The Archive Project

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 Reclaimed Russia, and became a household name with their bestselling book Surviving Autocracy, which was published in 2020 and written as both a warning and a call to action in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election. Gessen’s talk is a rare glimpse into their childhood and early professional life – growing up in the Soviet Union and emigrating at the age of 14; their early experience in Boston and how it shaped their life personally and professionally; their return to Moscow as a journalist and a rare and strange meeting with Vladimir Putin, and how their grandmothers’ life stories shaped their work. Gessen is one of the rare contemporary commentators on authoritarianism who has lived under such a regime, and in a democracy – and they have an urgent warning for us all. “I’ve always thought that I was very lucky to know when I had to leave (Russia) because one of the hardest decisions that somebody has to make…is figuring out when your home is no longer your home. It was kind of a great favor that Putin did to me.” M. Gessen is a Russian American author, translator, and journalist. They’ve written 11 books, including Surviving Autocracy, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction), and an award-winning account of the Boston Marathon bombers titled The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy. They spent years covering Putin’s regime in Russia and was famously dismissed as the editor of the Russian popular science magazine Vokrug sveta for refusing to cover a Putin event they felt was propaganda. Gessen received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the Hitchens Prize, an Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary, and the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. They’ve written for many US publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker. Gessen is a distinguished professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College. They live in New York with their wife and children.

In this episode, we feature Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation with Omar El Akkad from the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in October 2024. Coates’ versatility and virtuosity as a writer makes him one of the most singular and important writers at work today. He first rose to national recognition as a staff writer at The Atlantic Magazine, and in particular for an article he wrote in 2014 titled The Case for Reparations. A year later, Coates published his second book, a long essay called Between the World and Me which became an international bestseller. Coates went on to write a novel called The Water Dancer, for Marvel’s Black Panther comic book series, and a published collection of essays titled We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. For his work he has won a National Magazine Award, a MacArthur fellowship and the National Book Award, among many other prizes. He joined us in fall 2024 to talk about The Message, a new book of essays set in Senegal, South Carolina and Palestine about how our stories – personal or political – can both hide and reveal the truth. Coates is in conversation with Omar El Akkad, who is a journalist and author of the novels American War, What Strange Paradise and most recently One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, his debut book of nonfiction which publishes in February 2025. Ta-Nehisi Coates is an award-winning author and journalist. His books include Between The World and Me and The Water Dancer. He is currently a writer-in-residence at Howard University. Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award and the Oregon Book Award. His books have been translated into 13 languages. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of 100 novels that shaped our world.

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 selection is the memoir Solito by Javier Zamora. For information about how to engage with the program, visit the Multnomah County Library’s web site. I am thrilled to say Javier Zamora will be in Portland on Tuesday, March 11 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall for the culminating event of the 2025 Everybody Reads Program. For now, let’s return to the 2024 Everybody Reads event, featuring Gabrielle Zevin and her novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Gabrielle Zevin has been steadily publishing fiction for almost two decades and has also written occasional criticism as well as award-winning screenplays. But it was Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow that catapulted her to the stratosphere of literary stardom. It was a #1 New York Times bestseller and spent over 50 weeks on the fiction bestseller list. To be sure, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is about video games, and makes a convincing argument for the power and potential of narrative storytelling in video games. But really, it is about making art, and questions about originality, appropriation, and ambition that come with that pursuit. And perhaps more so, it is a love story, about friends and creative partners, and the excitement, joy, tragedy, and betrayal that come with any long relationship. It’s about something, I’d wager, we’ve all been thinking about the past few years: connection. Tickets for Everybody Reads 2025 with Javier Zamora are on sale now! Find your tickets here. Gabrielle Zevin is a New York Times best-selling novelist whose books have been translated into forty languages. Her tenth novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, was a New York Times Best Seller, a Sunday Times Best Seller, and a selection of the Tonight Show’s Fallon Book Club. Tomorrow was Amazon.com’s #1 Book of the Year, Time Magazine’s #1 Book of the Year, a New York Times Notable Book, and the winner of both the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction and the Book of the Month Club’s Book of the Year. Following a twenty-five-bidder auction, the feature film rights to Tomorrow were acquired by Temple Hill and Paramount Studios. The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry also spent many months on the New York Times bestseller list. A.J. Fikry was honored with the Southern California Independent Booksellers Award for Fiction, the Japan Booksellers’ Prize, among other honors. A.J. Fikry is now a feature film with a screenplay by Zevin. She has also written children’s books, including the award-winning Elsewhere. She is the screenwriter of Conversations with Other Women (Helena Bonham Carter) for which she received an Independent Spirit Award Nomination for Best First Screenplay. She has occasionally written criticism for the New York Times Book Review and NPR’s All Things Considered, and she began her writing career, at age fourteen, as a music critic for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. Zevin is a graduate of Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles.

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 received a Pulitzer Prize for the series, How Race is Lived in America. Somehow, between reporting trips, he also found time to write multiple award-winning, best-selling books. He won the National Book Award in 2006 for The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those who Survived the Great American Dustbowl, which was a New York Times bestseller and led to a Ken Burns documentary. Egan joined us to talk about his most recent book is A Fever in the Heartland: The Klu Klux’s Plot to Take Over American, and the Woman who Stopped Them. Once again, Egan turns his attention to an American disaster—this time, a social and political disaster of monstrous moral proportions, tracing the swift rise and eventual collapse of the Klu Klux Klan in 1920’s Indiana. A place and time, he notes, “where one in three white males swore on a Bible to uphold white supremacy.” A Fever in the Heartland is rigorously researched, and deeply — overwhelmingly — troubling. As a reader, it is not hard to draw parallels between these events that occurred a century ago, and all that is happening now. Egan himself said, in a recent interview, “I’m a big believer in the line that history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes.” But, to explore such a dark chapter in our history requires a firm belief in our potential as a country and as a species. The only way to rise to that potential is to see ourselves clearly and learn from our past. Timothy Egan is an American journalist and author of ten books. The most recent, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, was an immediate New York Times bestseller. Egan worked for The New York Times for 18 years, first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent, and then as a national enterprise reporter. As part of a team of reporters Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2001 for writing a series called How Race is Lived in America. Egan lives in Seattle with his family.

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 Things, to moderate their conversation. This conversation was titled “Deceit and Dark Humor.” Both novels featuring protagonists who are knowingly lying to the people around them: Kushner’s narrator is a spy tasked with infiltrating an anarchist cooperative in France and is actively deceiving everyone she encounters, while Senna’s protagonist, Jane, spirals into more and more lies as she tries to create a television show with a big-shot Hollywood producer. We have a special treat at the end of the episode. Another feature of Portland Book Festival is the annual launch of our Writers in the Schools anthology, featuring creative writing from Portland-area public high school students. We’ll hear from two students: William Nobles, Franklin HS, short story Ceiling Man Ari Romero, junior at Lincoln HS, piece called Missing the Mark Rachel Kushner is the author of Creation Lake, her latest novel, The Hard Crowd, her acclaimed essay collection, and the internationally bestselling novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books are translated into twenty-seven languages. Danzy Senna is the author of four previous works of fiction, including the bestselling Caucasia and, most recently, Colored Television, as well as a memoir. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, she teaches writing at the University of Southern California. Mat Johnson is a Philip H. Knight Chair of the Humanities at the University of Oregon. His publications include the novels Invisible Things, Loving Day, and Pym, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot, and the graphic novel Incognegro. Johnson is the recipient of the American Book Award, the United States Artists James Baldwin Fellowship, The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.

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 extraordinary songwriter and musician, who captivate and change the world through their music and their romance. Beginning in Bombay in the fifties, moving to London in the sixties, and New York for the last quarter century, the novel pulsates with a half-century of music and celebrates the power of rock ‘n’ roll. In this episode, Rushdie discusses the musical and mythological influences that inspired this ambitious work of magical realism. “The thing that I wanted to do most of all was to write a love story. And to find a way of writing a contemporary love story that was neither gushily sentimental nor fashionably cynical, but which could face up to great passion and try and make sense of it. And so, in my usual perverse way, while trying to write a modern story I found myself thinking about an ancient myth.” Salman Rushdie is the author of several novels, including Grimus, Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, and Shalimar the Clown. He has written collections of short stories, including East, West, and co-edited with Elizabeth West a collection of Indian literature in English, Mirrorwork. He has also published several works of nonfiction, among them The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz, and Joseph Anton, a memoir of his life under the fatwa issued after the publication of The Satanic Verses. His fourteenth novel, Victory City, released in 2023.

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 conversation, along with his early career as a translator of poems from the French. Siri Hustvedt is a novelist and essayist; her essays include the collections A Pleas for Eros and the memoir The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. Her novels include The Summer Without Men and The Blazing World. In this conversation she talks about the book she was writing at the time, The Sorrows of an American. Auster and Hustvedt were married in 1982. They came to Portland in January of 2006 and interviewed each other. At times it feels as if you are eavesdropping on an especially intelligent dinner table conversation. Their respect for each other’s work is delightful to hear – and several of the questions they remark they’ve never asked the other! It’s a rare opportunity to listen in on two great minds in conversation. Paul Auster was the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Bloodbath Nation, Baumgartner, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. Among his other honors are the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke, and the Premio Napoli for Sunset Park. In 2012, he was the first recipient of the NYC Literary Honors in the category of fiction. He was also a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions), the PEN/Faulkner Award (The Music of Chance), the Edgar Award (City of Glass), and the Man Booker Prize (4 3 2 1). Auster was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He died at age seventy-seven in 2024. Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, three collections of essays, a work of non-fiction, and six novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Her most recent novel The Blazing World was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won The Los Angeles Book Prize for fiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weil Cornell Medical College in New York. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.

It’s Valentine’s Day weekend, and love is in the air on The Archive Project. We are featuring two conversations from the 2024 Portland Book Festival with bestselling contemporary romance writers. In the last few decades, writing romance has become big business. From the Fabio-adorned mass market paperbacks of the 90s to self-published ebooks like Fifty Shades of Gray in the early 2000s, to now, when we are amidst an explosion of the genre with more than 39 million print copies of romance novels sold in 2023 alone. Even local libraries in Portland have said they’ve seen the number of romance novels checked out double since 2018. Readers are officially hot and bothered by this genre, and today we have conversations with some of the best contemporary romance writers. Later in the episode we’ll hear from Red, White & Royal Blue megastar author Casey McQuiston, discussing their latest book, The Pairing, with Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth. But first up, OPB’s own Crystal Ligori, host of All Things Considered, is in conversation with Lily Chu, author of The Takedown and Katelyn Doyle, author of Just Some Stupid Love Story. Lily Chu loves ordering the second-cheapest wine, wearing perfume all the time, and staying up far too late reading a good book. She writes uplit fiction set in Toronto with strong Asian characters. Her latest novel is titled The Takedown. Katelyn Doyle is a writer based in Los Angeles. Just Some Stupid Love Story is her debut rom-com. She also writes as the USA Today bestselling historical romance novelist Scarlett Peckham. Casey McQuiston is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of romantic comedies, including One Last Stop, I Kissed Shara Wheeler, and Red, White & Royal Blue, whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Bon Appetit. Born and raised in southern Louisiana, Casey now lives in New York City with a poodle mix named Pepper. Their latest novel is The Pairing.

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 to her Chinese family tradition, catapulted her onto the co-anchor chair on the CBS Evening News and made her a household name. Chung relates her battles and her victories with wit and humor and doesn’t hold back from calling out the sexism and racism she endured throughout her career. The book is also a portrait of an era in broadcast news where the lines between serious investigative journalism and tabloid fodder became blurred, a line Chung was often forced to walk against her will. Journalist Lisa Ling, of CBS News, said, “For generations of Asian Americans, Connie Chung will always be our superhero. Someone who looked like us who, on a national stage, held our most important political leaders accountable. She was bold, aggressive, and unafraid. So many of us pursued broadcast journalism because she singularly showed us it was possible. I didn’t think I could respect her any more than I already do, but this most candid account of her journey reminds us that Connie Chung is nothing short of a true American icon.” Connie Chung was interviewed by Literary Arts executive director Andrew Proctor, in front of a live audience in September 2024. Connie Chung, pioneer news anchor and reporter was the first woman to co-anchor the CBS Evening News, the flagship news broadcast on CBS. Connie was only the second woman to anchor any network evening broadcast in television history.

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 episode, we interview Watson about growing up in a predominantly black neighborhood in Northeast Portland, and how that community shaped her as a person. The event was hosted by Watson, and our guide for the episode is The Archive Project producer Matthew Workman. Renée Watson is a #1 New York Times Bestselling author. Her young adult novel, Piecing Me Together, received a Coretta Scott King Award and Newbery Honor. Her children’s picture books and novels for teens have received several awards and international recognition. Many of her books are inspired by her experiences growing up as a Black girl in the Pacific Northwest. Her poetry and fiction center around the experiences of Black girls and explore themes of home, identity, body image, and the intersections of race, class, and gender. Watson was a writer-in-residence for over twenty years teaching creative writing and theater in public schools and community centers throughout the nation. She founded I, Too Arts Collective, a nonprofit that was housed in the Harlem brownstone where Langston Hughes lived the last twenty years of his life. The organization hosted poetry workshops for youth and literary events for the community from 2016-2019. Watson is on the Council of Writers for the National Writing Project and is a member of the Academy of American Poets’ Education Advisory Council. Watson grew up in Portland, Oregon, and splits her time between Portland and New York City.

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 bestsellers followed, including Blink and Outliers, and in 2018, Gladwell co-founded Pushkin Industries, which that seeks to “expand the possibilities of spoken word audio,” and launched his wildly popular podcast, Revisionist History. In both his books and his podcasts, Gladwell reveals a world of hidden connections, everyday illusions, and overlooked details. He illuminates patterns in our policy and culture, and identifies the tiny tics that drive group behavior, introducing terms like, the Law of the Few, and the 10,000-hour rule into the larger cultural lexicon. Now, twenty-five years after The Tipping Point, Gladwell has returned to the ideas that first made him a household name. His new book, Revenge of The Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering, finds him once again exploring epidemics and viral behavior. This time, he is driven by a somewhat darker inquiry. We see the consequences of contagious phenomena and rethink the two most significant epidemics of our time: the opioid crises and Covid. Don’t worry, we are still treated Gladwell’s tremendous curiosity and humor, delving into such topics such as cheetah reproduction and the world’s most successful bank robbers. It is his most serious and personal book to date. With Revenge of The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell again proves himself one our finest storytellers. But more importantly: He helps us reimagine the stories that we tell about ourselves. Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times bestsellers — The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath. He is also the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, an audio content company that produces the podcasts Revisionist History, which reconsiders things both overlooked and misunderstood, and Broken Record, where he, Rick Rubin, and Bruce Headlam interview musicians across a wide range of genres. Gladwell has been included in the TIME 100 Most Influential People list and touted as one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers.

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 of Mother, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award in poetry. RedCherries’s Mother is a multidisciplinary work of poetry and prose about Indigenous identity; the narrator has been adopted out of her tribe and raised by a non-Indian family, and is now an adult seeking to connect with her origins. RedCherries brings in oral testimony, family lore, and more exploring pasts and futures both real and imaginary. She explains some of the research that she did for the project, and how it came to be in the form it took in Mother. Likewise, in His Name Is George Floyd, Robert Samuels and his co-author conducted hundreds of interviews with his family and friends in order to understand George Floyd’s singular life, as well as reporting and research into the history of institutional racism in the United States to place that life in the context of the systems this one man was up against. The result is a portrait of a man as well as that man’s America. The day this episode airs on the radio is May 25, 2025, which marks five years since George Floyd’s death – the book, His Name Is George Floyd, reckons with that day and its aftermath, but is, crucially, also the story of his life. Both books are deeply personal stories that offer insight into wider histories, drawing together both individual and shared past, present, and future. As m.s. RedCherries says, “storytelling is an act of sovereignty;” telling stories ensure survival. Robert Samuels is a national enterprise reporter for The Washington Post who focuses on politics, policy and the changing American identity. He is also the co-author of His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice, winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction and finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Nonfiction. Samuels has covered social issues in the District of Columbia, national politics and also serves as the newsroom’s analyst for figure skating. He grew up in the Bronx and is an alumnus of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, where he was editor in chief of the school newspaper, the Daily Northwestern. He has also worked as a staff writer at The Miami Herald and the New Yorker. m.s. RedCherries received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a JD from Arizona State University College of Law. She is a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and lives in Brooklyn.

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 Reclaimed Russia, and became a household name with their bestselling book Surviving Autocracy, which was published in 2020 and written as both a warning and a call to action in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election. Gessen’s talk is a rare glimpse into their childhood and early professional life – growing up in the Soviet Union and emigrating at the age of 14; their early experience in Boston and how it shaped their life personally and professionally; their return to Moscow as a journalist and a rare and strange meeting with Vladimir Putin, and how their grandmothers’ life stories shaped their work. Gessen is one of the rare contemporary commentators on authoritarianism who has lived under such a regime, and in a democracy – and they have an urgent warning for us all. “I’ve always thought that I was very lucky to know when I had to leave (Russia) because one of the hardest decisions that somebody has to make…is figuring out when your home is no longer your home. It was kind of a great favor that Putin did to me.” M. Gessen is a Russian American author, translator, and journalist. They’ve written 11 books, including Surviving Autocracy, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction), and an award-winning account of the Boston Marathon bombers titled The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy. They spent years covering Putin’s regime in Russia and was famously dismissed as the editor of the Russian popular science magazine Vokrug sveta for refusing to cover a Putin event they felt was propaganda. Gessen received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the Hitchens Prize, an Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary, and the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. They’ve written for many US publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker. Gessen is a distinguished professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College. They live in New York with their wife and children.

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 sensibility drawn from her upbringing in Ohio. Kristina is joined by Jolyn Chen and Louis Lin, co-owners of the Portland restaurant Xiao Ye, which bills itself as “first-generation American food.” Jolyn is the general manager of Xiao Ye, and Louis is the chef – they’re both business and life partners. They grew up in California, and each worked in hospitality for years before embarking on their own restaurant, where Jolyn designed the space and Louis designed the menu. Our moderator is novelist Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans, who was the editor of the esteemed food magazine Lucky Peach, and also grew up in California. Kristina, Jolyn, Louis, and Rachel discuss the intersections between their Asian-ness, their American-ness, and their Asian-American-ness, and how that all plays out in their relationships to food. They also talk about how where they grew up shapes their understanding of both food and family, and how the cooking and food they were drawn to comes from what was accessible or not to them early on. This relates to a conversation about the idea of authenticity, which is often misunderstood as being about tradition, but Louis eloquently describes as being true to oneself and where you are – Kristina gives an example of one of the women in her family using Bisquick in her steamed cupcakes. One thing I loved about this conversation is how clear it is that making food, and, crucially, feeding people – which is the ultimate goal, after all, of both home cooks and restauranteurs – is about nourishment but also about making art, and art that is reflective of both where you came from and where you are now. Let’s get into the conversation about what it means to make first-generation American food. Here are Jolyn Chen, Louis Lin, and Kristina Cho in conversation with moderator Rachel Khong. Kristina Cho is an award-winning cookbook author, recipe developer, home cook, baker, food stylist, and photographer. Her groundbreaking debut cookbook, Mooncakes and Milk Bread, won two James Beard awards and was described as an instant classic by The New York Times. Her latest cookbook is titled Chinese Enough. Jolyn Chen has worn many hats and lived many lives; born and raised in a small suburb of Los Angeles, she attended Cal Poly Pomona’s renowned Collins College and received her Bachelor’s in Hospitality Management. She spent her early years in the industry working in Washington, DC, soaking up all that the burgeoning food scene had to offer. Most notably was her time at Rose’s Luxury, where she really began to foster her own sense of hospitality. In true Jolyn fashion, while working two part-time jobs, she took a third at El Camino Travel, a start-up boutique travel company specializing in small, curated trips to emerging destinations. It was through that experience that she discovered her passion for design. Jolyn would move back to LA to pursue a career in Interior Design, completing the UCLA Extension program for Interior Architecture while working at Croft House & Ginny Macdonald Design. A few years later, she and Louis would begin their chapter in Portland, where she worked as a designer at Jessica Helgerson Interior Design before embarking on their own personal project, Xiao Ye. Louis Lin is a child of Taiwanese immigrants and was born and raised in that same suburb outside of LA. Unlike Jolyn, Louis always knew where his path would take him. After getting his degree in Business Economics and Accounting at UC Santa...

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 Iliad. Her genius has been to render these ancient stories in swift, unpretentious, contemporary language, allowing us to see that despite the rise and fall of empires, despite dramatic cultural shifts and technological progress, there are some essential truths about human nature—we are creatures of hubris and humility, of conflict and collaboration, of profound selfishness and of profound sacrifice. It is not hard to see in Homer’s Greece a startling similarity to our present-day world. Wilson assures us this is embedded in the text, writing in her introduction to The Iliad, “For a twenty-first-century reader, there is nothing unfamiliar about a partisan society riven by constant striving for celebrity dominance and attention.” “Tell me about a complicated man,” begins The Odyssey. From this first line, Wilson establishes herself as one of the most astute translators working in the English language, a translator both of Ancient Greek and of human complexity. “A translation, just like an original work of art, needs to have its own vision. And you need to have the humility to know that you can’t do everything. You have to commit to your own vision.” Emily Wilson is a classicist, translator, professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of the bestselling translations of Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad (winner of the 2024 Audie Award for Best Literary Fiction and Classics). In addition to Wilson’s Odyssey and Iliad, she has also published several other translated works, including translations of four tragedies of Euripides published in The Greek Plays: Bacchae, Helen, Electra, and Trojan Women, and translations of Six Tragedies by Seneca. Her other books include The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca, The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint, and Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton. Wilson was named a fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Wilson is a Professor of classical studies and chair of the program in comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Wilson lives in Philadelphia with her family and pets.

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 of Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life, which shifts our perception of the planet from an inanimate place on which life evolved, but instead a planet that came to life and is itself alive. Jabr reveals a new vision of Earth as a vast interconnected living system – and humans are one of the most radical impacts on those systems. Jabr introduces readers to different people who are working to protect Earth’s ecology and find a way to stabilize the planet in the face of the climate crisis. Amy Stewart is known for both the Kopp Sisters detective series along with popular works about the natural world such as The Drunken Botanist and Wicked Plants. Her latest book, which she wrote AND illustrated, is The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession. Stewart profiles fifty remarkable people whose lives have been transformed by their obsessive passion for… trees. This passion comes from a deeper commitment to being in community and radical vision for the future. Both books explore both the human relationship to the planet and the things that make it alive, and make it livable. It’s a wondrous conversation. Ferris Jabr is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He has also written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Scientific American. He is the recipient of a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant and fellowships from UC Berkeley and MIT. His work has been anthologized in several editions of Best American Science and Nature Writing. Ferris Jabr lives in Portland, Oregon, with his husband, Ryan, their dog, Jack, and more plants than they can count. His book is titled Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life. Amy Stewart is the New York Times bestselling author of The Drunken Botanist, Wicked Plants, and several other popular nonfiction titles about the natural world. She’s also written seven novels in her beloved Kopp Sisters series, based on the true story of one of America’s first female deputy sheriffs. She lives in Portland, Oregon. Her most recent book is titled The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession. Zoë Carpenter is a journalist and fiction writer from Oregon. Her writing has been published in Rolling Stone, The Nation, Guernica, Narratively, and elsewhere. A recipient of the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, she has also received grants and fellowships from the Pulitzer Center, the Catwalk Art Institute, Fishtrap, and PLAYA. She has an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was a postgraduate Zell Fellow. Prior that she was an editor at The Nation, where she worked on reported features, investigations, and opinion pieces for print and online.

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 looking forward and looking back. We’ll look back to the 2024 Verselandia!, hear some of the best poems of the night, and talk to the winner of last year’s competition about what it was like to win and how she’s preparing for this year’s event. We’ll also hear some poems from students competing in this year’s Verselandia. We’ll also talk to student poets and educators about how they’re getting ready for this year’s Verselandia and what writing and performing poetry does for the participants. A quick note to listeners: Portions of this episode contain mature themes that may not be suitable for all audiences.

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 Solito by Javier Zamora. Written from the perspective of his nine-year-old self, Solito is a gripping and beautiful account of Zamora’s three-thousand-mile journey from a small village in El Salvador to his new home in United States. Epic in scope and intimate in detail, it’s a book about the family one comes from, the family one longs for, and the family one makes. Zamora conjures all the wonder, fear and imaginative capacity of his young self; clear-eyed in his depictions of cruelty and danger, insistent on recognizing kindness. He also renders his journey with vivid detail with breathtaking lyricism, paying close attention to the power of language – this comes as no surprise, given that Zamora is also an award-winning poet. The writer Sandra Cisneros said, “I have waited decades for a memoir like Solito.” Solito isn’t simply a story of a migrant’s harrowing journey, it’s the story of a writer becoming a writer. It is also one of the most important American stories of our time. “Poetry and history were the first tools I had to begin to explain my life so far away from the land that watched me be born and grow up for the first nine years of my life.” Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador in 1990. When he was a year old, his father fled El Salvador due to the US-funded Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992). His mother followed her husband’s footsteps in 1995 when Javier was about to turn five. Zamora was left at the care of his grandparents who helped raise him until he migrated to the US when he was nine. His first poetry collection, Unaccompanied, explores some of these themes. In his debut New York Times bestselling memoir, SOLITO, Javier retells his nine-week odyssey across Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually through the Sonoran Desert. He travelled unaccompanied by boat, bus, and foot. After a coyote abandoned his group in Oaxaca, Javier managed to make it to Arizona with the aid of other migrants. Zamora is the winner of a 2024 Whiting Fellowship and the 2022 LA Times-Christopher Isherwood Prize. He holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University (Olive B. O’Connor), MacDowell, Macondo, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation (Ruth Lilly), Stanford University (Stegner), and Yaddo. He is the recipient of a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University, a 2017 Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2017 Narrative Prize, the 2016 Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award for his work in the Undocupoets Campaign. Javier lives in Tucson, AZ, where he volunteers with Salvavision, The Kino Border Initiative, and The Florence Project.

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 race and racism has had on Oluo’s personal life and mental well-being. She shares that thought she wouldn’t write another book because of that strain, but that through centering loving action that she found a new way of doing her writing work with this project. They also discuss the general writing life and process, and the importance, in the often difficult and consuming work of fighting for systemic change, of centering joy as an outcome of activism. Oluo’s book, Be a Revolution, highlights the way people all over the country are working to create real positive change for intersectional racial equity; as Fazal points out, giving new perspectives on big ideas through the stories of real, actual people. Their stories and Oluo’s work are intended to inspire action and change, and this conversation Ijeoma Oluo (ee-joh-mah oh-loo-oh) is a Seattle-based Writer, Speaker and Internet Yeller. Her work on social issues such as race and gender has been published in The Guardian, Esquire, Washington Post, ELLE Magazine, New York Times, NBC News and more. She has been featured on The Daily Show, All Things Considered, BBC News, and more. Her #1 NYT bestselling first book, So You Want To Talk About Race, was released January 2018 with Seal Press. Her second book, MEDIOCRE: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, was published December 2020 with Seal Press and her upcoming book, Be A Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World – and How You Can Too, was January 2024 with Harper One. Oluo was named one of the Most Influential People in Seattle by Seattle Magazine, one of the 50 Most Influential Women in Seattle by Seattle Met, one of The Root’s 100 Most Influential African Americans in 2017 & 2018, and is the recipient of the Feminist Humanist Award 2018 by the American Humanist Association, the Harvard Humanist of the year 2020, the Media Justice Award by the Gender Justice League, and the 2018 Aubrey Davis Visionary Leadership Award by the Equal Opportunity Institute. Hanif Fazal, author of An Other World, has developed and delivered innovative equity and inclusion programs across education, philanthropic, public, and non-profit sectors for over twenty years. He is currently the co-founder of the Center for Equity and Inclusion and is also an author, who writes about the fight for freedom, joy, and belonging in Black and Brown communities. His first book, An Other World, offers a hopeful path forward by nurturing identity and centering community. It’s a path where joy is the norm rather than struggle, where home and work are inclusive rather than exclusionary, and where Brown and Black relationships lead to a unique experience of freedom. Along with local and national news and podcast appearances, Hanif has spoken at South by Southwest, National Equity Summit, a two-time presenter at the CCAR summit on race, and many other equity and education-focused events. He is a National Pew Civic Change award winner, Multnomah County Hilltop award winner, and was awarded the Taste of Portland’s Changemaker award for his prolonged impact on equity and inclusion throughout Portland. Most recently, An Other World was awarded a silver medal at the 36th annual IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards.

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, something she attributes to her childhood, in which she was a veracious reader of fairytales. Hoffman was at the Festival to discuss her book Faithful, which had just been published. She is perhaps best known for her novel The Dovekeepers, which Toni Morrison called quote “a major contribution to 21st century literature.” It is considered by many to be Hoffman’s masterpiece. “A book you love makes you feel like you are known.” Alice Hoffman is the New York Times bestselling author of Practical Magic, Here on Earth, and The Dovekeepers, which was praised by Toni Morrison as, “beautiful, harrowing, a major contribution to twenty-first century literature.” Hoffman has published over thirty novels, three books of short fiction, and eight books for children and young adults. Her work has been published in more than twenty translations and more than one hundred foreign editions. Hoffman’s novels have received mention as notable books of the year by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, Library Journal, and People Magazine. Her short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe Magazine, Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Times, Architectural Digest, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and other magazines. Hoffman’s latest installment of the Once Upon a Time Bookshop Stories series titled The Bookstore Keepers is released February 2025.