregon, Pittsburgh, and Portland; KBOO radio (Portland), ABC and 3AW radio (Australia); the College Theology Society; National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation," and in the PBS film Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero (2002).

Doyle is a native of New York, was fitfully educated at the University of Notre Dame, and has been a magazine and newspaper journalist in Portland, Boston, and Chicago for more than twenty years. He and his family live in Portland, Oregon.