The Archive Project

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature the novelist Brit Bennett. Brit Bennett exploded onto the literary stage in 2016 with her novel, The Mothers. In her New York Times review, Mira Jacob praised the novel as a “ferociously moving debut.” Critics also noted Bennett’s talent for creating both propulsive, page-turning plots, and enduring, complex characters that stay with the reader l...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we celebrate the twentieth year of Multnomah County Library’s Everybody Reads program . Each year, the Library chooses one book that they hope everyone in Multnomah County will read and talk about. As part of the program, the Library and their partner organizations host events based on the themes of the book, and they distribute thousands of free copi...

In this episode, we share a The Archive Project exclusive: a collaboration with Oregon Symphony, featuring their Open Music program. Open Music is a new concert series in which composers featured in the classical subscription season offer a window into their spirit and creative process through an evening of music and conversation at an intimate venue in Portland. In March, composer Missy Mazzoli j...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature the legendary writer, Stephen King, who appeared at the Newmark Theatre for a Literary Arts Special Event in 2006. King first published in 1967 and went on to write some of the most iconic pop culture classics of the last half century, many of which were made into Hollywood films, including The Shining, Misery, and The Green Mile . He wrote over...

This episode of The Archive Project is the second of three in this season’s series with Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Artistic director Nataki Garrett is back on the mic, this time in conversation with playwright Dominique Morisseau, whose new production Confederates will be on the OSF stage, directed by Garrett, in the fall of 2022. Confederates explores racial and gender bias in American through...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong from Portland Arts & Lectures in January 2022. Hong became nationally famous in the spring of 2020 for her essay collection  Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning , a book so searing and powerful it landed her on the cover of  Time  magazine’s 2021 issue featuring the 100 most influential people in the...

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 2021. Each year, Portland-area youth spend the year writing and competing with their peers, and each April about twenty student finalists compete for the title of Portland Slam Champ. Be...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month with a feast of a conversation about Chinese American cookbooks, cuisine, and the history of Chinatowns. The episode is entered on two great cookbooks released last year: Mooncakes and Milkbread: Sweet and Savory Recipes Inspired by Chinese Bakeries by Kristina Cho, and Mister Jiu’s In Chinatow...

We are closing out season 8 of The Archive Project with the fourth episode in our series with Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in which we have explored storytelling in the intersections of playwriting, theatre production, performance, and literature. This episode features playwright Mona Mansour and director Evren Odcikin discussing unseen , which had its West Coast premiere at OSF in summer 2022. un...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature a talk and conversation with Daniel James Brown from 2021. Brown is probably best known for his international bestseller The Boys in the Boat, first published in 2013. It tells a narrative history of nine working-class Americans who rowed their way to gold at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. It’s a story of young men who persevere against immense cha...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature Paul Theroux. Theroux is an iconic writer of over fifty books of fiction and nonfiction. Most of his work takes the form of travel writing–a genre he has helped define for the 20th and 21st centuries, as he traveled alone to some of the most remote parts of the world, writing about them with sensitivity, insight, wit, and wonder. He was a global...

This episode of The Archive Project is the third in our partnership with Oregon Shakespeare Festival. This week we’ll explore the work and legacy of August Wilson, centered on OSF’s upcoming production of his one-man play, How I Learned What I Learned . August Wilson was a Pulitzer Prize–winning American playwright. His work focuses on the joys and struggles of African Americans in the 20 th centu...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature two virtual events form the 2021 Portland Book Festival with very different subjects, that take place nearly 1000 years apart, but that both feature powerful female protagonists and heroes changing their worlds. In the first half of our show, we feature Julia Cooke, author of  Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am . She is...

In this episode, we share a The Archive Project exclusive: a collaboration with Oregon Symphony, featuring their Open Music program. Open Music is a new concert series in which composers featured in the classical subscription season offer a window into their spirit and creative process through an evening of music and conversation at an intimate venue in Portland. In March, composer Missy Mazzoli j...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month with a feast of a conversation about Chinese American cookbooks, cuisine, and the history of Chinatowns. The episode is entered on two great cookbooks released last year: Mooncakes and Milkbread: Sweet and Savory Recipes Inspired by Chinese Bakeries by Kristina Cho, and Mister Jiu’s In Chinatow...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature the novelist, Richard Powers. Powers is a writer whose work is difficult to define. It is literary fiction based in a kind of realism, but with elements of science fiction, fantasy, and highly original structural elements that keep readers a little off balance. Powers won the National Book Award in 2006 for The Echo Maker . He is perhaps best kno...

In 1989, an unknown writer named Amy Tan published a novel entitled The Joy Club , and the career of a major American writer was born. In this episode of The Archive Project , we are reaching deep into the archive to 1991, when we hosted Tan because there’s something very special about hearing from a writer at the very beginning of their career. At the time, The Joy Luck Club had been on the New Y...

This episode of The Archive Project is the third in our partnership with Oregon Shakespeare Festival. This week we’ll explore the work and legacy of August Wilson, centered on OSF’s upcoming production of his one-man play, How I Learned What I Learned . August Wilson was a Pulitzer Prize–winning American playwright. His work focuses on the joys and struggles of African Americans in the 20 th centu...

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 2021. Each year, Portland-area youth spend the year writing and competing with their peers, and each April about twenty student finalists compete for the title of Portland Slam Champ. Be...

As part of our celebration of National Poetry Month, this week on The Archive Project we feature excerpts from three Portland Book Festival virtual events, which took place in November 2021. We’ll hear three conversations: First, a conversation with Christopher Rose and Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations , which Oprah.com called “a lionhearted odyssey through the self,” in which the poet “o...

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 remarkabl...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature a reading and conversation about the pandemic lockdowns and how people tried to get through them. They contain stories both sad and funny, strange and completely every day. We thought you’d want to hear them as we all begin to reckon with this strange and challenging time. First up is Katherine D. Morgan, who reads her short essay, Wish You Were...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we bring you a talk from Mira Jacob, which was the culminating event of the 2022 Everybody Read’s program. 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 thous...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature the novelist Brit Bennett. Brit Bennett exploded onto the literary stage in 2016 with her novel, The Mothers. In her New York Times review, Mira Jacob praised the novel as a “ferociously moving debut.” Critics also noted Bennett’s talent for creating both propulsive, page-turning plots, and enduring, complex characters that stay with the reader l...

In this episode, we feature novelist Ash Davidson in conversation with writer and educator, Jacqueline Fitzgerald. The event took place at the Portland Book Festival in November 2021. The novel,  Damnation Spring , by Davidson was one of the most anticipated and celebrated books of 2021. It takes place in 1977 in the Pacific Northwest, near the end of the era when the timber industry dominated the...