The full schedule for 2023 Portland Book Festival will be released by October 4! General Admission passes, Special Event ticket, and Umbrella passes are available now.
Anis Mojgani's verses create the yearning for rebirth, thriving love—a love of self and tenderness in a sorrowful world. Charif Shanahan articulates the need we all share for real intimacy and connection, and proves, time and again, that the true cost of our separateness is the love that our survival requires. Moderated by Mindy Nettifee.
Stephanie Adams-Santos's incantatory long poem draws the reader into a dreamworld where the barrier between life and death grows porous, populated by ancestors and spirits. Megan Kamalei Kakimoto's debut story collection is a blazing, bodily, raucous journey through contemporary Hawaiian identity and womanhood. Moderated by Kayla Kumari Upadhyahya.
Elisa Gonzalez dramatizes the mind in motion as it grapples with something more than an event: she writes of a whole life, to transcendent effect. Jae Nichelle taps into her experiences of growing up in the South as a queer Black woman to courageously confront the effects of a forced religion and the inherent dangers of living life in a female body. Marisa Siegel moderates.
Join 2023 National Book Award–honored authors Paul Harding and Paisley Rekdal in a cross-genre conversation on how to bring historical voices to life, and how to translate US history for a contemporary literary landscape. Moderated by Anis Mojgani, Oregon’s current Poet Laureate. Presented in partnership with the National Book Foundation.
Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a black British poet making her thrilling American debut explores the importance of “quiet” in producing forms of community, resistance, and love. Braiding memoir, theory, and criticism in his debut work of nonfiction, award-winning poet Roger Reeves finds new meaning in silence, protest, fugitivity, freedom, and ecstasy. Moderated by John Freeman.
Oliver de la Paz eloquently invokes the perseverance and myth of the Filipino diaspora in America. Paisley Rekdal draws a powerful, necessary connection between the completion of the transcontinental railroad and the Chinese Exclusion Act. Moderated by Eric Tran.
Jane Hirshfield, the author of “some of the most important poetry in the world today”, and Major Jackson, an acclaimed poet and preeminent voice in contemporary literature. Moderated by Matthew Zapruder.
Celebrate the tenth and final installment of the boundary-pushing literary journal, which explores all the ways of coming to an end. Featuring editor John Freeman and contributors Omar El Akkad, Debra Gwartney, and Sasha LaPointe.
