Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall

Singer, rapper, and author Dessa joins the Oregon Symphony for an evening of soaring ballads, thoughtful pop songs, and rap anthems. The concert also features new monologues in Dessa’s signature style, sharing true stories with intellectual rigor, tenderness, candor, and wit. Presented in collaboration with Literary Arts as an extension of the Portland Book Festival.

Singer, rapper, and author Dessa will join the Oregon Symphony for an evening of soaring ballads, writerly pop songs, and rap anthems. The concert also will include a series of new monologues, crafted in Dessa’s signature style—true stories told with intellectual rigor, tenderness, candor, and wit. Don’t miss this landmark performance, presented in collaboration with Literary Arts as an extension of the Portland Book Festival.

• Sarah Hicks Conductor
• Dessa Vocals
• Oregon Symphony

This concert is part of the Special Concerts series, and is eligible for the Choose Your Own Series (Portland only).

Concert begins promptly at the time listed.

November 15, 2026

Family Series

Alice McLerran’s classic children’s book The Mountain that Loved a Bird tells a heartwarming story of unlikely friendship between a barren mountain and a visiting bird named Joy. Experience Portland-based composer Caroline Shaw’s musical interpretation of the story as the book is narrated live in this celebration of friendship that teaches us the transformative power of kindness and care.

• Su-Han Yang Harold & Arlene Schnitzer Associate Conductor
• Pam Mahon Narrator
• Dance West Jason Davis, Artistic & Technical Director
• Pacific Youth Choir Chris Maunu, Artistic Director; Amber Schroeder, Associate Conductor
• Oregon Symphony

This concert is part of the Family Series, and is eligible for the Choose Your Own Series (Portland only).

This concert is part of the 2026/27 Sounds Like Portland festival.

This December, The Moth’s anticipated Mainstage season comes to Portland in partnership with Literary Arts.

One foot in front of another…

Join The Moth this fall for TIGHTROPE, an evening of extraordinary true stories about what happens when there’s no clear path—only the courage to keep moving forward.

Stories of balancing without a net. Trusting your gut. Taking the leap before you know where you’ll land. Of big gambles and near misses, quiet acts of bravery and glorious mistakes. Of sending the text, booking the flight, sharing the secret you’ve carried for years, and watching everything change.

The Mainstage tour is The Moth’s signature live show, featuring a carefully curated lineup of tellers—writers, artists, adventurers, community members, and unexpected voices—sharing true personal stories, told live and without notes.

Come spend an evening on the edge. One step can change the whole story.

About The Moth

The Moth is a global storytelling nonprofit with the mission to inspire people to listen and share openly, think and feel deeply, and expand their understanding of one another. Since 1997, The Moth has presented more than 70,000 true stories—told live and without notes—in 11 countries, across 4 continents. Today, The Moth produces 600+ live shows annually, as well as the Peabody Award-winning The Moth Radio Hour, and the popular The Moth Podcast. Through workshops for students, educators, adults, advocates, and professionals, The Moth guides thousands of new storytellers each year in finding and sharing their own voices. Learn more at themoth.org

To create access for our wider community, we need the support of event sponsors.
If you or your company is interested in sponsorship, please email [email protected].

Isabel Wilkerson is the author of The New York Times bestsellers The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. She was the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism and was awarded the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. Her work blends history, sociology and reportage to explore race in America, how unspoken histories and hierarchies inform our present moment.

Ben Rhodes is a writer, political commentator, and national security analyst. He is the author of The New York Times bestsellers After the Fall and The World as It Is. From 2009 to 2017, Ben served as a speechwriter and deputy national security advisor to President Obama. He is currently co-host of Pod Save the World, a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, a contributor for MS NOW, a senior advisor to former President Obama, and chair of National Security Action, which he co-founded with Jake Sullivan in 2018.

Literary Arts is pleased to present New York Times bestselling author Louise Erdrich at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on March 18, 2027.

Her appearance will conclude months of engaging programs and events through Multnomah County Library’s Everybody Reads program, a community-wide project that promotes shared reading and discussion around a single book.

Erdrich’s 2025 novel, The Mighty Red, is the library’s 2027 reading selection and the focal point of this year’s Everybody Reads. From January through March, library-led discussions and activities will center on the book’s themes around love, family, time, and the complexities of being human.

About the book:

In this stunning novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author Louise Erdrich tells a story of love, natural forces, spiritual yearnings, and the tragic impact of uncontrollable circumstances on ordinary people’s lives.

In the Red River Valley of North Dakota, several lives revolve around a wedding fraught with desire, jealousy, and uncertainty. Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed goth who can’t read her own future but will settle for fulfilling his. Her best friend, Hugo, a gentle, red-haired, homeschooled giant, also loves Kismet and is determined to steal her away and build a life together. Kismet’s mother, Crystal, drives a truck for Gary’s family, and on her nightly runs, tunes in to the darkness of late-night radio, experiences visions of guardian angels, and worries about what’s to come, for her daughter and herself.

The Mighty Red is Louise Erdrich at her consummate best. A novel of tender humor, disquietude, yearning, community, and family, it is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. Human time, deep time, Red River time, and geological time are explored alongside the impact of crises in our own time—climate change, the depletion of natural resources, the economic meltdown of 2008. It is a story about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.

Craig Fehrman is a journalist, historian, and the author of This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark, which offers a fresh account of one of the defining expeditions in American history and incorporates the stories of those long left out of the historical narrative.

Since 1998, the Oregon Historical Society has presented the Mark O. Hatfield Lecture Series, bringing together the nation’s top historians and award-winning authors for thought-provoking evenings of history. The series began at the suggestion of Senator Hatfield and continues as a tribute to his legacy of public service and as an opportunity to share stories of the people and events that have shaped history. Past speakers include notable historians and authors Heather Cox Richardson, David McCullough, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Jon Meacham, Cokie Roberts, and Isabel Wilkerson.

Thank you for purchasing tickets to Mark O. Hatfield Lecture Series, which supports the Oregon Historical Society's work to preserve our state's history and make it accessible to everyone!

Kiran Desai was born in New Delhi, India, educated in India, England, and the United States, and now lives in New York. She is the author of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, which was published to unanimous acclaim in over 22 countries, and The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Booker Prize in 2006, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. Her third novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker. In 2015, The Economic Times listed her as one of the 20 most influential global Indian women.