Pop-up: BIPOC Reading Series Presents Character Work

Paul Susi reads from his new memoir Character Work at Portland Art Museum in the Northwest Art Gallery (Level 4, Room 400), paired with Andrea Bowers, Radical Patience. Presented by BIPOC Reading Series and hosted by Kyle Yoshioka and Jessica Meza-Torres.

About Character Work:

Nearly two decades into his theatrical career, Paul Susi is cast as Chee Gong, a Chinese immigrant executed in 1889 for a crime he did not commit and buried in an unmarked grave in Susi’s hometown of Portland, Oregon. This role sets off a meditation on cultural erasure and how the act of “forgetting” can be both a survival mechanism and a trap. But the heart of Character Work takes place offstage: Susi has spent many years managing shelters for unhoused people, and out of that work grew his mutual aid project, PDX ID Assistance, a radical effort that literally gives people back their identities. His book is at once a memoir, a manifesto, and a startlingly honest account of what compassion can look like.