The Archive Project

Jill Lepore is a Harvard professor and contributing writer to the New Yorker. Her books include  The Secret History of Wonder Woman ,  New York Burning ,  These Truths: A History of the United States , and her latest,  We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution  – and instant New York Times bestseller.    This year is the semi-quincentennial of the United States of America and, as Lepore po...

Each year, Portland youth spend months writing and competing in poetry slam competitions on high school campuses across the city. Each April, about 20 finalists compete for the title of city-wide Portland slam champ at Verselandia!, in front of an audience of nearly 1,000. The 2026 Verselandia! competition returns to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Thursday, April 30 at 7 pm. For more informa...

April is National Poetry Month, and to kick things off, this year we have a conversation from the 2025 Portland Book Festival between two of our most accomplished contemporary poets: Pádraig Ó Tuama and Patricia Smith. Their conversation is moderated by Portland poet, musician, and Torah teacher, Alicia Jo Rabins. An Oregon Book Award finalist for her collection Fruit Geode , Alicia published her...

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...

This week features a conversation on humor in fiction featuring two masters of the genre: Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Thingas and, most recently, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, the story of a lesbian clown navigating life, love, and art in Florida; and Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins and, most recently, So Far Gone, about a journalist living off the grid who is forced back into...

Portland Book Festival has been a proud partner of the National Book Foundation Presents program for many years now, and at the 2025 festival we featured a program called “The Cost of Hope,” moderated by National Book Foundation executive director Ruth Dickey, and featuring 2024 National Book Award in Nonfiction winner Jason De Leon, author of Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of...

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. At Literary Arts, our role is to bring the author to town f...

Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, three short story collections and several works of nonfiction. He has written countless articles, plays, an opera libretto and a collection of poetry, and been a finalist for the Booker Prize multiple times He is perhaps best known for his novel Brooklyn , which was made into a movie that was nominated for three Oscars. Set in the middle of the 20th cent...

If you like Heated Rivalry – if you don’t, you’re the only one, but anyway – if you like Heated Rivalry and want more queer romance but wish it had more wine, we’ve got the books for you. This week’s conversation is features queer romance at the 2025 Portland Book Festival, with authors Jasmine Guillory, Adib Khorram, and moderator Anita Kelly. Jasmine Guillory is the New York Times bestselling au...

In 2016 Tara Roberts was living in Washington DC feeling, in a new way, the deep fractures in America, including the way we understand our history.  She felt called to be part of trying to heal these divisions.   It was a chance encounter with a photograph at the National Museum of African American History and Culture that changed the trajectory of her life.  It was of a group of Black women on a...

Baldwin was key figure in the American civil rights movement of the last 1960s, and he is one of our most important American writers. Author of the novels If Beale Street Could Talk , Go Tell It on the Mountain , and Giovanni’s Room , he was also an essayist, poet, and playwright. Baldwin’s influence continues to grow, but even if you’ve never read a word James Baldwin has written – first, you sho...

We’re back at the 2025 Portland Book Festival this week, with poets m. mick powell and Taylor Byas, and moderater Jae Nichelle.    Taylor Byas’s second collection, Resting Bitch Face, uses watching and surveillance to explore Black female subjectivity. Byas engages with multiple art forms — painting, film, sculpture, and photographs – to explore the perspectives of artist and muse, of watche...

In this episode, we feature the beloved Irish novelist Emma Donoghue, in conversation with OPB’s Crystal Ligori, from the 2025 Portland Book Festival.  Emma Donoghue has extraordinary range, writing for the screen, and the stage, as well as authoring many acclaimed novels. Her international bestseller Room was a New York Times Best Book of 2010 and a finalist for the Man Booker, Commonwealth...

In this episode, we feature two of Oregon’s most accomplished writers, Omar El Akkad and Karen Russell from a conversation that took place at the 2025 Portland Book Festival.  They were joined onstage by Willamette Week ‘s arts and culture editor Rachel Saslow for a conversation about the ongoing American reckoning of its violent past and present. Russell’s novel The Antidote is...

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...

In this episode of The Archive Project , we feature a discussion on late writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s legacy of pacifism and environmentalism. Our moderator is Theo Downes-Le Guin, Ursula’s son and literary executor. Theo is in conversation with Oregon-based writers Juhea Kim, author of the novel Beasts of a Little Land , a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Michelle Ruiz Keil, a...

Join us in our third installment of this special episode where we spend the day at the 2025 Portland Book Festival. Saturday, November 8, in downtown Portland. Our Virgil is once again editor and producer Matthew Workman, who is taking a turn at the microphone as he searches for festival authors to get their book recommendations. It’s an exclusive, rare! Behind-the-scenes look at the festival, plu...

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 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 o...

Angela Flournoy came to Portland for the 2025 Portland Book Festival, where she discussed her new novel The Wilderness in conversation with Renée Watson, award-winning author of skin & bones. The title of The Wilderness refers to what Flournoy describes as the true “coming of age” — instead of the transition out of adolescence, the decades from one’s twenties onward. The book revolves ar...

This week we are bringing you a conversation that Literary Arts hosted in October 2025 with historian and political philosopher Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny , who spoke about his book On Freedom with Literary Arts executive director – and co-host of this show – Andrew Proctor. Timothy Snyder is the author of several books including Bloodlands and The Road To Freedom , as well as numerous a...

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 N...

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...

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...

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...