The Archive Project

We’re back at the 2025 Portland Book Festival this week, with poets m. mick powell and Taylor Byas, and moderater Jae Nichelle.   Taylor Byas’s second collection, Resting Bitch Face, uses watching and surveillance to explore Black female subjectivity. Byas engages with multiple art forms — painting, film, sculpture, and photographs – to explore the perspectives of artist and muse, of watcher and watched.   Taylor is in conversation with m. mick powell, whose debut poetry collection Dead Girl Cameo: A Love Stroy in Poems features of chorus of pop stars – Aaliyah, Whitney Houston, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, and more – in an exploration of grief, sexuality, and celebrity. Powell refers to the collection as a documentary, and it includes imagery, speculative verse, and more.   Poet Jae Nichelle leads a conversation that starts from the prompt “pop culture poetry.” Engaging with pop culture, as these collections do, is an act of engaging with the cultural moment. Done well, it doesn’t “date” the work, but creates a time capsule – a documentary. Both collections are deeply researched, and Taylor and mick discuss their relationships to art, scholarship, and commerce, and the interplay between those different aspects of publishing this particular collections.    In the conversation, first we’ll hear m. mick powell read the title poem of their debut collection, Dead Girl Cameo, followed by a reading by Taylor Byas of the title poem of Resting Bitch Face and then a conversation between mick, Taylor, and the moderator, Jae.   A heads up – there’s some mature language that may not be appropriate for all listeners, and you’ll hear some bleeps in the opening poem.    Taylor Byas is an award-winning poet and a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her poetry collection I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times won the Maya Angelou Book Award, the Ohioana Book Award, the CHIRBy Award, and the BCALA Best Poetry Honor. m mick powell is a queer Black Cabo Verdean femme, poet, artist, Aries, and the author of DEAD GIRL CAMEO (One World Books, 2025) and threesome in the last Toyota Celica & other circus tricks, winner of the 2023 Host Publications Chapbook Prize. An assistant professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut, mick enjoys chasing waterfalls and being in love.  Louisiana-born Jae Nichelle (she/her) is the author of God Themselves (Andrews McMeel, 2023) and the chapbook The Porch (As Sanctuary) (YesYes Books, 2019). She was a finalist for a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and won the inaugural John Lewis Writing Award in poetry from the Georgia Writers Association. Her poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2020 (University of Virginia Press, 2020), the Washington Square Review, The Offing, Muzzle Magazine, and elsewhere. She believes in all of our collective ability to contribute to radical change. 

In this episode, we feature the beloved Irish novelist Emma Donoghue, in conversation with OPB’s Crystal Ligori, from the 2025 Portland Book Festival.  Emma Donoghue has extraordinary range, writing for the screen, and the stage, as well as authoring many acclaimed novels. Her international bestseller Room was a New York Times Best Book of 2010 and a finalist for the Man Booker, Commonwealth, and Orange Prizes, and it is what brought her fame and readers all over the world.   She joined us on stage to discuss The Paris Express, a novel based on an 1895 disaster at the Paris Montparnasse train station that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs.  It’s a propulsive novel set on a train packed with a fascinating cast of characters who hail from as close as Brittany and as far as Russia, Ireland, Algeria, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia. Members of parliament hurry back to Paris to vote; a medical student suspects a girl may be dying; a secretary tries to convince her boss of the potential of moving pictures; two of the train’s crew build a life away from their wives; a young anarchist makes a terrifying plan, and much more.   Emma Donoghue is the author of sixteen novels, including the award-winning national bestseller Room, the basis for the acclaimed film of the same name. Her latest novel is The Paris Express. She has also written the screenplays for Room and The Wonder and nine stage plays. Her next film (adapted with Philippa Lowthorpe from Helen Macdonald’s memoir) is H Is for Hawk. Born in Dublin, she lives in Ontario with her family.  As one of the local hosts of OPB’s “All Things Considered”, Crystal Ligori seeks out unique stories from diverse communities, often focusing on food systems, pop culture, and LGBTQ+ communities. She also narrates OPB’s Emmy-award winning documentary food series “Superabundant” and was the longtime producer/editor for Literary Arts’ weekly radio program and podcast “Literary Arts: The Archive Project”. Before joining OPB, Crystal was a host at KUFO in Portland, OR, KZZU in Spokane, WA and KBGA in Missoula, MT. Her work has been heard nationally on NPR Newscasts, APM’s “Marketplace”, PRX’s “Living on Earth,” and NPR’s “All Things Considered”.  An alumna of the School of Journalism at the University of Montana, she has three SPJ awards for television feature reporting and LGBTQ+ Equity Reporting in audio, a Hearst Journalism Award for broadcast news radio features, and shares three regional Emmy awards for her work on Superabundant. 

In this episode, we feature two of Oregon’s most accomplished writers, Omar El Akkad and Karen Russell from a conversation that took place at the 2025 Portland Book Festival.  They were joined onstage by Willamette Week‘s arts and culture editor Rachel Saslow for a conversation about the ongoing American reckoning of its violent past and present. Russell’s novel The Antidote is set in the Great Depression Dust Bowl in a fictional town in Nebraska and examines the history of the American colonialism and the violence it enacted.  It is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities At the center of El Akkad’s book One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This is the present-day destruction and violence in Palestine, and the realization how much of the West’s moral promises are lies. The book is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage. At the time of the live event, both El Akkad and Russell were finalists for the National Book Awards in nonfiction and fiction respectively. El Akkad would go on to be given the award for nonfiction just a few weeks later, joining just a small handful of Oregonians ever to receive a national Book Award — including Ursula K Le Guin, William Stafford, Barry Lopez and Mary Szybist. A note to the listener this episode contains mature themes and discussions of violence that may not be suitable for all listeners. The Archive Project airs audio from live conversations and events, edited for length and clarity to better serve a listening audience. An earlier version of this episode omitted a portion of the conversation, as well as the audience Q&A. An extended edition is now available. Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager, and now lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Oregon Book Award for fiction. His books have been translated into thirteen languages. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of one hundred novels that shaped our world. His latest book is titled One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Karen Russell is the author of six works of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, and was selected for the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” prize and The New Yorker‘s “20 under 40” list (She is now decisively over 40). She has taught literature and creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of California-Irvine, Williams College, Columbia University, and Bryn Mawr College, and was the Endowed Chair of Texas State’s MFA program. She serves on the board of Street Books, a mobile-library for people living outdoors. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, son, and daughter. Russell’s new book is titled The Antidote. Rachel Saslow is the arts and culture reporter at Willamette Week. She began her journalism career at the Washington City Paper in Washington, D.C., followed by a staff writer position at the Washington Post, where she wrote the Arts Beat column for the Style section. She now lives in her hometown of Portland, Ore., with her husband and their three children.

On this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Barbara Kingsolver in conversation with Jess Walter. Barbara Kingsovler is the author of seventeen books, including nonfiction, short stories, poetry, and novels. Her novels include modern classics like The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna. Kingsolver is known for socially engaged writing that embraces the psychological and emotional. As she has said, “A good book should be trouble and delight the reader.” And few do that as well as Kingsolver. Her latest novel is Demon Copperhead, set in rural Appalachia, where Kingsolver was raised and lives today. In the book, she remaps Charles Dickens’ Victorian classic David Copperfield onto her real-life community, to illuminate the poverty, broken social and education systems, the influence of industrial agriculture, and the targeting of Appalachians by Big Pharma, and the consequent pervasive and destructive opioid epidemic. Like Dickens, she tells the story of a resilient kid caught in the crosshairs. The novel is, in the words of The Times UK, “Like Dickens directed by the Coen brothers.” Indeed, despite the subject matter, this novel is a delight to read from the first line, thanks to Kingsolver’s inventiveness and Demon’s distinctive voice. Many critics praise it as her best book yet. Barbara Kingsolver is the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, The Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, and The Bean Trees, as well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. Her work of narrative nonfiction is the influential bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts, as well as the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia. Jess Walter is the author of six novels, including the bestsellers Beautiful Ruins and The Financial Lives of the Poets, the National Book Award finalist The Zero, and Citizen Vince, the winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a discussion on late writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s legacy of pacifism and environmentalism. Our moderator is Theo Downes-Le Guin, Ursula’s son and literary executor. Theo is in conversation with Oregon-based writers Juhea Kim, author of the novel Beasts of a Little Land, a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Michelle Ruiz Keil, author most recently of the young adult novel Summer in the City of Roses, which was a finalist for the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. In her speech at the 2014 National Book Awards, accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Ursula said: “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.” Juhea Kim and Michelle Ruiz Keil are two of those voices that we need now. In this conversation, Juhea and Michelle discuss how they came—and returned—to Le Guin’s work, her influence on their writing, and how they are carrying her legacy forward, including the responsibility of the artist as a humanitarian. This conversation was recorded in front of a live audience at Literary Arts on July 15, 2022. “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin Find your copy of these books through the Literary Arts Bookstore. Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was a celebrated author whose body of work includes 23 novels, 12 volumes of short stories, 11 volumes of poetry, 13 children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and SFWA’s Grand Master, along with the PEN/Malamud and many other awards. In 2014 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016 joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America. Michelle Ruiz Keil is an author, playwright, and tarot reader with an eye for the enchanted and way with animals. She is the author of the critically acclaimed young adult novels All of Us With Wings and Summer In The City of Roses. Her writing for adults can be found most recently in Bitch, Cosmonauts Avenue, and the anthology Dispatches From Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin. She is a 2021 Tin House Scholar and the recipient of residencies from Hedgebrook, The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and the Bloedel Reserve. Born in San Francisco, Michelle has lived in Portland, Oregon for many years where she curates the fairytale reading series All Kinds of Fur and lives with her family in a cottage where the forest meets the city. Juhea Kim is a writer, artist, and advocate based in Portland, Oregon. Her bestselling debut novel Beasts of a Little Land was named a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a Best Book of 2021 by Harper’s Bazaar, Real Simple, Ms., and Portland Monthly. Her writing has been published in Granta, Slice, The Massachusetts Review, Zyzzyva, Guernica, Catapult, Times Literary Supplement, The Independent, Sierra Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the founder and editor ofPeaceful Dumpling, an online magazine at the intersection of sustainable lifestyle and ecological literature. She has received fellowship support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Regional Arts & Culture Council, and Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She earned her BA in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University.

Join us in our third installment of this special episode where we spend the day at the 2025 Portland Book Festival. Saturday, November 8, in downtown Portland. Our Virgil is once again editor and producer Matthew Workman, who is taking a turn at the microphone as he searches for festival authors to get their book recommendations. It’s an exclusive, rare! Behind-the-scenes look at the festival, plus a great source for your to-read list and hopefully some gifting inspiration for the readers in your own life. We once again asked some of our featured festival authors to recommend books by other authors in the festival. We have a bit of a National Book Awards theme happening here too: We will hear recommendations from: Patricia Smith, author of The Intentions of Thunder, winner of the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry Jason De Leon, author of Soliders and Kings, winner of the 2024 National Book Award in Nonfiction Karren Russell, author of The Antidote, finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Fiction Megha Majumdar, author of A Guardian and a Thief, finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Fiction Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, winner of the 2025 National Book Award in Nonfiction Renée Watson, author of All the Blue in the Sky Ruth Dickey, poet and executive director of the National Book Foundation Kristen Arnett, novelist and author of Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One A quick note to listeners: Portions of this episode contain mature themes that may not be suitable for all audiences.

This episode of The Archive Project features a lecture from Tommy Orange in Portland, Oregon. This lecture was the culminating event of the Multnomah County Library’s 2020 Everybody Reads program—an annual shared reading experience that includes city-wide events for readers of all ages. In his lecture, Orange details his experience as a Native American growing up and working in Oakland, California. He didn’t always want to be a writer, and he shares the twisting path that led him to this work. His debut novel, There There, is a winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and named one of the best books of the year by numerous publications. There There—and Orange himself in this lecture—explores a multitude of themes, from identity and ownership to the urban-rural divide. Link to “Ghost Dance” short film referenced in Orange’s lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5plHAdBums Tommy Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, California.

This episode of The Archive Project features author Salman Rushdie reading from and discussing his 1999 New York Times bestseller The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Just one year after almost a decade in hiding from the Iranian government, Rushdie made his first public appearance in Portland, discussing the ideas, both mythical and musical, that inspired this New York Times bestseller. In his remaking of the myth of Orpheus, Rushdie tells the story of Vina Apsara, a pop star, and Ormus Cama, an extraordinary songwriter and musician, who captivate and change the world through their music and their romance. Beginning in Bombay in the fifties, moving to London in the sixties, and New York for the last quarter century, the novel pulsates with a half-century of music and celebrates the power of rock ‘n’ roll. In this episode, Rushdie discusses the musical and mythological influences that inspired this ambitious work of magical realism. “The thing that I wanted to do most of all was to write a love story. And to find a way of writing a contemporary love story that was neither gushily sentimental nor fashionably cynical, but which could face up to great passion and try and make sense of it. And so, in my usual perverse way, while trying to write a modern story I found myself thinking about an ancient myth.” Salman Rushdie is the author of several novels, including Grimus, Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, and Shalimar the Clown. He has written collections of short stories, including East, West, and co-edited with Elizabeth West a collection of Indian literature in English, Mirrorwork. He has also published several works of nonfiction, among them The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz, and Joseph Anton, a memoir of his life under the fatwa issued after the publication of The Satanic Verses. His fourteenth novel, Victory City, released in 2023.

Angela Flournoy came to Portland for the 2025 Portland Book Festival, where she discussed her new novel The Wilderness in conversation with Renée Watson, award-winning author of skin & bones. The title of The Wilderness refers to what Flournoy describes as the true “coming of age” — instead of the transition out of adolescence, the decades from one’s twenties onward. The book revolves around four friends as they navigate those years, when you confront who you thought you might be as an adult, and what is actually happening in your life: your friendships, romances, success, grief, career, and so much more. The “found family” of long, deep friendship is the center of the book, and Flournoy and Watson discuss the constant choosing that creates and sustains a found family, the ongoing making and remaking that happens over decades of friendship. Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, an Indie Next pick, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Flournoy has taught at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, and UCLA. She lives in New York. Flournoy’s latest novel is titled The Wilderness. Renée Watson is a #1 New York Times bestselling author. Over the past decade she has authored twenty books for young readers including Black Girl You Are Atlas and Cicely Tyson, which have collectively sold more than a million copies. She received a Coretta Scott King Award and a Newbery Honor for her novel Piecing Me Together and high praise for 1619 Project: Born on the Water, co-written with Nikole Hannah-Jones. Her debut adult novel, skin & bones, was published May 7th, 2024. Watson is on the Council of Writers for the National Writing Project and is a member of the Academy of American Poets’ Education Advisory Council. She splits her time between Portland, Oregon and New York City. Her latest middle grade title is All the Blues in the Sky.

This week we are bringing you a conversation that Literary Arts hosted in October 2025 with historian and political philosopher Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, who spoke about his book On Freedom with Literary Arts executive director – and co-host of this show – Andrew Proctor. Timothy Snyder is the author of several books including Bloodlands and The Road To Freedom, as well as numerous articles and a popular Substack. He is a scholar of Eastern European history who Anne Applebaum has called, “one of our most original and perceptive thinkers.” He currently serves Chair in Modern European History at University of Toronto. He has won both the Carnegie and the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Literature Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding and the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.  He speaks five languages and reads in ten, once telling a reporter, “If you don’t know Russian, you don’t really know what you’re missing.” The Guardian called him, “one of the most eloquent interpreters of the war in Ukraine.” He served as an advisor to UN Security Council, and has met privately with Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In the wake of the 2016 election, what began as a list of thoughts on an airplane napkin became On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century. The book spent two years on the bestseller list and catapulted Snyder from respected historian to one of the most prominent voices in fight against authoritarianism. The lessons of On Tyrrany were widely shared, inspiring multiple poster campaigns and at least one rap song. With On Freedom, Snyder once again places the past in direct conversation with the present and the future. Freedom, for Snyder, is not external thing we may or may not achieve, but an ongoing, embodied struggle. With immediacy and striking humility, he draws lessons from history, not simply to predict future risk, but to claim agency in the present, to see clearly our potential as individuals, as a country and as a species. Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His books, which have been published in over forty languages, include Bloodlands, Black Earth, On Tyranny, Road to Unfreedom, Our Malady, and On Freedom. His work has inspired poster campaigns and exhibitions, sculptures, a punk rock song, a rap song, a play, and an opera, and he has appeared in over fifty films and documentaries. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut

Every once in a while, a writer arrives in a historic moment who can explain it, even while it is still actually occurring. M. Gessen is one of these writers. They are a part of the lineage of other incredible writers of their moments, like George Orwell, and Hannah Arendt.  Gessen is the author of eleven books and has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2014, and is a columnist for the New York Times. They won the National Book award in 2017 for The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, and became a household name with their bestselling book Surviving Autocracy, which was published in 2020 and written as both a warning and a call to action in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election.  Gessen’s talk is a rare glimpse into their childhood and early professional life – growing up in the Soviet Union and emigrating at the age of 14; their early experience in Boston and how it shaped their life personally and professionally; their return to Moscow as a journalist and a rare and strange meeting with Vladimir Putin, and how their grandmothers’ life stories shaped their work.   Gessen is one of the rare contemporary commentators on authoritarianism who has lived under such a regime, and in a democracy – and they have an urgent warning for us all.  “I’ve always thought that I was very lucky to know when I had to leave (Russia) because one of the hardest decisions that somebody has to make…is figuring out when your home is no longer your home. It was kind of a great favor that Putin did to me.” M. Gessen is a Russian American author, translator, and journalist. They’ve written 11 books, including Surviving Autocracy, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction), and an award-winning account of the Boston Marathon bombers titled The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy. They spent years covering Putin’s regime in Russia and was famously dismissed as the editor of the Russian popular science magazine Vokrug sveta for refusing to cover a Putin event they felt was propaganda. Gessen received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the Hitchens Prize, an Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary, and the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. They’ve written for many US publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker. Gessen is a distinguished professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College. They live in New York with their wife and children.  

In this episode, we feature Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation with Omar El Akkad from the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in October 2024.   Coates’ versatility and virtuosity as a writer makes him one of the most singular and important writers at work today. He first rose to national recognition as a staff writer at The Atlantic Magazine, and in particular for an article he wrote in 2014 titled The Case for Reparations. A year later, Coates published his second book, a long essay called Between the World and Me which became an international bestseller. Coates went on to write a novel called The Water Dancer, for Marvel’s Black Panther comic book series, and a published collection of essays titled We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. For his work he has won a National Magazine Award, a MacArthur fellowship and the National Book Award, among many other prizes.    He joined us in fall 2024 to talk about The Message, a new book of essays set in Senegal, South Carolina and Palestine about how our stories – personal or political – can both hide and reveal the truth.     Coates is in conversation with Omar El Akkad, who is a journalist and author of the novels American War, What Strange Paradise and most recently One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, his debut book of nonfiction which publishes in February 2025.  Ta-Nehisi Coates is an award-winning author and journalist. His books include Between The World and Me and The Water Dancer. He is currently a writer-in-residence at Howard University.  Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award and the Oregon Book Award. His books have been translated into 13 languages. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of 100 novels that shaped our world. 

Emily Wilson was cast as Athena in a stage production of The Odyssey at the age of eight.  It turned out to be a defining moment in her life, that ultimately set her on a course of decades of passionate and devoted study.  Her 2018 translation of The Odyssey garnered overwhelming critical acclaim, became a bestseller, and is defining how a generation reads Homer, and by extension understands the relevance of classical literature in general. She followed up, in 2023, with her translation of The Iliad.     Her genius has been to render these ancient stories in swift, unpretentious, contemporary language, allowing us to see that despite the rise and fall of empires, despite dramatic cultural shifts and technological progress, there are some essential truths about human nature—we are creatures of hubris and humility, of conflict and collaboration, of profound selfishness and of profound sacrifice.    It is not hard to see in Homer’s Greece a startling similarity to our present-day world. Wilson assures us this is embedded in the text, writing in her introduction to The Iliad, “For a twenty-first-century reader, there is nothing unfamiliar about a partisan society riven by constant striving for celebrity dominance and attention.”    “Tell me about a complicated man,” begins The Odyssey.  From this first line, Wilson establishes herself as one of the most astute translators working in the English language, a translator both of Ancient Greek and of human complexity.    “A translation, just like an original work of art, needs to have its own vision. And you need to have the humility to know that you can’t do everything. You have to commit to your own vision.” Emily Wilson is a classicist, translator, professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of the bestselling translations of Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad (winner of the 2024 Audie Award for Best Literary Fiction and Classics). In addition to Wilson’s Odyssey and Iliad, she has also published several other translated works, including translations of four tragedies of Euripides published in The Greek Plays: Bacchae, Helen, Electra, and Trojan Women, and translations of Six Tragedies by Seneca. Her other books include The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca, The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint, and Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton. Wilson was named a fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Wilson is a Professor of classical studies and chair of the program in comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Wilson lives in Philadelphia with her family and pets.  

Every year, the Multnomah County Library chooses one book they hope the whole city of Portland will read. Between January and April, the Library, and their partner organizations, host events based around the themes of the book, and they distribute thousands of free copies—thanks to the Library Foundation—to readers of all ages from across the county. Here at Literary Arts, our role is to bring the author to town for a talk in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.   This year, the 2025 Everybody Reads selection is the memoir Solito by Javier Zamora. For information about how to engage with the program, visit the Multnomah County Library’s web site. I am thrilled to say Javier Zamora will be in Portland on Tuesday, March 11 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall for the culminating event of the 2025 Everybody Reads Program.   For now, let’s return to the 2024 Everybody Reads event, featuring Gabrielle Zevin and her novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.   Gabrielle Zevin has been steadily publishing fiction for almost two decades and has also written occasional criticism as well as award-winning screenplays. But it was Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow that catapulted her to the stratosphere of literary stardom. It was a #1 New York Times bestseller and spent over 50 weeks on the fiction bestseller list.    To be sure, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is about video games, and makes a convincing argument for the power and potential of narrative storytelling in video games. But really, it is about making art, and questions about originality, appropriation, and ambition that come with that pursuit. And perhaps more so, it is a love story, about friends and creative partners, and the excitement, joy, tragedy, and betrayal that come with any long relationship. It’s about something, I’d wager, we’ve all been thinking about the past few years: connection.    Tickets for Everybody Reads 2025 with Javier Zamora are on sale now! Find your tickets here.  Gabrielle Zevin is a New York Times best-selling novelist whose books have been translated into forty languages.   Her tenth novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, was a New York Times Best Seller, a Sunday Times Best Seller, and a selection of the Tonight Show’s Fallon Book Club. Tomorrow was Amazon.com’s #1 Book of the Year, Time Magazine’s #1 Book of the Year, a New York Times Notable Book, and the winner of both the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction and the Book of the Month Club’s Book of the Year. Following a twenty-five-bidder auction, the feature film rights to Tomorrow were acquired by Temple Hill and Paramount Studios.  The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry also spent many months on the New York Times bestseller list. A.J. Fikry was honored with the Southern California Independent Booksellers Award for Fiction, the Japan Booksellers’ Prize, among other honors. A.J. Fikry is now a feature film with a screenplay by Zevin. She has also written children’s books, including the award-winning Elsewhere.   She is the screenwriter of Conversations with Other Women (Helena Bonham Carter) for which she received an Independent Spirit Award Nomination for Best First Screenplay. She has occasionally written criticism for the New York Times Book Review and NPR’s All Things Considered, and she began her writing career, at age fourteen, as a music critic for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. Zevin is a graduate of Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles. 

This week features a conversation from the 2024 Portland Book Festival, featuring best-selling author Ijeoma Oluo, who is a self-described “writer, speaker, and internet yeller.” She discusses her latest book, Be a Revolution: How Everyday People are Fighting and Changing the World — and How You Can, Too with Portland’s Hanif Fazal, author of An Other World and co-founder of the Center for Equity and Inclusion. They engage in a very honest conversation about the impact that “being loud” about race and racism has had on Oluo’s personal life and mental well-being. She shares that thought she wouldn’t write another book because of that strain, but that through centering loving action that she found a new way of doing her writing work with this project. They also discuss the general writing life and process, and the importance, in the often difficult and consuming work of fighting for systemic change, of centering joy as an outcome of activism. Oluo’s book, Be a Revolution, highlights the way people all over the country are working to create real positive change for intersectional racial equity; as Fazal points out, giving new perspectives on big ideas through the stories of real, actual people. Their stories and Oluo’s work are intended to inspire action and change, and this conversation Ijeoma Oluo (ee-joh-mah oh-loo-oh) is a Seattle-based Writer, Speaker and Internet Yeller. Her work on social issues such as race and gender has been published in The Guardian, Esquire, Washington Post, ELLE Magazine, New York Times, NBC News and more. She has been featured on The Daily Show, All Things Considered, BBC News, and more. Her #1 NYT bestselling first book, So You Want To Talk About Race, was released January 2018 with Seal Press. Her second book, MEDIOCRE: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, was published December 2020 with Seal Press and her upcoming book, Be A Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World – and How You Can Too, was January 2024 with Harper One. Oluo was named one of the Most Influential People in Seattle by Seattle Magazine, one of the 50 Most Influential Women in Seattle by Seattle Met, one of The Root’s 100 Most Influential African Americans in 2017 & 2018, and is the recipient of the Feminist Humanist Award 2018 by the American Humanist Association, the Harvard Humanist of the year 2020, the Media Justice Award by the Gender Justice League, and the 2018 Aubrey Davis Visionary Leadership Award by the Equal Opportunity Institute. Hanif Fazal, author of An Other World, has developed and delivered innovative equity and inclusion programs across education, philanthropic, public, and non-profit sectors for over twenty years. He is currently the co-founder of the Center for Equity and Inclusion and is also an author, who writes about the fight for freedom, joy, and belonging in Black and Brown communities. His first book, An Other World, offers a hopeful path forward by nurturing identity and centering community. It’s a path where joy is the norm rather than struggle, where home and work are inclusive rather than exclusionary, and where Brown and Black relationships lead to a unique experience of freedom. Along with local and national news and podcast appearances, Hanif has spoken at South by Southwest, National Equity Summit, a two-time presenter at the CCAR summit on race, and many other equity and education-focused events. He is a National Pew Civic Change award winner, Multnomah County Hilltop award winner, and was awarded the Taste of Portland’s Changemaker award for his prolonged impact on equity and inclusion throughout Portland. Most recently, An Other World was awarded a silver medal at the 36th annual IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards.

Every year, the Multnomah County Library chooses one book they hope the whole city will read. Between January and April, the Library, and their partner organizations, host events based around the themes of the book, and they distribute thousands of free copies—thanks to the Library Foundation—to readers of all ages from across the county.  Here at Literary Arts, our role is to bring the author to town for a talk in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. The 2025 Everybody Reads book was the memoir Solito by Javier Zamora.    Written from the perspective of his nine-year-old self, Solito is a gripping and beautiful account of Zamora’s three-thousand-mile journey from a small village in El Salvador to his new home in United States. Epic in scope and intimate in detail, it’s a book about the family one comes from, the family one longs for, and the family one makes. Zamora conjures all the wonder, fear and imaginative capacity of his young self; clear-eyed in his depictions of cruelty and danger, insistent on recognizing kindness. He also renders his journey with vivid detail with breathtaking lyricism, paying close attention to the power of language – this comes as no surprise, given that Zamora is also an award-winning poet.   The writer Sandra Cisneros said, “I have waited decades for a memoir like Solito.”    Solito isn’t simply a story of a migrant’s harrowing journey, it’s the story of a writer becoming a writer. It is also one of the most important American stories of our time.   “Poetry and history were the first tools I had to begin to explain my life so far away from the land that watched me be born and grow up for the first nine years of my life.” Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador in 1990. When he was a year old, his father fled El Salvador due to the US-funded Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992). His mother followed her husband’s footsteps in 1995 when Javier was about to turn five. Zamora was left at the care of his grandparents who helped raise him until he migrated to the US when he was nine. His first poetry collection, Unaccompanied, explores some of these themes.    In his debut New York Times bestselling memoir, SOLITO, Javier retells his nine-week odyssey across Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually through the Sonoran Desert. He travelled unaccompanied by boat, bus, and foot. After a coyote abandoned his group in Oaxaca, Javier managed to make it to Arizona with the aid of other migrants.   Zamora is the winner of a 2024 Whiting Fellowship and the 2022 LA Times-Christopher Isherwood Prize. He holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University (Olive B. O’Connor), MacDowell, Macondo, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation (Ruth Lilly), Stanford University (Stegner), and Yaddo. He is the recipient of a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University, a 2017 Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2017 Narrative Prize, the 2016 Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award for his work in the Undocupoets Campaign. Javier lives in Tucson, AZ, where he volunteers with Salvavision, The Kino Border Initiative, and The Florence Project.  

A life-long Northwesterner, Egan has spent much of his career exploring his home region. One might even say he is the quintessential Pacific Northwest writer. He served as the first Pacific Northwest correspondent for the New York Times and he also wrote one of the definitive books about our region in 1990, The Good Rain. During his eighteen-year tenure at the New York Times, Egan covered everything from the Exxon Valdez disaster to the OJ Simpson trial. In 2001, he and a team of reporters received a Pulitzer Prize for the series, How Race is Lived in America. Somehow, between reporting trips, he also found time to write multiple award-winning, best-selling books. He won the National Book Award in 2006 for The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those who Survived the Great American Dustbowl, which was a New York Times bestseller and led to a Ken Burns documentary. Egan joined us to talk about his most recent book is A Fever in the Heartland: The Klu Klux’s Plot to Take Over American, and the Woman who Stopped Them.  Once again, Egan turns his attention to an American disaster—this time, a social and political disaster of monstrous moral proportions, tracing the swift rise and eventual collapse of the Klu Klux Klan in 1920’s Indiana. A place and time, he notes, “where one in three white males swore on a Bible to uphold white supremacy.” A Fever in the Heartland is rigorously researched, and deeply — overwhelmingly — troubling. As a reader, it is not hard to draw parallels between these events that occurred a century ago, and all that is happening now. Egan himself said, in a recent interview, “I’m a big believer in the line that history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes.”  But, to explore such a dark chapter in our history requires a firm belief in our potential as a country and as a species. The only way to rise to that potential is to see ourselves clearly and learn from our past. Timothy Egan is an American journalist and author of ten books. The most recent, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, was an immediate New York Times bestseller. Egan worked for The New York Times for 18 years, first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent, and then as a national enterprise reporter. As part of a team of reporters Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2001 for writing a series called How Race is Lived in America. Egan lives in Seattle with his family.

This week’s episode features one of the most highly anticipated conversations from the 2024 Portland Book Festival. Author Rachel Kushner joined the festival with her most recent novel, the Booker Prize finalist Creation Lake, her take on a noir spy thriller. We paired her with Danzy Senna, whose new novel is Colored Television, the story of a struggling novelist attempting to break into Hollywood. We invited Oregon-based writer Mat Johnson, whose most recent book is the fantastic Invisible Things, to moderate their conversation.   This conversation was titled “Deceit and Dark Humor.” Both novels featuring protagonists who are knowingly lying to the people around them: Kushner’s narrator is a spy tasked with infiltrating an anarchist cooperative in France and is actively deceiving everyone she encounters, while Senna’s protagonist, Jane, spirals into more and more lies as she tries to create a television show with a big-shot Hollywood producer.   We have a special treat at the end of the episode. Another feature of Portland Book Festival is the annual launch of our Writers in the Schools anthology, featuring creative writing from Portland-area public high school students. We’ll hear from two students:   William Nobles, Franklin HS, short story Ceiling Man   Ari Romero, junior at Lincoln HS, piece called Missing the Mark   Rachel Kushner is the author of Creation Lake, her latest novel, The Hard Crowd, her acclaimed essay collection, and the internationally bestselling novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books are translated into twenty-seven languages.   Danzy Senna is the author of four previous works of fiction, including the bestselling Caucasia and, most recently, Colored Television, as well as a memoir. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, she teaches writing at the University of Southern California.   Mat Johnson is a Philip H. Knight Chair of the Humanities at the University of Oregon. His publications include the novels Invisible Things, Loving Day, and Pym, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot, and the graphic novel Incognegro. Johnson is the recipient of the American Book Award, the United States Artists James Baldwin Fellowship, The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. 

This week we have a conversation between one of the ultimate literary power couples: Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt.    Paul Auster passed away in April of 2024. The New York Times obituary called him the “patron saint of literary Brooklyn.” He wrote screenplays, poetry, and nonfiction, but is probably best known as a novelist, and as an novelist his best known work is the New York Trilogy—City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, all published in the mid-1980s–which he discusses in this conversation, along with his early career as a translator of poems from the French.    Siri Hustvedt is a novelist and essayist; her essays include the collections A Pleas for Eros and the memoir The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. Her novels include The Summer Without Men and The Blazing World.  In this conversation she talks about the book she was writing at the time, The Sorrows of an American.    Auster and Hustvedt were married in 1982. They came to Portland in January of 2006 and interviewed each other. At times it feels as if you are eavesdropping on an especially intelligent dinner table conversation. Their respect for each other’s work is delightful to hear – and several of the questions they remark they’ve never asked the other! It’s a rare opportunity to listen in on two great minds in conversation.  Paul Auster was the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Bloodbath Nation, Baumgartner, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. Among his other honors are the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke, and the Premio Napoli for Sunset Park. In 2012, he was the first recipient of the NYC Literary Honors in the category of fiction. He was also a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions), the PEN/Faulkner Award (The Music of Chance), the Edgar Award (City of Glass), and the Man Booker Prize (4 3 2 1). Auster was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He died at age seventy-seven in 2024.  Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, three collections of essays, a work of non-fiction, and six novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Her most recent novel The Blazing World was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won The Los Angeles Book Prize for fiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weil Cornell Medical College in New York. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. 

This week’s episode features the trailblazing, legendary journalist: Connie Chung, in conversation about her new memoir, CONNIE. In her book, Chung shares the story of her decades-long career as an Asian woman in the white-male-dominated world of broadcast journalism, when she relentlessly pursued stories and fought hard for scoops. Her hard work – her schedule for many years was truly unbelievable, with six days of work on multiple programs at her own request — Her hard work, which she connects to her Chinese family tradition, catapulted her onto the co-anchor chair on the CBS Evening News and made her a household name. Chung relates her battles and her victories with wit and humor and doesn’t hold back from calling out the sexism and racism she endured throughout her career. The book is also a portrait of an era in broadcast news where the lines between serious investigative journalism and tabloid fodder became blurred, a line Chung was often forced to walk against her will. Journalist Lisa Ling, of CBS News, said, “For generations of Asian Americans, Connie Chung will always be our superhero. Someone who looked like us who, on a national stage, held our most important political leaders accountable. She was bold, aggressive, and unafraid. So many of us pursued broadcast journalism because she singularly showed us it was possible. I didn’t think I could respect her any more than I already do, but this most candid account of her journey reminds us that Connie Chung is nothing short of a true American icon.” Connie Chung was interviewed by Literary Arts executive director Andrew Proctor, in front of a live audience in September 2024. Connie Chung, pioneer news anchor and reporter was the first woman to co-anchor the CBS Evening News, the flagship news broadcast on CBS. Connie was only the second woman to anchor any network evening broadcast in television history.