The Archive Project

We continue to celebrate National Poetry Month with a deep dive into Verselandia!, the annual city-wide high school poetry slam championship. In this week’s episode of The Archive Project, we’ll hear from some of the 2023 competitors, and we’ll follow a few 2024 hopefuls as they compete in their school slams.     Verselandia! was founded by a visionary team of Portland public high school librarian...

This week, we continue to celebrate National Poetry Month with a conversation from the 2023 Portland Book Festival. Jane Hirshfield is one of our most important living poets, and last year she released The Asking , a new and selected volume. Hirshfield has published ten volumes of poetry, two now-classic essay collections on the craft of poetry, and she has co-translated four books presenting worl...

April is National Poetry Month, and we are celebrating with a collection of some of our favorite poetry moments over the years at Literary Arts. We will hear from a Portland high school student, the United States poet laureate, an Oregon Literary Fellowship recipient, a Nobel Prize winner, and more.    Ada Limón, U.S. poet laureate, speaks at Portland Arts & Lectures in April 2023 about how im...

We’re reaching back into the archive to 2009 to bring you a powerful talk by Karen Armstrong, originally broadcast in 2016.    Armstrong has written 30 books on faith and the major religions, studying what Islam, Judaism and Christianity have in common, and how these faiths shaped world history and drive current events. A former nun, Armstrong wrote her first book, Through the Narrow Gate, about h...

This episode of The Archive Project  features a conversation between 2020 Oregon Book Award winners Kesha Ajose Fisher and Ashley Toliver, with Oregon Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani . Much of their conversation focuses on craft—writing from the space of the unknown, writing as self-discovery, the role of time in the creative process—but they also discuss what it is like to cultivate a diligent writing...

In this episode, we bring you a talk from Ruth Ozeki. It was the culminating event of the 2023 Everybody Reads program. 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 Libra...

This week we have a conversation featuring Naomi Alderman, who joined us for Portland Book Festival in November 2023 for the very first event for her new novel, The Future . Alderman is the author of the mega best-seller, Barack Obama-endorsed, Margaret Atwood-mentored novel The Power . She talks with interviewer Omar El Akkad about the pressure she felt writing this follow-up, about a handful of...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature legendary actor, filmmaker, and writer, Tom Hanks. Hanks was joined on stage at the Keller auditorium in May 2023 by fiction and screenwriter Jon Raymond. What’s great about this conversation is that the through line involves Tom Hanks’s longtime make-up artist Danny Stripeke; because in many ways it reveals why Hanks is such an incredible storyt...

This episode is a conversation from the 2023 Portland Book Festival on food, cooking, family, traditions, and storytelling. And like some of the best meals, it just happens to be … vegetarian.     Portland’s superstar chef Gregory Gourdet, chef/owner at kann , which was awarded “Best New Restaurant 2023” from multiple outlets, including the James Beard Awards, is also the author of a wonderf...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature nonfiction writer David Grann on the release of his new book, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder . Grann’s literary journalism combines archival research with in-person interviews and on-the-ground investigation, and it’s said that he’s obsessed with stories and how they are told. Grann has said, “Stories and narratives are a...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we have an event from the 2023 Portland Book Festival featuring two wonderful poets, whose friendship and fandom shines through in their conversation. Major Jackson, author of Razzle Dazzle and host of The Slowdown poetry podcast and newsletter interviews fellow poet Tracy K. Smith about her latest book, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul ....

In this episode of The Archive Project , we reach back deep into the archive for a lecture by Caryl Phillips from Portland Arts and Lectures in 1999. It’s a fascinating talk about the tragic life of singer and songwriter Marvin Gaye.     Caryl Phillips was born on the Caribbean Island of St. Kitts in 1958 and was raised in Leeds, England. His career began in the 1980s British theater and quickly e...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature best-selling, award-winning novelist Ann Patchett, who discusses her latest novel, Tom Lake , with Portland’s own Cheryl Strayed. Ann Patchett is one of our most beloved contemporary authors. She is the author of two children’s books, four books of nonfiction, and nine novels. The New York Times Book Review has said “expect miracles when you read...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature Viet Thanh Nguyen in conversation with author Tommy Orange from the 2023 Portland Book Festival. Viet Than Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for his debut novel The Sympathizer , which sold more than one million copies worldwide, catapulted him to national fame. Since then, Nguyen has gone on to publish two more books of fiction, and a work o...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we explore storytelling and the intersections between literature and music with our friends at the Oregon Symphony and 45 th Parallel Universe.     First, we have a conversation led by Oregon Symphony creative chair Gabriel Kahane. As part of the 2023 Portland Book Festival, Kahane spoke with one of his frequent collaborators, the poet Matthew Zapruder. The...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature renowned author, Mary Beard. Probably the most famous classicist in the world, Mary Beard is best known for her international bestsellers SPQR , about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, and Women & Power: A Manifesto, a study of ancient and modern attitudes toward female speech. She joined us in the fall of 2023 to talk about her latest b...

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...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature Leslie Marmon Silko in conversation with Molly Gloss from a special event in 2010, at Portland State University’s Lincoln Hall. While Leslie Marmon Silko had begun to publish poems and short stories in the 1960s, it was her iconic and ground-breaking novel, Ceremony , published in 1978, that established her as one our greatest living writers. Sin...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul from a visit he made to Portland, Oregon in 1991. The storied career of Naipaul spans more than a half century. In his lifetime, he was compared to Conrad, Dickens, and Tolstoy. Born in Trinidad to an Indo-Trinidadian family, he lived a peripatetic life, travelling the world constantly, though ultimately based in Engla...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we take you behind the scenes at the 2023 Portland Book Festival, which we hosted in downtown Portland on November 4, 2023. The festival featured over 100 writers in more than 50 events throughout the day. One of the best things about book festivals is the magic of having that particular group of authors all together at the same place at the same time. It mi...

On this episode of The Archive Project , we feature Barbara Kingsolver in conversation with Jess Walter. Barbara Kingsovler is the author of seventeen books, including nonfiction, short stories, poetry, and novels. Her novels include modern classics like The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna . Kingsolver is known for socially engaged writing that embraces the psychological and emotional. As she has...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we’re reaching back into the archive to 2020, to a virtual conversation with Colson Whitehead from Portland Arts & Lectures. It was, in fact, our very first virtual event of the pandemic and while we are so glad to be back live, it is fascinating to hear again from that time period. We’ve chosen to broadcast this conversation now because Whitehead has j...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature a conversation with Michael Lewis from the 2023 Portland Book Festival. Lewis is the author of 17 books of nonfiction including Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short and Flashboys . His books are about unconventional people doing extraordinary things, usually behind the scenes. Lewis joined Portland Book Festival to talk about his new book, Goin...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature Zadie Smith in conversation with New Yorker staff writer Parul Sehgal. Smith is one of the preeminent fiction writers of our age. She burst onto the stage in the year 2000 with her debut novel, White Teeth . It was a huge bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, and signaled a bold new talent had entered the literary world. Since then, she has p...

In this episode of The Archive Project, we share a conversation about something you probably never think about, unless you think about it all of the time: disabled parenting. We’ll hear from Eliza Hull, a contemporary musician, disability advocate, and writer based in regional Victoria, Australia, and the editor of a new anthology, We’ve Got This: Essays By Disabled Parents , which features storie...