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 watcher and watched.  

Taylor is in conversation with m. mick powell, whose debut poetry collection Dead Girl Cameo: A Love Stroy in Poems features of chorus of pop stars – Aaliyah, Whitney Houston, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, and more – in an exploration of grief, sexuality, and celebrity. Powell refers to the collection as a documentary, and it includes imagery, speculative verse, and more.  

Poet Jae Nichelle leads a conversation that starts from the prompt “pop culture poetry.” Engaging with pop culture, as these collections do, is an act of engaging with the cultural moment. Done well, it doesn’t “date” the work, but creates a time capsule – a documentary. Both collections are deeply researched, and Taylor and mick discuss their relationships to art, scholarship, and commerce, and the interplay between those different aspects of publishing this particular collections.   

In the conversation, first we’ll hear m. mick powell read the title poem of their debut collection, Dead Girl Cameo, followed by a reading by Taylor Byas of the title poem of Resting Bitch Face and then a conversation between mick, Taylor, and the moderator, Jae.  

A heads up – there’s some mature language that may not be appropriate for all listeners, and you’ll hear some bleeps in the opening poem. 

Taylor Byas is an award-winning poet and a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her poetry collection I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times won the Maya Angelou Book Award, the Ohioana Book Award, the CHIRBy Award, and the BCALA Best Poetry Honor.

m mick powell is a queer Black Cabo Verdean femme, poet, artist, Aries, and the author of DEAD GIRL CAMEO (One World Books, 2025) and threesome in the last Toyota Celica & other circus tricks, winner of the 2023 Host Publications Chapbook Prize. An assistant professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut, mick enjoys chasing waterfalls and being in love. 

Louisiana-born Jae Nichelle (she/her) is the author of God Themselves (Andrews McMeel, 2023) and the chapbook The Porch (As Sanctuary) (YesYes Books, 2019). She was a finalist for a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and won the inaugural John Lewis Writing Award in poetry from the Georgia Writers Association. Her poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2020 (University of Virginia Press, 2020), the Washington Square Review, The Offing, Muzzle Magazine, and elsewhere. She believes in all of our collective ability to contribute to radical change. 

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, and Orange Prizes, and it is what brought her fame and readers all over the world.  

She joined us on stage to discuss The Paris Express, a novel based on an 1895 disaster at the Paris Montparnasse train station that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs.  It’s a propulsive novel set on a train packed with a fascinating cast of characters who hail from as close as Brittany and as far as Russia, Ireland, Algeria, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia. Members of parliament hurry back to Paris to vote; a medical student suspects a girl may be dying; a secretary tries to convince her boss of the potential of moving pictures; two of the train’s crew build a life away from their wives; a young anarchist makes a terrifying plan, and much more.  

Emma Donoghue is the author of sixteen novels, including the award-winning national bestseller Room, the basis for the acclaimed film of the same name. Her latest novel is The Paris Express. She has also written the screenplays for Room and The Wonder and nine stage plays. Her next film (adapted with Philippa Lowthorpe from Helen Macdonald’s memoir) is H Is for Hawk. Born in Dublin, she lives in Ontario with her family. 

As one of the local hosts of OPB’s “All Things Considered”, Crystal Ligori seeks out unique stories from diverse communities, often focusing on food systems, pop culture, and LGBTQ+ communities. She also narrates OPB’s Emmy-award winning documentary food series “Superabundant” and was the longtime producer/editor for Literary Arts’ weekly radio program and podcast “Literary Arts: The Archive Project”. Before joining OPB, Crystal was a host at KUFO in Portland, OR, KZZU in Spokane, WA and KBGA in Missoula, MT. Her work has been heard nationally on NPR Newscasts, APM’s “Marketplace”, PRX’s “Living on Earth,” and NPR’s “All Things Considered”. 

An alumna of the School of Journalism at the University of Montana, she has three SPJ awards for television feature reporting and LGBTQ+ Equity Reporting in audio, a Hearst Journalism Award for broadcast news radio features, and shares three regional Emmy awards for her work on Superabundant. 

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 set in the Great Depression Dust Bowl in a fictional town in Nebraska and examines the history of the American colonialism and the violence it enacted.  It is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities

At the center of El Akkad’s book One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This is the present-day destruction and violence in Palestine, and the realization how much of the West’s moral promises are lies. The book is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.

At the time of the live event, both El Akkad and Russell were finalists for the National Book Awards in nonfiction and fiction respectively. El Akkad would go on to be given the award for nonfiction just a few weeks later, joining just a small handful of Oregonians ever to receive a national Book Award — including Ursula K Le Guin, William Stafford, Barry Lopez and Mary Szybist.

A note to the listener this episode contains mature themes and discussions of violence that may not be suitable for all listeners.

The Archive Project airs audio from live conversations and events, edited for length and clarity to better serve a listening audience.

An earlier version of this episode omitted a portion of the conversation, as well as the audience Q&A. An extended edition is now available.

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 Association Award and the Oregon Book Award for fiction. His books have been translated into thirteen languages. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of one hundred novels that shaped our world. His latest book is titled One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

Karen Russell is the author of six works of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, and was selected for the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” prize and The New Yorker‘s “20 under 40” list (She is now decisively over 40). She has taught literature and creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of California-Irvine, Williams College, Columbia University, and Bryn Mawr College, and was the Endowed Chair of Texas State’s MFA program. She serves on the board of Street Books, a mobile-library for people living outdoors. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, son, and daughter. Russell’s new book is titled The Antidote.

Rachel Saslow is the arts and culture reporter at Willamette Week. She began her journalism career at the Washington City Paper in Washington, D.C., followed by a staff writer position at the Washington Post, where she wrote the Arts Beat column for the Style section. She now lives in her hometown of Portland, Ore., with her husband and their three children.

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 said, “A good book should be trouble and delight the reader.” And few do that as well as Kingsolver.

Her latest novel is Demon Copperhead, set in rural Appalachia, where Kingsolver was raised and lives today. In the book, she remaps Charles Dickens’ Victorian classic David Copperfield onto her real-life community, to illuminate the poverty, broken social and education systems, the influence of industrial agriculture, and the targeting of Appalachians by Big Pharma, and the consequent pervasive and destructive opioid epidemic.

Like Dickens, she tells the story of a resilient kid caught in the crosshairs. The novel is, in the words of The Times UK, “Like Dickens directed by the Coen brothers.” Indeed, despite the subject matter, this novel is a delight to read from the first line, thanks to Kingsolver’s inventiveness and Demon’s distinctive voice. Many critics praise it as her best book yet.

Barbara Kingsolver is the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, The Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, and The Bean Trees, as well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. Her work of narrative nonfiction is the influential bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts, as well as the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.

Jess Walter is the author of six novels, including the bestsellers Beautiful Ruins and The Financial Lives of the Poets, the National Book Award finalist The Zero, and Citizen Vince, the winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington.

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, author most recently of the young adult novel Summer in the City of Roses, which was a finalist for the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

In her speech at the 2014 National Book Awards, accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Ursula said: “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.”

Juhea Kim and Michelle Ruiz Keil are two of those voices that we need now. In this conversation, Juhea and Michelle discuss how they came—and returned—to Le Guin’s work, her influence on their writing, and how they are carrying her legacy forward, including the responsibility of the artist as a humanitarian.

This conversation was recorded in front of a live audience at Literary Arts on July 15, 2022.

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was a celebrated author whose body of work includes 23 novels, 12 volumes of short stories, 11 volumes of poetry, 13 children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and SFWA’s Grand Master, along with the PEN/Malamud and many other awards. In 2014 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016 joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.

Michelle Ruiz Keil is an author, playwright, and tarot reader with an eye for the enchanted and way with animals. She is the author of the critically acclaimed young adult novels All of Us With Wings and Summer In The City of Roses. Her writing for adults can be found most recently in Bitch, Cosmonauts Avenue, and the anthology Dispatches From Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin. She is a 2021 Tin House Scholar and the recipient of residencies from Hedgebrook, The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and the Bloedel Reserve. Born in San Francisco, Michelle has lived in Portland, Oregon for many years where she curates the fairytale reading series All Kinds of Fur and lives with her family in a cottage where the forest meets the city.

Juhea Kim is a writer, artist, and advocate based in Portland, Oregon. Her bestselling debut novel Beasts of a Little Land was named a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a Best Book of 2021 by Harper’s Bazaar, Real Simple, Ms., and Portland Monthly. Her writing has been published in Granta, Slice, The Massachusetts Review, Zyzzyva, Guernica, Catapult, Times Literary Supplement, The Independent, Sierra Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the founder and editor ofPeaceful Dumpling, an online magazine at the intersection of sustainable lifestyle and ecological literature. She has received fellowship support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Regional Arts & Culture Council, and Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She earned her BA in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University.

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, plus a great source for your to-read list and hopefully some gifting inspiration for the readers in your own life.

We once again asked some of our featured festival authors to recommend books by other authors in the festival. We have a bit of a National Book Awards theme happening here too:

We will hear recommendations from:

Patricia Smith, author of The Intentions of Thunder, winner of the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry

Jason De Leon, author of Soliders and Kings, winner of the 2024 National Book Award in Nonfiction

Karren Russell, author of The Antidote, finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Fiction

Megha Majumdar, author of A Guardian and a Thief, finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Fiction

Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, winner of the 2025 National Book Award in Nonfiction

Renée Watson, author of All the Blue in the Sky

Ruth Dickey, poet and executive director of the National Book Foundation

Kristen Arnett, novelist and author of Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One

A quick note to listeners: Portions of this episode contain mature themes that may not be suitable for all audiences.

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. He didn’t always want to be a writer, and he shares the twisting path that led him to this work. His debut novel, There There, is a winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and named one of the best books of the year by numerous publications. There There—and Orange himself in this lecture—explores a multitude of themes, from identity and ownership to the urban-rural divide.

Link to “Ghost Dance” short film referenced in Orange’s lecture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5plHAdBums

Tommy Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised 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 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.

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 around four friends as they navigate those years, when you confront who you thought you might be as an adult, and what is actually happening in your life: your friendships, romances, success, grief, career, and so much more. The “found family” of long, deep friendship is the center of the book, and Flournoy and Watson discuss the constant choosing that creates and sustains a found family, the ongoing making and remaking that happens over decades of friendship.

Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, an Indie Next pick, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Flournoy has taught at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, and UCLA. She lives in New York. Flournoy’s latest novel is titled The Wilderness.

Renée Watson is a #1 New York Times bestselling author. Over the past decade she has authored twenty books for young readers including Black Girl You Are Atlas and Cicely Tyson, which have collectively sold more than a million copies. She received a Coretta Scott King Award and a Newbery Honor for her novel Piecing Me Together and high praise for 1619 Project: Born on the Water, co-written with Nikole Hannah-Jones. Her debut adult novel, skin & bones, was published May 7th, 2024. 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. She splits her time between Portland, Oregon and New York City. Her latest middle grade title is All the Blues in the Sky.

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 articles and a popular Substack. He is a scholar of Eastern European history who Anne Applebaum has called, “one of our most original and perceptive thinkers.” He currently serves Chair in Modern European History at University of Toronto. He has won both the Carnegie and the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Literature Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding and the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.  He speaks five languages and reads in ten, once telling a reporter, “If you don’t know Russian, you don’t really know what you’re missing.” The Guardian called him, “one of the most eloquent interpreters of the war in Ukraine.” He served as an advisor to UN Security Council, and has met privately with Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

In the wake of the 2016 election, what began as a list of thoughts on an airplane napkin became On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century. The book spent two years on the bestseller list and catapulted Snyder from respected historian to one of the most prominent voices in fight against authoritarianism. The lessons of On Tyrrany were widely shared, inspiring multiple poster campaigns and at least one rap song.

With On Freedom, Snyder once again places the past in direct conversation with the present and the future. Freedom, for Snyder, is not external thing we may or may not achieve, but an ongoing, embodied struggle. With immediacy and striking humility, he draws lessons from history, not simply to predict future risk, but to claim agency in the present, to see clearly our potential as individuals, as a country and as a species.

Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His books, which have been published in over forty languages, include Bloodlands, Black Earth, On Tyranny, Road to Unfreedom, Our Malady, and On Freedom. His work has inspired poster campaigns and exhibitions, sculptures, a punk rock song, a rap song, a play, and an opera, and he has appeared in over fifty films and documentaries. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut