Episodes

On this episode of The Archive Project, we feature multi-genre bestselling poet and author of thirty-eight books, Kwame Alexander, who discusses his memoir Why Fathers Cry at Night with James Beard award-winning chef of Portland’s Kann, and author of the cookbook Everybody’s Table, Gregory Gourdet. Their conversation was recorded at Powell’s Books in downtown Portland. Alexander is best-known for his children’s books, including The Door of No Return and The Crossover, which was recently made in...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a talk from Edwidge Danticat from Portland Arts & Lectures on May 12, 2022. Danticat became nationally recognized with her debut novel published in 1994 Breath, Eyes, Memory which was an Oprah Book Club selection and national bestseller. Since then, she has gone on to publish more than a dozen books in multiple genres—novels, short fiction, memoir, literary criticism, young adult, and children’s books—many which were bestsellers including the F...

On this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a conversation between Kiese Laymon and Imbolo Mbue on storytelling, environmental racism, and activism, recorded at the 2023 AWP Conference in Seattle, Washington. Set in a fictional African village being polluted by an oil company, Imbolo Mbue’s latest novel, How Beautiful We Were, confronts environmental devastation, corporate colonialism and activism. Kiese Laymon, author of the memoir Heavy, has multigenerational roots in Mississippi have ...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature some of the incredible slam poets who performed as part of Verselandia!—the annual, city-wide youth poetry slam championship event, presented by Literary Arts—in 2022. Each year, youth spend months writing and competing in slams on high school campuses across the city. Then, each April, about twenty student finalists compete for the title of city-wide Portland slam champ. What is important about this episode is that these young poets are thril...

Join us in welcoming Ann Patchett back to Portland on Thursday, September 7 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. She’ll share her newest novel, TOM LAKE, and will be in conversation with writer Cheryl Strayed. Find more info and tickets here. In this episode of The Archive Project, we hear from beloved, best-selling novelist, essayist, and bookstore owner Ann Patchett. The talk in this episode is from her appearance at Portland Arts & Lectures in 2013. Patchett joined us on the publication of a...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we are celebrating the kickoff of National Poetry Month with a special event, recorded in front of a live audience at Literary Arts event space in downtown Portland on September 17, 2022. This event was part of a partnership with the Alano Club of Portland and their Artists in Recovery series, about the intersections of mental health and substance use recovery, creativity, and building community. Learn more at PortlandAlano.org. Alano Club director of dev...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we’re reaching back more than 30 years into the archive to feature the prolific novelist Jane Smiley from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in 1991. This period was an inflection point in her career. At that time, she had established herself as an important and respected American writer, but had yet to find a large audience—to this day, many believe The Greenlanders, published just three years before this talk in 1988, to be a significantly underappreciated...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature journalist Patrick Radden Keefe from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in February 2023. Keefe is the author of five books of nonfiction, most recently Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Rebels, and Crooks, a collection of essays from his work as a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. NPR called Rogues “a wonderful book, not only because Keefe’s prose is masterful, but because he has a preternatural gift for reading people. He recognizes that ...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Lauren Groff from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in early 2023 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Groff is the author of six books of fiction, the last three of which, Fates and Furies, Florida, and Matrix were all national bestsellers and all finalists for the National Book Award. One of the many delights in reading Groff’s books is the dramatic shift in time, place, and focus from title to title. She is not an artist writing the same boo...

This week on The Archive Project, we bring you a lecture from the 2003/2004 season of Portland Arts & Lectures, featuring renowned memoirist and short story writer Tobias Wolff. Best known for his memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army, Wolff has also published award-winning fiction, mostly short stories, and in this lecture is discussing his 2003 novel, Old School, which was a finalist for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In his lecture, Wolff explores the balance and conflict b...

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...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we reach back to the year 2000 to highlight one of the best conversations about writing found in our archives: A special event with Amy Bloom and Michael Cunningham. Amy Bloom had just published a collection of stories entitled, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, and Cunningham had published one his most important and bestselling novels, The Hours, just two years earlier. The Hours went on to become a movie that received nine Academy Award nominatio...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a conversation from Pickathon 2022. Literary Arts partnered with the Pickathon music festival to program on-stage author readings, and for a live recording of The Archive Project at the Lucky Barn stage. At The Archive Project live, Oregon poet laureate Anis Mojgani led a wide-ranging conversation with Portland-based multidisciplinary writers and artists Dao Strom, author most recently of the music and poetry project Traveler’s Ode/Instrument; a...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Scottish novelist Douglas Stuart, winner of the Booker Prize for his debut novel, Shuggie Bain. He speaks about his new novel, Young Mungo, with Portland-based author and Oregon Book Award winner Omar El Akkad. They discuss the desire and longing at the heart of the story of the love between two working class young men from different religious backgrounds in Glasgow. A highlight is Stuart’s description of how his previous career in the textile i...

On this episode of The Archive Project, we feature multi-genre bestselling poet and author of thirty-eight books, Kwame Alexander, who discusses his memoir Why Fathers Cry at Night with James Beard award-winning chef of Portland’s Kann, and author of the cookbook Everybody’s Table, Gregory Gourdet. Their conversation was recorded at Powell’s Books in downtown Portland. Alexander is best-known for his children’s books, including The Door of No Return and The Crossover, which was recently made in...

In this episode, we feature a conversation between Louise Erdrich and Portland-based writer Trevino Brings Plenty from the 2021 Portland Book Festival. Louise Erdrich joined us virtually from Minneapolis for an event in front of a live audience at the Newmark Theater. She is on our most celebrated and writers alive. Her novels include The Night Watchman, which won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, The Round House, which won the National Book Award for Fiction, Love Medicine, and LaRose received the Natio...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Abdulzarak Gurnah from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in September 2022. He joined us as part of the American launch of his most recent novel Afterlives. He had just won the Nobel prize for literature, after a long and distinguished career as a novelist in Britain, thought he was relatively unknown here in the United States. In his talk, Gurnah describes the rich layers of cultural influence that formed his native Zanzibar, now known as Tanza...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a Portland Book Festival event with two prominent young adult novelists whose work appeals to readers of any age. Ellen Hagan’s novel in verse, Don’t Call Me a Hurricane, explores the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy on a New Jersey shore community through the perspective of Eliza, who is fighting to protect her home from development while navigating the lingering trauma of the storm and the climate crisis—plus the additional crisis of having a cru...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a talk by Amor Towles from a Literary Arts special event on February 1, 2023. Towles is the author of three novels including the huge, international bestseller, A Gentleman in Moscow. He joined us to talk about his latest work The Lincoln Highway, also a bestselling novel, which began for Towles a full twenty years before its publication with a simple initial image: A warden driving a young man home for a juvenile detention center. From this ju...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a talk from Edwidge Danticat from Portland Arts & Lectures on May 12, 2022. Danticat became nationally recognized with her debut novel published in 1994 Breath, Eyes, Memory which was an Oprah Book Club selection and national bestseller. Since then, she has gone on to publish more than a dozen books in multiple genres—novels, short fiction, memoir, literary criticism, young adult, and children’s books—many which were bestsellers including the F...

On this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a conversation between Kiese Laymon and Imbolo Mbue on storytelling, environmental racism, and activism, recorded at the 2023 AWP Conference in Seattle, Washington. Set in a fictional African village being polluted by an oil company, Imbolo Mbue’s latest novel, How Beautiful We Were, confronts environmental devastation, corporate colonialism and activism. Kiese Laymon, author of the memoir Heavy, has multigenerational roots in Mississippi have ...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Ada Limón from the closing night of the 2022-23 Portland Arts & Lectures series. Limón is the author of six books of poetry and a finalist for numerous prizes for her work. In 2022, Limon published a collection of new poems The Hurting Kind and was also named the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, at the age of 46. Of this recognition Limón said, “Again and again, I have been witness to poetry’s immense power to reconnect us to the world,...

On this episode of The Archive Project, we have a conversation recorded exclusively for our show. We are featuring Portland Youth Philharmonic, the nation’s oldest youth orchestra, and we’ve brought together a conductor, a composer, a poet, and a vocalist to discuss their cross-disciplinary collaboration on a poetry-inspired piece titled Because I Will Not Despair. The piece is based on the poetry of Oregon Literary Fellowship recipient and Oregon Book Award finalist Alicia Jo Rabins. Composer J...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Charles Simic from a Poetry Downtown event in 2007. Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1938, and some of his earliest memories are of German bombs falling on the city. Later the Russian army would arrive. In 1954, Simic was brought to the United States by his family and, at the age fifteen, he began to learn English. It’s remarkable that nearly half a century later, Simic would be named Poet Laureate of the United States, the sam...