Arts & Media❯Readings

Portland Art Museum invites the community to join a Free First Thursday event, offering free admission to the museum for all, plus a Live Wire event as part of the Literary Arts Portland Book Festival. Visitors can take in the afternoon gallery pop-ups, the evening show, or both!

4:30 – 6 p.m. — Free, pre-show, pop-up performances will take place throughout the Museum’s galleries. Performers are poet and rapper Dessa, bestselling children’s author Mac Barnett, Pulitzer Prize Finalist Ed Park, and Portland comedian Mx. Dahlia Belle.

Free First Thursday tickets can be reserved online one week in advance and are also available at the door.

7 p.m. — Enjoy a fully seated, ticketed Live Wire taping hosted by Luke Burbank with announcer Elena Passarello, featuring a blend of interviews, comedy, and music performed live for the audience, then edited into an episode for broadcast to over 200 public radio stations nationwide. Performers are poet and rapper Dessa, bestselling children’s author Mac Barnett, Pulitzer Prize Finalist Ed Park, and Portland comedian Mx. Dahlia Belle. Doors will open at 6:30pm.

GA Tickets are $15. Preferred Seating is $40. Discounts available to Portland Book Festival passholders.

Dessa is a singer, rapper, and writer who fell in love with language as a toddler—and just never got over it. Now, she works in fields that traffic in words: she’s recorded rap bangers as part of the fiercely independent Doomtree collective, released a live album with the Grammy-winning Minnesota Orchestra; contributed to The New York Times and National Geographic Traveler; delivered a TED Talk on the intersection of romance and neuroscience that’s notched more than 4 million views; hosted 2 seasons of behavioral science podcast Deeply Human (BBC/American Public Media); and published a memoir recounting most of the above called My Own Devices (Penguin Random House).

Mac Barnett, the 2025–2026 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, is a New York Times bestselling author of stories for children. Mac’s books have won many prizes, including two Caldecott Honors, three New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Children’s Book Awards, three E. B. White Read Aloud Awards and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, as well as several international prizes. He lives in Oakland, California. His latest book, illustrated by X. Fang, is Tom Nancy: The Sheep Who Swapped Brains with a Boy. From two of the most exciting picture book makers today comes a hilarious trickster tale and Freaky Friday switcheroo story: a sneaky, cheeky sheep named Tom Nancy has a brain swap proposal for an innocent farm boy named Felix that will change both of their lives forever. Laugh-out-loud, subversive, and totally unexpected.

Ed Park is the author of the novels Personal Days and Same Bed Different Dreams. He is a founding editor of The Believer, and has worked in newspapers, book publishing, and academia. His writing appears in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Profound, wily, and beautifully wrought, his new book Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties is a meeting of memory and myth, confession and obfuscation, coalescing to offer a singular picture of creativity in action.

The princess of Portland comedy, best known for her breakout performance on the popular Netflix special Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda, Mx. Dahlia Belle has been compared to a Swiss Army knife—different tools to extract sharpness, softness, vulnerability, hope, and wicked wit. She’s been declared one of “11 Trans Comedians… Funnier Than Dave Chappelle” by Out Magazine, repeatedly featured on NPR, and has written for Cosmopolitan Magazine, The Guardian, The Stranger, and Portland Mercury. Her live performances have included NW Black Comedy Festival, Upper Left Comedy Festival, SF Sketchfest, and an awkward conversation with John Waters and Piers Morgan. In the upcoming live taping of her comedy special Affirmed at Polaris Hall on November 22nd, Mx. Dahlia Belle delivers 60 new minutes of stand-up to celebrate and affirm being human in the modern world through a combination of the wholesome and mundane, anecdotes about house cats, liscivious foibles of the LGBT community, and an unapologetic account of her personal journey with gender-affirming care, all delivered with her trademark free form wit.

Free First Thursdays at the Museum and PAM CUT’s Tomorrow Theater aligns with the revitalization of the long-standing Portland art galleries’ tradition of opening their doors for openings, receptions, and events on the first Thursday of each month. In recent months art and culture organizations have joined to bring back this popular activity, including the Pacific Northwest College of Art and the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education in the North Park Blocks.

Generous support provided by Art Bridges Foundation’s Access for All program.

The Literary Arts Bookstore is pleased to welcome Kimberly Blaeser to celebrate her latest book Red Ants. Blaeser will be joined in conversation by Christopher Diaz.

About the book:

BOLD is thrilled to host The Body Has Teeth: A Reading and Conversation with Amy Baskin, David Loring Nash, Anthony DiPietro, and Summer Stewart.

Four writers enter the dark from different doors. Anthony DiPietro’s poems move through gay love, sex, and the strange repetitions of desire. Amy Baskin gives Lilith—the first woman, cast as a demon—her fierce voice. Summer Stewart’s poems and essays expose the scripts written onto women’s bodies and lives. In David Loring Nash’s Northwoods, witchcraft, revenge, and human folly wait just beyond the treeline. Join them for a reading, followed by a conversation led by Summer Stewart.

Hannah Lillith Assadi reads from her new novel Paradiso 17 at Portland Art Museum in the Northwest Art gallery (Level 4, Room 402), paired with Esther Podemski, In the Desert. Presented by the National Book Foundation.

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE

The intimate, sweeping tale of one Palestinian man’s restless search for home the world over, as the pendulum of fate swings between loss and life, grief and euphoria, regret and hope.

All his life, exile has been the shadow stitched to the sole of Sufien’s shoe.

Born in Palestine on the precipice of 1948’s Nakba, Sufien is forced to leave the only home he’s ever known, the one on the hill with a beautiful blue door. This is the precise moment when time stops making sense. He spends the rest of his life propelled forward, always on the way—although in search of what, he is never quite sure. In the dusty, oil-rich desert of Kuwait, he meets his first love and decides he must leave his family. In a small Italian university town, he spends his youth wrapped up in the sweet promise of the West and the forgetful assurance of wine. When life takes him to a gritty New York, he discovers his true vocation and falls for a Jewish woman born into a wholly different world. Finally, he finds himself recalled to the wild, vast open skies of the desert, in Arizona.

Sufien’s life spans friendships lost and maintained, a stint selling leathers at a tanner’s stall, the ineffable company of cats, and the freedom of the open road, the glowing pride of fatherhood, Sufi myths, prophetic dreams, and visions of the afterlife—and always, always, no matter how far he chases joy, the sweet, treacherous song of a balcony urging him to fly, to fall, to fall. The lyrical pages of Paradiso 17 weave in and out of time and space, beginning at the end and ending at the beginning. They are haunting, haunted with grief, struck through, as Dante once wrote, with “the arrow that the bow of exile / shoots first,” and yet they throb with light—not just the light that Sufien sees as he approaches his own end, but the brilliant light of a life lived.

Like all of our dead, Sufien still speaks, the book begins. Listen, this is his story.

“With stunning intimacy, Hannah Lillith Assadi has crafted an unforgettable story about the many stunted afterlives of hyphenated belonging. In this book live some of the most complex characters I’ve read in a long time, and a deeply nuanced exploration of exile as both event and inheritance.” —Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Suffused with tenderness.” —The New York Times

Join the Columbia Writers Series for a reading and conversation with the novelist, journalist, and editor Ed Park. Park is the author of the novels Same Bed Different Dreams and Personal Days, and the short story collection An Oral History of Atlantis (2025). He has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN Hemingway Award, and other honors, and has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Asian Pacific American Award for Literature. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and many other places. He is a founding editor of The Believer and was executive editor at Penguin Press. He teaches creative writing at Princeton.

Tina Chang reads from her new poetry collection Lion at Portland Art Museum in the Native American Art gallery (Level 2, Room 215), paired with Sara Siestreem, fastened to the rock (blood, sweat, and tears).

In Lion, Tina Chang mines personal and collective memory to explore safety and danger, visibility and invisibility as an Asian American woman. Throughout the collection, Chang responds to multi-hyphenate women artists, including Haena Yoo, Hồng-An Trương, Astria Suparak, and a collective whose work paid tribute to the life of Christina Yuna Lee, a young woman who was killed during the height of anti-Asian hate crimes. Responding to art across various media—text, illustration, painting, video, and sculpture—Lion sparks cross-disciplinary dialogue on Asian American perspectives, surveillance, and the myth of the model minority.

As the aftermath of the pandemic is examined, so too are the structures of bias, racism, and violence that continue. The collection’s title explores the word’s cultural history, composite Chinese iconography, and lion-centered explorations of strength and mastery. Lion traverses the closeness and distance between the racialized self the world views and the perceived self who endures and survives.

“An urgent exploration of Asian American identity from a poet with a ‘fearless imagination.’”–Tracy K. Smith, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

We are delighted to welcome Gavin Van Horn, editor of the new anthology Sensoria: Attending to the Wonder and Vitality of Nature to Broadway Books. He will be joined by poet Brittney Corrigan, one of the contributors to the anthology.

A stunning gathering of creative nonfiction, research, and poetry, Sensoria transports readers into compelling stories and ethical reflections that stretch the limits of the moral imagination, calling attention to the wondrous ways in which humans and other-than-human beings experience and perceive the world. By exploring the sensorium among all forms of life endowed with different kinds of consciousness and communicative abilities, this volume highlights ecologically and socially diverse ways of touching the world with mind, and touching mind with the world.

Join Mary Miller Doyle and friends for a presentation of Wonder Is a Lovely Place to Be: 365 Days of Wit, Wisdom, and Irrepressible Imagination by Brian Doyle and Mary Miller Doyle. Drawing from both beloved and previously unpublished Brian Doyle works, this collection of essays, poems and sketches invites readers to notice holiness woven through ordinary, everyday moments.

Mary Miller Doyle and John and Cindy McPhee will read passages from Wonder is a Lovely Place to Be and retired Lake Oswego Public Library director Bill Baars will host. We'll also be serving apple and marionberry pie, Brian's favorite flavors.

Brian Doyle (1956-2017) was the author of many books, including the novels Mink River and The Plover; The Grail, his account of a year in a pinot noir vineyard in Oregon; and The Wet Engine, a memoir about his infant son’s heart surgery and the young doctor who saved his life. He edited Portland Magazine at the University of Portland.

This program is supported by the Friends of the Lake Oswego Public Library. Participation is free, and no registration is required. Please note, seating is limited due to the size of the space. Seats will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.A livestream will be available.

Lake Oswego Public Library is located at 706 Fourth Street, Lake Oswego. For more information, contact Alicia Yokoyama at 503-534-4228 or [email protected]

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Live Wire teams up with the Portland Art Museum during First Thursday and the Portland Book Festival. From 4:30 to 6 p.m., complimentary pop-up performances roam the museum galleries, no ticket needed. At 7 p.m., host Luke Burbank and announcer Elena Passarello lead a seated, ticketed taping with poet and rapper Dessa, children’s author Mac Barnett, Pulitzer Prize finalist Ed Park, and Portland comedian Mx. Dahlia Belle. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.. Portland Book Festival passholders get 10% off.

Facilitated by Déy Rivers

Wanna play in alternate worlds? It’s challenging but glorious here! Join us for an Intro to Spec-Fic. Learn what is considered Speculative Fiction. Get ideas down using artwork as inspiration to explore spec-fic lines of thinking: “What if..”, “If only…” and “If this goes on…” Walk away with writing to possibly expand or refine later.

Portland Book Festival youth writing workshops are recommended for ages 14+. Workshops are free to attend but require a festival wristband (free for youth) and registration in advance. Please register by purchasing a free ticket below.

Join the Portland release of I Believe in Everything: A Memoir of Illness, Motherhood and Magic. Jen Dary will give a reading from her debut memoir before local Portland artist Lisa Congdon facilitates a conversation and and audience Q&A. Jen will sign books as well.

Books and drinks will be available for purchase. This event is for ages 21+.

Bring a friend or a book club, or come alone, ready to make some new friends. Whether you've known Jen for years or stumbled upon this event by accident, you are welcome.

Tickets cost $10. $5 of every ticket will be donated to the American Brain Tumor Association.

Join The Literary Arts Bookstore & Cafe for an evening of Hollywood nostalgia and holiday classics!

We’re thrilled to host local author Matt Mikalatos to celebrate his latest, Finding Wonderful: Hopeful Lessons from Jimmy Stewart and It’s a Wonderful Life.

About the book:

It’s a Wonderful Life impacted the lives of many, but no one got more from it than star Jimmy Stewart, who credited the film with giving his life new purpose post-World War II service. Learn the lessons on faith, community, kindness, and more from Stewart and the iconic film with this inspiring gift book.

Beloved star and one of Hollywood’s greatest actors, Stewart achieved fame, fortune, and acclaim—but found that none of it guaranteed happiness. Leaving it all behind to serve as a combat pilot in World War II, he returned home changed by loss and searching for meaning. But while filming the perennial Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life, Stewart learned how to heal and live with gratitude and grace with the help of friends, faith, and purpose. Drawing on his life and words, as well as iconic moments from It’s a Wonderful Life, this book explores how the actor who embodied decency on screen lived it off-screen, too.

Endorsed by the Stewart estate and featuring little-seen photos throughout, Finding Wonderful is a heartfelt series of essays that capture the virtues and values of a man who discovered that the secret to a wonderful life has nothing to do with fame—and everything to do with love, service, and simple goodness.

Join us for the Mountain Writers Series readingswith:
Gerald Costanzo & Michele Glazer

Gerald Costanzo’s Badlands: First Poems, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 1973, and in 1974, In the Aviary, won the Devins Award. Other of his poetry collections include Nobody Lives on Arthur Godfrey Boulevard (BOA, 1992), The Laps of the Bridesmaids (Bits Press, 1992), and most recently, Regular Haunts (Nebraska, 2018). Founder of the Carnegie Mellon University Press (1972), Costanzo served as Director of the Press, also teaching writing and literature courses at Carnegie Mellon University, until he retired in 2024. Costanzo has edited numerous anthologies, among them Three Rivers, Ten Years: An Anthology of Poems from Three Rivers Poetry Journal, and American Poetry: The Next Generation. He has received two N.E.A. Creative Writing Fellowships as well as two Pushcart Prizes for his poetry. He divides his time between Mt. Lebanon, PA and a home on the Oregon Coast.

Michele Glazer is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, fretwork (Iowa, 2021). Others include On Tact, & the Made Up World (Iowa, 2010); Aggregate of Disturbances (Iowa Poetry Prize, 2004); and It Is Hard to Look at What We Came to Think We’d Come to See (Pittsburgh, 1997; AWP Award). She has published poems in The New Yorker, Boston Review, and Lo-Ball, among others. Glazer was the founding director of the MFA Creative Writing program at Portland State University and has been a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and at the University of Montana as the Richard Hugo Chair in Poetry. She lives in Portland.

Oregon Humanities and Constellation Reading Series are teaming up to ask Portland writers the question: What’s the book that made you say, Books are for me?

The idea comes from the Works Cited section of Oregon Humanities magazine, where authors reflect on the foundational texts that shaped their lives. On Wednesday, November 4, we’re bringing that idea to the new PALS (Portland Arts & Literary Society) Building for an evening of literary show-and-tell.

We'll hear from Aleksandr Chernousov, Lydia Kiesling, Tim Lane, Jae Nichelle, Christopher Rose, and Eric Tran about the books that shaped them, and they'll also share passages from their work. Then we’ll open the mic to you.

Bring the book that started your literary origin story! It could be a children’s book, a comic, a classic—all books count. During our lightning round open mic, you’ll have 60 seconds to share your book and why it matters. If you’d rather just listen, that’s welcome too, just pull up a seat and enjoy the evening.

Up Up Books will be open especially for the event, and the readers’ books will be for sale.

Come celebrate the reading life with us! This event is part of the Portland Book Festival's Cover to Cover series.

Julián Delgado Lopera reads from his new novel Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You at Portland Art Museum in the Northwest Art gallery (Level 4, Room 402), paired with V. Maldonado, Sala Roja. Presented by the National Book Foundation.

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

From the award-winning author of Fiebre Tropical, an electric, highly anticipated novel set in Colombia’s underground queer scene.

It is a known fact that the queens who refuse their destiny are haunted. Rejection turns itself inward, a bullet to the heart of said queen, and unleashes, per Travesti Lore, a river of curses.

Cloistered in a dreary Bogotá apartment, Ignacio’s light has dimmed, leaving his teenage daughter, Valentina, to raise herself in the wake of her mother Alma’s death. Lonely and love-starved, Valentina aches to discover the details of her mother’s drowning, and for her father to snap out of his depression. But Ignacio can’t. He spends listless afternoons smoking cigarettes in long blonde wigs, telenovelas humming in the background, haunted not only by matrimonial guilt, but by memories of a young man he once loved and betrayed.

From Ignacio’s tragic past emerges the luminous queen of Bogotá’s queer underground, Mamadora Eléctrica, the wise travesti who he first met under the silvery lights of Club Aquario when he was just a shy country boy. With Alma gone, Mamadora steps in as a mother figure to Valentina the way she once did for the girl’s father. But as an expert in Travesti Lore, she fears the worst: that Ignacio’s self-destruction may have unleashed a curse on them all.

From “a writer who is grinding their own colors” (Dwight Garner, New York Times), Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You is a profound and richly imagined story about coming undone.

Four writers approach the dark from different directions. Anthony DiPietro’s poems trace gay love, sex, and desire’s strange repetitions. Amy Baskin gives Lilith—the first woman, cast as demon—a fierce voice. Summer Stewart’s poems and essays examine the scripts written onto...

Join us for the Portland launch of Any Time But This Time (Mad Creek Books), the debut story collection from LA filmmaker and author Adam Peterson, in conversation with Portland poet, novelist, and painter Zachary Schomburg.

The human condition is dire. We knew that. But it's also always been that way–we've always craved to be sometime else, from the first human woman (Denise, stuck with neanderthals) to the final man (Keith, losing all his language but the name of his girl–that, he'll save). In between, Peterson introduces himself as a shapeshifter, voicing a semi-delinquent and moderately depressed teenage Jesus in "Jesus Does a Hero;" a convincingly polyamorous prairie romance; 1983's fiber optic saleswoman to the local government of Shanghai, Barbara Roach; and a hormonal crop of teenagers sent to fight "the Schmoopys" once their orbit arrives and their hair has gone gray.

As they'll tell you, the findings are fairly straightforward. In all of human history, we have only been one thing: lonely. Well, two things. We've been horny, too.

Unrelenting, bold, and cynical in the way that only a child of Nebraska-gone-Hollywood could write, Any Time But This Time gifts us 300,000 years of humans destined to be alone, willing to give it all up for connection.

"As history tends to shave off the weird bumps and ridges of our past, it's exhilarating and unsteadying to read a collection that ambitiously seeks to provide a kind of bizarro reimagining of our world. Any Time But This Time is odd and hilarious and yet so tenderly human, so unafraid of cataloging all the strange desires and cruelties and moments of true connection that have somehow gotten us to this moment in time, and then it rockets beyond that to imagine an even stranger future. This is wildness of the highest order, unforgettable and highly original."
—Kevin Wilson, author of Now Is Not The Time To Panic

"The stories in Adam Peterson's Any Time But This Time are funny, but, like, really, really funny, but like, the kind of funny that make you laugh and laugh and then make you question your own soul, or whether you even have a soul, because Adam Peterson has slyly tricked you into laughing at some of the worst possible things, the most terrible of people, the most dire of situations. He has made you laugh the kind of laughter that keeps you honest, makes you see the world as it really is. This is a fabulous, unrelenting collection of stories, full of gorgeous, punchy, compulsively readable prose. Do yourself a favor: pick it up, take it home, and start reading."
—Manuel Gonzales, author of The Miniature Wife and other stories

"Deeply entertaining, the stories in this collection crackle with the spark of imagination, invention, and compassion. Peterson writes with a satisfying blend of humor and pathos, fearless in both wit and empathy. For lovers of George Saunders and Haruki Murakami, with a dash of Aimee Bender, this collection also feels somehow entirely fresh."
—Aja Gabel, author of Lightbreakers

"Each story in this collection is a window into unseen moments of history, and deftly conveys the "incomprehensible beauty, all too comprehensible horror" of the human experience. Peterson's voice carries an almost prophetic weight, masterfully balancing the lyrical, existential, heartbreaking, and humorous with a skill and style akin to writers like George Saunders and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. From the first cave woman to identify as human, to the unraveling of language as our species dies off, I was enraptured by this book, and felt genuinely changed after reading it. Uniquely funny, profoundly moving, and innovatively written, Any Time But This Time is a rare and exciting feat of literature."
—Erin Slaughter, author of A Manual for How to Love Us and The Dead Dad Diaries

Adam Peterson is a writer and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. He's the author of the prose poetry collections My Untimely Death, The Flasher, and [SPOILER ALERT] (with Laura Eve Engel). His short fiction has appeared in Epoch, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and a mess of other places. His films have played at HollyShorts, Fantasia Fest, and Just for Laughs, among many other festivals.

Zachary Schomburg has written books of poems like Wool Moon (Black Ocean, 2026)and a novel, Mammother (Featherproof, 2017). And he's a painter too. In fact, he once painted a painting owned by Adam Peterson. He lives in Portland with B and Y.

Lake Oswego Public Library is located at 706 Fourth Street, Lake Oswego. For more information, contact Alicia Yokoyama at 503-534-4228 or [email protected]

A monthly, prompt-driven freewriting gathering welcomes writers of every genre and experience level. Guided by author and poet Jone Rush MacCulloch, the session starts with a creative prompt, offers focused time to write, then invites anyone who wishes to share their work. It is a friendly space to connect with other writers, approach the page with curiosity, and see where inspiration leads. Jone is the author of Tilt, a novel in verse, and facilitates writing salons and events online and at Cup of Tea.

The Literary Arts Bookstore is pleased to welcome author Rebecca Handler to celebrate her new novel, In the Round. Handler will be joined in conversation by Selina Fillinger.

About the book:

Have you ever been dead certain that you’re being observed, that maybe your very existence is predicated on how others see you? A few minutes after she’s become convinced she’s the victim of a home invasion, In the Round’s brilliant and intimate narrator plunges us into a feminist Kafkaesque literary mystery that unfolds over the course of one weird—and dare we say, dramatic—night in San Francisco. Nothing is missing from her family’s home, but everything feels wrong. So begins a sleepless night of questioning, and a novel packed with the kind of astonishing twists that leave readers wondering: Is all the world a stage, after all? Over the course of the evening, theatrical elements creep in: a cast list, a prop list, an intermission.

At once an avant-garde thriller, a meditation on motherhood and mortality, a full-throated endorsement of gut-level intuition, and a tribute to the rapture of live theater in a post-pandemic world, In the Round is a lively, inventive, and completely singular story.

• Thursday, November 5
• The Heathman Lodge | 7801 NE Greenwood Dr., Vancouver
• Doors Open: 6:00 p.m. | Program Begins: 6:30 p.m.

Celebrate the release of A Thousand Flames, the debut poetry collection by Corey S. Pressman. Corey S. Pressman's debut collection, A Thousand Flames, offers poems of secular devotion in which a bird feeder can stand as the axis mundi and the bees have a god of their own. Across twelve sections, they travel from a Rockland County childhood to a hilltop in the fog, and as far back as the rooftops of Neolithic Çatalhöyük. Each poem asks you to slow down and stay a little longer than expected.

"Corey Pressman is a magical human - magical art, magical writing. His finely made poems are bells of vision and clarity to help us 'stay the same changing.'" - Naomi Shihab Nye

What do you get when Don Lemon, award-winning journalist, and DL Hughley, one of the original Kings of Comedy, and highly recognized stand-up comedians come together for a night of conversation?

Expect the unexpected from these two brilliant minds doing their public service while taking you on a journey exploring topics spanning everything from social issues, race, pop-culture and current events. Nothing is off limits!

Join us at The Literary Arts Bookstore & Cafe to hand-sew decorative plush to celebrate animals! Sew felt fish, cats, foxes, frogs, and more! ✨ Bring a friend! Make a friend! Grab a beverage, browse the books, and gather round to hand-sew some adorable little friends!

Traceable templates & embroidery stitch printouts provided. Self-guided & beginner-friendly. A SCRAP educator will be ready to assist newer sewists with hand-sewing basics!

This is a ticketed event. Drop-ins welcome. Get tickets here.

Alicia Jo Rabins reads from her new memoir When We’re Born We Forget Everythingat Portland Art Museum in the Asian Art gallery (Level 1, Room 108), paired with Watanabe Sadao, Adam and Eve.

From the creator of the internationally acclaimed singer-songwriter project Girls in Trouble, a memoir following her journey from a secular Jewish childhood to becoming a modern queer woman owning ancient teachings and finding her own meanings in them, refracted through feminist interpretations of the lives of Biblical women.

As a self-described ‘90s suburban high school weirdo, Alicia Jo Rabins spent her time practicing violin and smoking cigarettes behind the mall while secretly dreaming of setting out on a spiritual quest no one around her seemed to understand. She often found herself drawn to the more ritualistic and rigorous Judaism that her parents had abandoned to assimilate and “become American.” In college, a chance meeting led her on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to study rabbinical texts (and play bluegrass fiddle on the street for cash). But that two years of immersing herself in traditional observance was only the start of a journey full of twists and turns.

When We’re Born We Forget Everything follows Alicia’s relentless, often embarrassing, sometimes enlightening search for the sacred in everyday life as she tours America playing with a klezmer-punk band, falls in and out of love, scrapes through the initiations of motherhood, and witnesses the beauty—and danger—of mysticism. Rabins braids this personal narrative with the hidden stories of biblical women, uncovering a path of queer identity, feminist awakening, and spiritual self-invention. This lyrical, searching memoir is a meditation on longing, lineage, and what it takes to find meaning in a fractured world.

“Alicia Jo Rabins writes as if she’s in conversation with the divine itself. . . .This isn’t merely a book to be read—it’s a scripture for the searching heart, a reminder that the border between the human and the holy is, and always has been, porous.”
—Reza Aslan, author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

The haunting new novel from New York Times bestselling author Melissa Albert, in which the estranged adult children of a legendary author, written into their dead mother’s beloved fantasy series, must contend with the vine-like creep of legacy, memory, and magic. Interviewed by OPB’s Jess Hazel.

Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods. In one, she and her brother, Ennis, live in the wooded shadow of their family’s isolated Vermont farmhouse; in the other, the pages of their mother’s world-famous Ninth City books, where their magical adventures have made them household names. In reality, Guinevere’s childhood isn’t the enchanted idyll her mother’s readers imagine: she and Ennis are growing up near-feral, unwashed and underfed, escaping each day to the wild woods they’ve made their playland. As Edith Sharpe’s books explode into epic popularity, the threats of a rural childhood give way to the escalating perils of fame—until the night it all goes up in flames, leaving Edith’s series unfinished and her children the sole survivors.

Now an adult coasting on her mother’s name, Guinevere is mid-promotion for a ghostwritten memoir when her estranged brother, an artist who has until now spurned his family’s legacy, announces an upcoming installation titled, simply, Mother. As rumors swirl around a death connected to his last show, unsettling recollections from Guinevere’s childhood begin to surface. Her public facade starts to crack, forcing her to confront the questions she’s spent the last twenty years running from: What really happened the night of the fire? And what dark history lies behind their mother’s fantasy world?

The Children is wise to the mythic weight childhood memories gather over time, and the way the most beloved stories grow up with us. It’s for anyone who’s ever revisited an old favorite and found its pages cast in a darker light, the line separating magic from reality blurring as we discover the books that once comforted us carry shadows of their own.

Julia Wertz reads from her new memoir Bury Me Already (It’s Nice Down Here) at Portland Art Museum in the Prints & Drawings gallery (Level 0, Room 007), paired with Mary Kay Nitchie, Jump, from the portfolio Wayzgoose.

Raw, honest, and hilarious, Bury Me Already (It’s Nice Down Here) chronicles the joy and horror of becoming a mother during challenging times.

In this follow-up to the acclaimed memoir Impossible People—a book about getting sober and becoming a professional artist in New York City—cartoonist Julia Wertz returns home to Northern California where she reunites with her family and rekindles a relationship with an ex-boyfriend. After a surprise pregnancy and a marriage proposal, Julia settles (somewhat reluctantly) into a quiet life in a small town. But as 2020 approaches, her world, and the world at large, takes a sharp turn toward unexpected chaos. Through comic vignettes, essays, and diary doodles, Julia recounts the events of her pregnancy and its attendant body horror, a miscarriage, family trauma, marriage, a life-altering accident, and the joy and surprises of parenthood as it all unfolds against the backdrop of local wildfires and a global pandemic. The result of this unconventional collection is a heart-wrenching and hilarious story of adversity, resilience, and, ultimately, love.

BOLD is thrilled to host a reading with Adam Oyster-Sands, author of We're doing pretty good if we can just get out alive, in conversation with Scott Cannon of Friendly Monster Press.

Adam's first poetry chapbook, don’t call us punk because we hate that, was then released in 2024 through Steel Toe Books. Over the years, a number of Adam’s poems have been published in various literary journals and collections, including Picture Frame Press, The Dewdrop, and Cathexis Northwest Press. We’re doing pretty good if we can just get out alive is his first full-length poetry book. Vibrating with the reverence and spirit of the Pacific Northwest, this collection of poems is a raw, lyrical eulogy for fated beloveds, sublime landscapes, and ephemeral wonders that spans the vastness of time and place. Oyster-Sands showcases a true talent for imbuing the smallest human details with authenticity and layered meanings. Each poem maps the human heart in relation to the larger human heart everyone shares, with all its internal conflicts, with precision and grace.

Join Oregon Poet Laureate Ellen Waterston for a free and public event in the Lincoln City Cultural Center. The event will include a presentation and time for audience Q&A.

Join us the night before the full Portland Book Festival begins as authors Michelle St. Romain, Tara Badstubner, and Liz Collins discuss their recently released novels and the remarkable animals who play starring roles in their work. The evening will include interesting discussion, Q&A, and music by Free the Internet, a Portland area band. Animal-themed trivia will be sprinkled throughout the evening, with great prizes available, including copies of the books and other swag.

Develop your writing in a welcoming, creative environment alongside friends and local best-selling YA author Jamie Pacton. This is time to write, share ideas, ask questions, and meet other teen writers!

Broadway Books is thrilled to celebrate Wandering Aengus Press with editor-in-chief Jill McCabe Johnson, and authors Chrys Buckley, John Fadely, Veronica Kornberg, and A. Molotkov.

Wandering Aengus Press and its imprint, Trail to Table Press, are dedicated to publishing works to enrich lives and make the world a better place, because why not do as much good as we can in the world with what little time we have? Established in 2017, they publish literary works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Publishing between two to six books a year, they work closely with each author to create books they can feel proud of and readers will love, be inspired by, and treasure. Their editors generously donate their time and expertise, and every book is a work borne of love and dedication. Wandering Aengus is named after the title of a poem by Yeats. Aengus is the Celtic god of love and poetic inspiration, as well as the treasured cat of press founder Jill McCabe Johnson.

BOOK FEST IS SOLD OUT.

For more than a decade, Portland Art Museum has been proud to partner with Literary Arts and serve as a home base for the Portland Book Festival, bringing thousands of writers, readers, and book lovers downtown for one of the city’s biggest literary celebrations.

Festival activity fills the PAM campus and Cultural District throughout the day, making it an especially lively time to visit.

How does PAM ticketing work on Portland Book Festival Day?

With regular Museum admission (including PAM member admission), visitors can enjoy the galleries along with select festival activities happening in them, including:

• Pop-up author readings thematically paired with artworks, 11 a.m.–4 p.m.
• KMHD Jazz Radio Listening Lounge in Gallery 300, 12–4 p.m.

PAM members receive their usual free Museum admission; a Festival Pass is required for full festival access.

Visit the Portland Book Festival website for the complete schedule.

The Literary Arts Bookstore is pleased to welcome Amanda Uhle to celebrate her memoir, Destroy This House.

About the book:

For fans of The Glass Castle and The Liars’ Club, a tender, heartbreaking, and hilarious memoir written with “unwavering affection” (ELLE) chronicling the challenges of growing up with a desperately scheming father, a mother plagued by an acute hoarding disorder, and parenting parents while seeking independence.

The Long family’s love was fierce, their lifestyle bizarre, and their deceptions countless. Once her parents were gone, Amanda Uhle realized she was closer to them than anyone else, yet she found herself utterly confounded by the lives they had led.

Amanda’s striving fashion designer mother and her charismatic wheeler-dealer father wove a complex life together that spanned ten different homes across five states over forty perplexing years. Throughout her childhood, as her mother’s hoarding disorder flourished and her father’s schemes crumbled, contradictions abounded. They bartered for dental surgery and drove their massive Lincoln Town Car to the food bank. When financial ruin struck, they abandoned their repossessed mansion for humble parish housing, and Amanda’s father became a preacher. They swung between being filthy rich and dirt poor, devious and virtuous, lonely and loved, fake and real.

In this “iconic, only-in-America fable of desperate Midwestern dreamers” (Dave Eggers, bestselling author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), Amanda sets out to document her parents’ unbelievable exploits and her own hard-won escape into independence. With humor and tenderness, Uhle has crafted a heartfelt and utterly unique memoir, capturing the raucousness, pain, joy, and ultimately, the boundless love that exists between all parents and children.

Anthony Hudson reads from his new collection of performance works Lamp Black: Plays and Other Grievances at Portland Art Museum in the American Art gallery (Level 2, Room 211), paired with Moses Soyer, Girl with a Cigarette.

Followed by book signing at The Shop at PAM.

A major collection of performance works by artist and agitator Anthony Hudson.

Lamp Back: Plays and Other Grievances collects nearly a decade of work by Anthony Hudson, a queer Indigenous artist and agitator also known as Portland, Oregon’s premier drag clown, Carla Rossi. Whether fumbling with a lamp in a satirical takedown of land acknowledgments or confronting the history of redface in pop culture, Hudson alternates between Rossi’s cackling “ghost of white privilege” and more earnest, vulnerable confessionals as himself—all with a deep commitment to bitter humor and brutal honesty. In these performance works, a mixed-race Native boy plays a pilgrim in his kindergarten Thanksgiving pageant. A young artist recounts the racism in their favorite musical and the larger American theater system. A drag queen storytime goes disastrously wrong and calls for an exorcism with a plunger. Kate Bredeson’s unflinching introduction speaks to Hudson’s work through a cultural and historical lens and illuminates the importance of his project to filet the American Empire.

Join us at the concluding event of the 23rd Annual Ray Warren Symposium on Race and Ethnic Studies: Race Monologues

Each year a different group of L&C students writes an original series of personal narratives to share their feelings, experiences, and understandings of race, ethnicity, and identity.

Learn more about this year’s Ray Warren Symposium keynote speakers, art exhibit, and event schedule.

In rating Small Things Like These 41st on its list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, the New York Times said: “Not a word is wasted in Keegan’s small, burnished gem of a novel, a sort of Dickensian miniature….”

This is an important novella in the vein of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, but with an ending that packs a different punch. At its center is a man torn between family, community, church, and one young woman in a terrible predicament. He must make a choice, and Keegan’s exquisite, concise writing reveals that agonizing choice. It’s a perfect story to ponder and discuss: What would you choose in his situation?

Keegan’s other work, “Foster,” is a long short story with a big impact. No word is wasted as Keegan tells the story of a young girl sent to live with another family when her own mother is fraught with problems of her own. Again, in the New York Times’s glowing review they say: “Keegan makes us complicit in what her characters want, setting us up for utter heartbreak when they don’t get it.”

Foster’s is already considered canonical and is taught as a required text for Comparative Literature in the curriculum for Ireland’s secondary schools.

Join us in this two-week exploration of these incredible short works by an Irish writer of spare prose and mmense talent.

Access Program
We want our writing classes and seminars to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some people. Our Access Program offers writing class and seminar tuitions at a reduced rate. Most writing classes have at least one access spot available.

Please apply here for access rate tuition. Contact Susan Moore at [email protected] if you have questions.

Liaison position
Every in-person class and seminar at Literary Arts has one liaison position. Liaisons perform specific duties for each class meeting. If you are a liaison for a class or seminar, the full amount of your tuition is covered by Literary Arts.

Apply here for the liaison position.

Join us for a reading and celebration of Paul Maziar’s Junebug. The evening with feature musical guests Kelli Schaefer and Drew Grow.

When asked for eight words to describe Junebug, Maziar channeled Agent Cooper: “Everyday, once a day, give yourself a present.” But did he mean the present? Either way, Junebug is a gift.

Junebug situates Paul Maziar’s latest acts of listening and attending, transmission and transcription. He’s built a modular space suggestive of both the theatre and the gallery, performance and (inter)play. The aphoristic title sequence hones sharp accessibilities — we find words available to us, for our limbs and limbics to hold, hurrumph, to slap our knees and share. A mysterious dramatis personae pervades Junebug’s expanse across the mental maps Maziar graphs as he organizes streets of words and questions what their design might reference. We encounter, among others, Toulouse-Lautrec, Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, Jack Whitten, Colette, Robert Walser. Who are all these characters in Maziar’s parade? Maybe there’s some insight in the final serial sequence, “Hives,” which states that “The real thing is inside of what everything appears as.” The real in Junebug asks us to admire the distance between the surface and the subject. We already have the right tools.

Charles North: From short poems to prose poems to the wonderful fragments collected in its title poem, Paul Maziar’s writing revels in imaginative discontinuity. Junebug is smart, witty, surprising—and inspiring—throughout.

Merrill Gilfillan: These works step up in the name of Poetry and its heartwood, its ever-salvational “What’s on the river today?”

Tetra Balestri: Maziar manages to resurrect a conversation started sometime in the early to mid-20th century that cuts through the present-day pandemonium with polish and swagger. Junebug is a pair of pants worth trying on.

Simone Kearney: Reading Paul Maziar’s Junebug, I feel the tightrope walker’s high-wire balance between the forces of levity and gravity, the contexts of interior and exterior, the concocted and the perceived, thought and overheard speech. These poems make me wonder how it is that we move through the world, which is also a moving-through language.

I’m reminded that language bears a strange mystery. It’s always received and always being made at the same time; it’s a material we inherit and get to play with. In Maziar’s work, overheard phrases and sayings arrive solidified, brick-like things. The language resembles the fragments of familiar tunes — an echo, or memory of one — appearing as the freshest, strangest thing newly imagined.

I feel the intimacy and elusiveness of unspoken thought in the poems: words not yet uttered, still inside the mind. This makes me feel the dynamics of inside and outside that are part of the human drama. Am I looking at something the poet is looking at, or am I inside his head? Maziar lets us inhabit uncertainty. This is living language just being breathed, catapulted from lips, cemented into freshly-thought speech.

Junebug lets me delight in the way language can tend to trip over itself: “I’d rather stimulate than simulate”; “a certain vigor (or vinegar?).” Decontextualized, speech is absurd, funny, strangely moving: “I’m not going anywhere until I see a horse.”

What emerges is a tour de force composed of song, slogan, slip of the tongue, reverie, note, advertisement, fragment, nonsense, musing, hiccup, rupture, tidbit, epiphany. “The only faith he had was in the confusion of his experiences,” Maziar writes, suggesting that one thing we can do amid such confusion is continue to place words onto the page — in relation to ourselves, to others, to images, and to other words. And those words keep coming to meet us: flat, full, flowing, tired, zippy, and ready for more.

Kelli Schaefer's latest record, Even Still, could be the soundtrack to a modern gothic, a playlist for a trudge through a muddy forest or the accompaniment to a subconscious mantra. She demonstrates deftness in refusing to confine herself to a single genre. Schaefer excavates her past while planting herself deeper into the avant-garde, offering a fresh take on the age-old singer-songwriter trope, delivering haunting melodies over swirling woodwinds, piano, classical guitar, and upright bass.

The Pacific Northest's beloved troubadour, musician/artist Drew Grow (Slang, Modern Kin, Pastor's Wives) is back with new songs and a new stripped down method. Spotted playing solo shows around Portland this summer, he is out on his own, debuting new music and packing a wall of little guitar amps. It's new digs for the artist. Drew's solo approach, raw and exposed, is even more striking than the bands of his past. His powerful voice still ringing through as ever, magnetic and arching over the solo guitar and twisted old amps. The sound is momentous and vulnerable, seeming to come from a deeper place. What have you brought us?

A $10 ticket supports our musical guests, Kelli Schaefer and Drew Grow.

THE FESTIVAL FROM THE CITY THAT LOVES TO READ This November marks the return of Literary Arts’ Portland Book Festival (PBF), the largest celebration of books and storytelling in the Pacific Northwest. The festival’s largest gathering takes place Saturday November 7 with more than 100 local, regional, and nationally acclaimed authors gathering for Portland Book Festival in the South Park Blocks. NE

Spend Sunday afternoon with independent presses and the people who make Portland’s literary scene: authors, publishers, readers, writers, editors, and booksellers. Unsolicited Press authors and publisher will join local independent presses for readings, conversation, and local beer.

unsolicitedpress.com

LitFootA new, year-long series of author readings, curated by Sellwood Community House Volunteer & Two-Time Moth GrandSLAM Champion Sarah Bunger. Readings take place from 7-9pm at Sellwood Community HouseAuthors include:September 16: Willy Vlautin & The Left and the LuckyOctober 21: Liz Prato & PurgatoireNovember 18: Emma Pattee & TiltJanuary 20: Dr. Michelle Chappel & The Power of AuthenticityFebruary 17: Kristin Jeffries & Red Wine LoverMarch 17: Olufunke Grace Bankole & The Edge of WaterApril 21: Tom Alkire & Western WatersMay 19: Ling Ling Huang & Immaculate ConceptionClick Here to RSVP!

Join Unsolicited Press authors at Leikam Brewing for short readings, local beer, and conversation. Stop in for this evening event or make it part of a full weekend of books and breweries. https://www.unsolicitedpress.com/portland-book-festival

Inspired by Crater Lake National Park, Michael Gordon’s Natural History weaves Native and symphonic music in this paean to the natural landscape. Plus, hear works by two of classical music’s most intrepid pioneers: Stravinsky’s experimental musical essay on wind and brass sounds, Symphonies of Wind Instruments,and Beethoven’s vivacious and dramatic Symphony No. 1. Oregonian Grace Miedziak enhances the program with a new work that celebrates the Pacific Northwest.

• Norman Huynh Conductor
• Steiger Butte Drum and Singers Native American ensemble
• Members of Portland State University Chamber Choir Ethan Sperry, Conductor
• Oregon Symphony

• STRAVINSKY Symphonies of Wind Instruments
• Michael GORDON Natural History
• Grace MIEDZIAK Cascadence (Rizzo-Cummings Emerging Composer Fellow at the Oregon Symphony, Oregon Symphony commission)
• BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21

This concert is part of Classical Series A, and is eligible for the Choose Your Own Series (Portland only). Concert length is approximately 1 hour 33 minutes, with one intermission.

This pre-concert talk takes place one hour before the Sunday matinee performance.

SUN, NOV 1, 1PM: Conductor Norman Huynh and Rizzo-Cummings Emerging Composer Fellow Grace Miedziak with All Classical Radio host Warren Black.

When the nation and culture you grew up in and love have been taken over by a war-waging fascist dictatorship, how do you come to understand the nature and causes of what has happened? Perhaps you can do this only after you fled for your life. How then would you look at the ruins left inside yourself? This was the situation faced by one of the most sophisticated and profound thinkers of the twentieth century, Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), when he found himself living in Los Angeles during World War II after escaping from Nazi Germany.

In this Delve we will study Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life—the amazing book he wrote between 1944 and 1949 to explore his feelings about the calamitous situation of a world facing despotism. We will read the entire book and focus on selected essays. The book is made up of 153 very short essays, ranging from 1-3 pages. The essays focus his philosophical genius on deeply observed and subtle aspects of ourselves that contribute to or resist the ways in which we are socialized that result in alienation, loss of will and agency, and unfulfillment. He explores consumer culture, the arts, and politics along with his recollections of the rise of fascism. Each essay is a deep and intricate knot of feelings and ideas, presented by a contemplative, perseverant, unblinking thinker of the highest order Although written in grief, Adorno always seeks hope by confronting, with maximum honesty and penetration, the deep roots of the problems human society faces. Minima Moralia is a monument to the sensitive study of culture and our psyches amidst disaster trauma. Adorno’s brilliant and strong style make this book a pleasure to think with. In this Delve we will read the entire book and focus on selected entries.

Text:
Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life<, Theodor Adorno, translator E. F. N. Jephcott (Verso)

Access Program
We want our writing classes and seminars to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some people. Our Access Program offers writing class and seminar tuitions at a reduced rate. Most writing classes have at least one access spot available.

Please apply here for access rate tuition. Contact Susan Moore at [email protected] if you have questions.

Liaison position
Every in-person class and seminar at Literary Arts has one liaison position. Liaisons perform specific duties for each class meeting. If you are a liaison for a class or seminar, the full amount of your tuition is covered by Literary Arts.

Apply here for the liaison position.

Lewis & Clark College Department of Music and Portland State University’s School of Music and Theater present an afternoon with Grammy Award-winning soprano Audrey Luna on Wednesday, November 4, 2026 from 3pm to 6pm in Evans Auditorium.

Featuring special guest Gary Hershberger (Mike Nelson) in person!

Joins us for the complete Twin Peaks series on the big screen for the first time in history! We continue our year-long celebration of the greatest TV show of all time The Missing Pieces. Rarely shown in theaters, this feature film presents deleted scenes from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me assembled together as an untold portion of the story’s prequel. Following a Q&A, we’ll then begin The Return with episodes “My Log Has a Message for You” and “The Stars Turn and a Time Presents Itself.”

Gary Hershberger will be signing autographs and taking photos with fans for an additional fee at the event.