Episodes

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 Ili...

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...

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 r...

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 So...

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 rece...

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 Thin...

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 extrao...

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 conversat...

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...

This episode features readings and conversations from an event entitled “I See My Light Shining.” The event was a part of the Elders Project, which is sponsored by Columbia University and features interviews with African Americans from across the country. Here in Portland, acclaimed writer Renée Watson interviewed dozens of Portlanders about their lives for the project. Through the episode, we’ll take you through the event and hear the stories of some of the elders Watson interviewed. In this e...

This episode features Malcolm Gladwell in conversation about his newest book, Revenge of The Tipping Point. He spoke with Literary Arts executive director Andrew Proctor in front of a live audience in downtown Portland in October 2024. The Tipping Point hit shelves in 2000 and became a true cultural phenomenon, spending a whopping 334 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and turning everyone—from your priest to your barista—into budding social scientists. Multiple New York Times bestsell...

We have been proud to partner with the National Book Foundation to present conversations featuring National Book Award finalists as part of the annual Literary Arts Portland Book Festival. The 2024 event was on the theme of awards and activism. National Book Foundation executive director Ruth Dickey led a conversation between journalist Robert Samuels, co-author of His Name Is George Floyd, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and poet m.s. RedCherries, author...

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...

This week we have a conversation from the 2024 Portland Book Festival on first-generation American food: cooking that combines tradition and lineage with evolution and personal stories. The conversation features a cookbook author and home chef, restaurant co-owners, and a writer and food editor. We’ll hear from Kristina Cho, author of the cookbook Chinese Enough, which blends the flavors of traditional Cantonese cooking with California ingredients, reflecting her current home, and a midwestern s...

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 Ili...

This week we have a 2024 Portland Book Fest conversation about Planet Earth, and remarkable people who are working to understand it and protect its wonders. Our moderator is Zoë Carpenter, a writer and editor who has reported all over the United States and South America for Rolling Stone, The Nation, Guernica, and other publications. She currently teaches for the Writers in the Schools program with Literary Arts. Zoë led a conversation with two Portland-based writers. Ferris Jabr is the author o...

Each year, Portland area youth spend months writing and competing in poetry slam competitions on high school campuses across the city. And each April, 20 finalists compete for the title of city-wide Portland slam champ at Verselandia! in front of an audience of nearly 1,000. We’re excited to share that the 2025 Verselandia! competition returns to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Thursday, April 24 at 7 pm. For more information visit our website literary-arts.org. This episode, the theme is l...

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 So...

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 r...

In this episode, we feature the celebrated novelist and screenwriter Alice Hoffman. She’s in conversation with the former Director of the Multnomah County Library, Vailey Oehlke, at the Portland Book Festival in 2016. Hoffman has published over 40 books, including the 2024 novel about Anne Frank’s life, When We Flew Away. Most of her books have been novels, but shas also published short story collections, and books for young adults and children. Her work almost always contains a magical element...

In this recording, Michael Ondaatje shares his fourth novel, Anil’s Ghost. He begins by giving an overview of the plot, which is set in a civil war-torn Sri Lanka at the end of the twentieth century. The story follows Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, and educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist to investigate human rights violations. Anil, along with archaeologist Sarath Diyasena, discovers the skeleton of a recently murdered man in ...

This week we are taking you back to Portland Book Festival 2024, with a conversation on the theme of “reconciliation” featuring Renée Watson, discussing her latest book, Skin & Bones, and Joe Wilkins, author of The Entire Sky, plus one of my absolute favorite moderators, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Mitchell S. Jackson. Renée’s novel, Skin & Bones, is about a plus-size Black woman building a life in Portland, Oregon, and navigating motherhood, daughterhood, friendship, and roman...

This week we are featuring a conversation from the 2024 Portland Book Festival. The incomparable Richard Powers came to Portland to discuss his new novel, Playground, with Literary Arts Executive Director Andrew Proctor. Any opportunity to spend time with Richard Powers and his vast, unique, amazing mind is a gift. He discusses how he chose to combine the setting of the ocean with the digital age and AI, and shares the astonishing story of how he became a novelist. He also talks about how his mo...

When Annie Dillard won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, she was the youngest women ever to do so. She won for a book published the previous year called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which is a nonfiction book that meditates on writing, solitude, the natural world, and spirituality. The book had a profound impact at the time of its publication and garnered comparisons to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Dillard has gone on to have genre bending career, publishing over a dozen titles including book-length nonf...