The Archive Project

In this humorous and personal lecture, Tayari Jones discusses her complex journey to literary success, and her novel, An American Marriage . She describes the path her career has taken, from childhood to university and beyond, in which she’s made decisions to pursue writing despite receiving varying levels of support from educators, family, and the publishing industry. She finishes the talk by sha...

This episode of The Archive Project , features a lecture from prolific author Jonathan Lethem from 2007. As a writer, Lethem melds genres, often mixing crime and sci-fi with more traditional fiction. He is also known for his unpretentious incorporation of American pop-culture into his works. In this lecture, Lethem’s dry humor, sincerity, literary allusions, and post-modern sensibility are o...

This episode of The Archive Project features Azar Nafisi, author of the acclaimed Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books . In her lecture, Nafisi discusses Iranian literature and how it serves as a source of identity. She examines the fundamentalist Muslim identity in comparison to the national identity, concluding that people must focus on the literature of a nation in order to truly underst...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we highlight sections from three recent interviews shared through Literary Arts’ Long Distance podcast series. The Long Distance series was created during the COVID-19 pandemic as an online space where we can host conversational interviews with authors during a time when we are missing gathering in community—at bookstores and events—to hear from authors and...

In this episode of Long Distance , debut novelist Raven Leilani talks with Literary Arts’ Amanda Bullock about Luster ( on sale now !). Luster  focuses on Edie, who is stumbling her way through her twenties—sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She is also haltingly, fitfully giving heat and air to the art tha...

Click here to view the slideshow Lewis references during her lecture. In this episode of The Archive Project , poet, scholar, and National Book Award winner Robin Coste Lewis presents on “The Race Within Erasure.” Lewis first became widely known in 2015, when her debut poetry collection,  Voyage of the Sable Venus  won the National Book Award in poetry –– it was the first time a poetry debut by an...

In this episode of The Archive Project , Orhan Pamuk discusses his published works and why he writes about Turkey so much: to him, this act is not only about portraying the city to outsiders, but also about retracing his memories of the city. He reads from Other Colors , a collection of articles and notes from his personal journals, which comprise ideas and segments of writing he wanted to include...

Jesmyn Ward is the author of the National Book Award-winning novels  Sing, Unburied, Sing  and  Salvage the Bones,  and the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning memoir  Men We Reaped . Ward is in conversation with Mitchell S. Jackson, Whiting Award-winner, native Portlander, and author of the novel  The Residue Years  and nonfiction book  Survival Math  (forthcoming 2019). Both Ward and Jack...

This episode of The Archive Project features an interview with Salman Rushdie from June 2020. This interview with Steph Opitz was presented through a partnership between the Wisconsin Book Festival , Literary Arts, Black Mountain Institute , and The Loft’s Wordplay , and was originally live-streamed online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rushdie and Opitz’s discussion focuses on Quichotte , Ru...

In this episode of Long Distance , Literary Arts’ Amanda Bullock interviews debut novelist Kelli Jo Ford. Ford’s Crooked Hallelujah ( on sale now !) is a novel-in-stories which depicts a family of proud, stubborn, Cherokee women as they sacrifice for those they love, amid larger forces of history, religion, class, and culture. It is a big-hearted and ambitious novel of the powerful bonds between m...

Nikky Finney, the 2011 National Book Award winner for poetry, tells a full-house audience that her grandmother’s words have always guided her work as a poet: “To tell a lie is a sin of the highest order.” She gives extensive, fascinating introductions for each of her long-form narrative poems before performing them. Her subjects include family ties, the writing life, oppression, maternity, solidar...

In this episode of  The Archive Project , we bring you poet and dramatist Cornelius Eady, from a Poetry Downtown event in 2002. Cornelius Eady published his first book of poetry, Kartunes , in 1980, at the age of 26. He went on to publish seven more books of poetry over the next 20 years, winning numerous prizes and being nominated as a finalist for a National Book Award. In the 1990s and early 20...

In this Long Distance conversation, bestselling author and independent bookstore owner Emma Straub speaks with Literary Arts’ Amanda Bullock about her recently released novel, All Adults Here . The book is a warm, funny, and keenly perceptive novel about the life cycle of one family–as the kids become parents, grandchildren become teenagers, and a matriarch confronts the legacy of her mistakes. In...

Three months after the catastrophic earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat begins her lecture with a proverb from the country she grew up in: “We remember, but we move forward.” She mentions Haiti’s nickname, terre glissée or “slippery ground,” and expounds on the metaphoric and literal connotations of that phrase. With the devastation still on everyone’s mind, Dant...

Julia Alvarez reflects on her dual childhood in the Dominican Republic and in the United States: living in a world under the hand of a dictator; her poor performance in school but robust and diverse education at home; her difficult time adjusting to immigrant life and the prejudice she faced; the sixth grade teacher who showed her the world that existed within books; and her realization that 1) in...

The 2020 Oregon Book Awards ceremony was originally scheduled on April 27, 2020 as a live event. However, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, our 33 rd annual ceremony was reimagined into this special, state-wide broadcast and podcast episode, with special thanks to our partners at Oregon Public Broadcasting. Since 1997, the Oregon Book Awards have celebrated the work of our state’s authors. Thi...

In this episode of Long Distance from The Archive Project , debut novelist Jean Kyoung Frazier talks with Amanda Bullock about Pizza Girl . Set in Los Angeles, the eponymous Pizza Girl is a pregnant 18-year-old who falls into obsession with an older woman for whom she delivers pizza. In this discussion, Frazier talks about her writing practice, including some surprising real-life inspirations for...

Toni Morrison begins her lecture by saying she wants to discuss two of her books in particular— Beloved (1987) and Jazz (still forthcoming at the time)—and the progression of her writing. She considers the impact of history on both novels. In discussing Beloved , Morrison touches on the pornography of writing about violence as a voyeur and how she worked to keep the focus on the characters themsel...

This episode of Long Distance , Literary Arts’ new podcast series, features an interview with author Megha Majumdar whose debut novel, A Burning , was recently released . A Burning features three protagonists all connected by a terrorist incident involving a train bombing in India. Jivan, a young Muslim woman, witnesses the incident, and creates a social media post asking “If the police didn’t hel...

This episode of The Archive Project features a lecture from Tommy Orange in Portland, Oregon. This lecture was the culminating event of the Multnomah County Library’s 2020 Everybody Reads program—an annual shared reading experience that includes city-wide events for readers of all ages. In his lecture, Orange details his experience as a Native American growing up and working in Oakland, California...

This episode of The Archive Project , features a panel discussion between authors Casey Cep, Lara Prescott, and moderator Pamela Paul of The New York Times , from the 2019 Portland Book Festival. Cep and Prescott are both New York Times best selling debut authors who have drawn inspiration from famous figures in literary history. Cep’s nonfiction book, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Tr...

This first episode of Long Distance , Literary Arts’ new podcast series, features an interview with author Kristen Arnett whose debut novel, Mostly Dead Things , was recently released in paperback by Tin House Books. In her conversation with Literary Arts’ Amanda Bullock, Arnett dives into the novel’s inspiration, including family dynamics and her obsession and deep research into taxidermy. They a...

In this episode of The Archive Project , poet Eavan Boland reads a selection of her poetry and prose, pausing between pieces to discuss how each particular work originated and her writing process. The topics of her work include history vs. the past and love vs. loss (most often as these topics relate to Ireland), and she weaves Greek and Roman mythology into many of her poems. At the end of her re...

In March 2019, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie joined thousands of book-lovers for the culminating lecture of the Multnomah County Library’s Everybody Reads program. Starting in January, readers across the county took part in reading and discussing Adichie’s novel Americanah and her book-length essay We Should All Be Feminists . In this episode, Adichie discusses her journey as a writer—from her earliest...

In this episode of The Archive Project , playwright Terrence McNally traces the arc of his career with humor and passion—from a boyhood in New York and Texas, the special influence of a high school English teacher, mentorship by Elaine May—to the peaks (and valleys) of a career that spanned five decades. McNally explores what it is that ignites a person’s interest in the arts, and how crucial it i...