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

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 New York Times. They won the National Book award in 2017 for The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, and became a household name with their bestselling book Surviving Autocracy, which was published in 2020 and written as both a warning and a call to action in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election. 

Gessen’s talk is a rare glimpse into their childhood and early professional life – growing up in the Soviet Union and emigrating at the age of 14; their early experience in Boston and how it shaped their life personally and professionally; their return to Moscow as a journalist and a rare and strange meeting with Vladimir Putin, and how their grandmothers’ life stories shaped their work.  

Gessen is one of the rare contemporary commentators on authoritarianism who has lived under such a regime, and in a democracy – and they have an urgent warning for us all. 

“I’ve always thought that I was very lucky to know when I had to leave (Russia) because one of the hardest decisions that somebody has to make…is figuring out when your home is no longer your home. It was kind of a great favor that Putin did to me.”

M. Gessen is a Russian American author, translator, and journalist. They’ve written 11 books, including Surviving Autocracy, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction), and an award-winning account of the Boston Marathon bombers titled The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy. They spent years covering Putin’s regime in Russia and was famously dismissed as the editor of the Russian popular science magazine Vokrug sveta for refusing to cover a Putin event they felt was propaganda. Gessen received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the Hitchens Prize, an Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary, and the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. They’ve written for many US publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker. Gessen is a distinguished professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College. They live in New York with their wife and children.  

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 Case for Reparations. A year later, Coates published his second book, a long essay called Between the World and Me which became an international bestseller. Coates went on to write a novel called The Water Dancer, for Marvel’s Black Panther comic book series, and a published collection of essays titled We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. For his work he has won a National Magazine Award, a MacArthur fellowship and the National Book Award, among many other prizes.   

He joined us in fall 2024 to talk about The Message, a new book of essays set in Senegal, South Carolina and Palestine about how our stories – personal or political – can both hide and reveal the truth.    

Coates is in conversation with Omar El Akkad, who is a journalist and author of the novels American War, What Strange Paradise and most recently One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, his debut book of nonfiction which publishes in February 2025. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an award-winning author and journalist. His books include Between The World and Me and The Water Dancer. He is currently a writer-in-residence at Howard University. 

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’ Award and the Oregon Book Award. His books have been translated into 13 languages. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of 100 novels that shaped our world. 

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 relevance of classical literature in general. She followed up, in 2023, with her translation of The Iliad.    

Her genius has been to render these ancient stories in swift, unpretentious, contemporary language, allowing us to see that despite the rise and fall of empires, despite dramatic cultural shifts and technological progress, there are some essential truths about human nature—we are creatures of hubris and humility, of conflict and collaboration, of profound selfishness and of profound sacrifice.   

It is not hard to see in Homer’s Greece a startling similarity to our present-day world. Wilson assures us this is embedded in the text, writing in her introduction to The Iliad, “For a twenty-first-century reader, there is nothing unfamiliar about a partisan society riven by constant striving for celebrity dominance and attention.”   

“Tell me about a complicated man,” begins The Odyssey.  From this first line, Wilson establishes herself as one of the most astute translators working in the English language, a translator both of Ancient Greek and of human complexity.   

“A translation, just like an original work of art, needs to have its own vision. And you need to have the humility to know that you can’t do everything. You have to commit to your own vision.”

Emily Wilson is a classicist, translator, professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of the bestselling translations of Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad (winner of the 2024 Audie Award for Best Literary Fiction and Classics). In addition to Wilson’s Odyssey and Iliad, she has also published several other translated works, including translations of four tragedies of Euripides published in The Greek Plays: Bacchae, Helen, Electra, and Trojan Women, and translations of Six Tragedies by Seneca. Her other books include The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca, The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint, and Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton. Wilson was named a fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Wilson is a Professor of classical studies and chair of the program in comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Wilson lives in Philadelphia with her family and pets.  

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 author to town for a talk in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.  

This year, the 2025 Everybody Reads selection is the memoir Solito by Javier Zamora. For information about how to engage with the program, visit the Multnomah County Library’s web site. I am thrilled to say Javier Zamora will be in Portland on Tuesday, March 11 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall for the culminating event of the 2025 Everybody Reads Program.  

For now, let’s return to the 2024 Everybody Reads event, featuring Gabrielle Zevin and her novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.  

Gabrielle Zevin has been steadily publishing fiction for almost two decades and has also written occasional criticism as well as award-winning screenplays. But it was Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow that catapulted her to the stratosphere of literary stardom. It was a #1 New York Times bestseller and spent over 50 weeks on the fiction bestseller list.   

To be sure, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is about video games, and makes a convincing argument for the power and potential of narrative storytelling in video games. But really, it is about making art, and questions about originality, appropriation, and ambition that come with that pursuit. And perhaps more so, it is a love story, about friends and creative partners, and the excitement, joy, tragedy, and betrayal that come with any long relationship. It’s about something, I’d wager, we’ve all been thinking about the past few years: connection.   

Tickets for Everybody Reads 2025 with Javier Zamora are on sale now! Find your tickets here. 

Gabrielle Zevin is a New York Times best-selling novelist whose books have been translated into forty languages. 

 Her tenth novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, was a New York Times Best Seller, a Sunday Times Best Seller, and a selection of the Tonight Show’s Fallon Book Club. Tomorrow was Amazon.com’s #1 Book of the Year, Time Magazine’s #1 Book of the Year, a New York Times Notable Book, and the winner of both the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction and the Book of the Month Club’s Book of the Year. Following a twenty-five-bidder auction, the feature film rights to Tomorrow were acquired by Temple Hill and Paramount Studios. 

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry also spent many months on the New York Times bestseller list. A.J. Fikry was honored with the Southern California Independent Booksellers Award for Fiction, the Japan Booksellers’ Prize, among other honors. A.J. Fikry is now a feature film with a screenplay by Zevin. She has also written children’s books, including the award-winning Elsewhere.  

She is the screenwriter of Conversations with Other Women (Helena Bonham Carter) for which she received an Independent Spirit Award Nomination for Best First Screenplay. She has occasionally written criticism for the New York Times Book Review and NPR’s All Things Considered, and she began her writing career, at age fourteen, as a music critic for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. Zevin is a graduate of Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles. 

This week features a conversation from the 2024 Portland Book Festival, featuring best-selling author Ijeoma Oluo, who is a self-described “writer, speaker, and internet yeller.” She discusses her latest book, Be a Revolution: How Everyday People are Fighting and Changing the World — and How You Can, Too with Portland’s Hanif Fazal, author of An Other World and co-founder of the Center for Equity and Inclusion.

They engage in a very honest conversation about the impact that “being loud” about race and racism has had on Oluo’s personal life and mental well-being. She shares that thought she wouldn’t write another book because of that strain, but that through centering loving action that she found a new way of doing her writing work with this project. They also discuss the general writing life and process, and the importance, in the often difficult and consuming work of fighting for systemic change, of centering joy as an outcome of activism.

Oluo’s book, Be a Revolution, highlights the way people all over the country are working to create real positive change for intersectional racial equity; as Fazal points out, giving new perspectives on big ideas through the stories of real, actual people. Their stories and Oluo’s work are intended to inspire action and change, and this conversation

Ijeoma Oluo (ee-joh-mah oh-loo-oh) is a Seattle-based Writer, Speaker and Internet Yeller. Her work on social issues such as race and gender has been published in The Guardian, Esquire, Washington Post, ELLE Magazine, New York Times, NBC News and more. She has been featured on The Daily Show, All Things Considered, BBC News, and more. Her #1 NYT bestselling first book, So You Want To Talk About Race, was released January 2018 with Seal Press. Her second book, MEDIOCRE: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, was published December 2020 with Seal Press and her upcoming book, Be A Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World – and How You Can Too, was January 2024 with Harper One. Oluo was named one of the Most Influential People in Seattle by Seattle Magazine, one of the 50 Most Influential Women in Seattle by Seattle Met, one of The Root’s 100 Most Influential African Americans in 2017 & 2018, and is the recipient of the Feminist Humanist Award 2018 by the American Humanist Association, the Harvard Humanist of the year 2020, the Media Justice Award by the Gender Justice League, and the 2018 Aubrey Davis Visionary Leadership Award by the Equal Opportunity Institute.

Hanif Fazal, author of An Other World, has developed and delivered innovative equity and inclusion programs across education, philanthropic, public, and non-profit sectors for over twenty years. He is currently the co-founder of the Center for Equity and Inclusion and is also an author, who writes about the fight for freedom, joy, and belonging in Black and Brown communities. His first book, An Other World, offers a hopeful path forward by nurturing identity and centering community. It’s a path where joy is the norm rather than struggle, where home and work are inclusive rather than exclusionary, and where Brown and Black relationships lead to a unique experience of freedom. Along with local and national news and podcast appearances, Hanif has spoken at South by Southwest, National Equity Summit, a two-time presenter at the CCAR summit on race, and many other equity and education-focused events. He is a National Pew Civic Change award winner, Multnomah County Hilltop award winner, and was awarded the Taste of Portland’s Changemaker award for his prolonged impact on equity and inclusion throughout Portland. Most recently, An Other World was awarded a silver medal at the 36th annual IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards.

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.  Here at Literary Arts, our role is to bring the author to town for a talk in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. The 2025 Everybody Reads book was the memoir Solito by Javier Zamora.   

Written from the perspective of his nine-year-old self, Solito is a gripping and beautiful account of Zamora’s three-thousand-mile journey from a small village in El Salvador to his new home in United States. Epic in scope and intimate in detail, it’s a book about the family one comes from, the family one longs for, and the family one makes. Zamora conjures all the wonder, fear and imaginative capacity of his young self; clear-eyed in his depictions of cruelty and danger, insistent on recognizing kindness. He also renders his journey with vivid detail with breathtaking lyricism, paying close attention to the power of language – this comes as no surprise, given that Zamora is also an award-winning poet.   The writer Sandra Cisneros said, “I have waited decades for a memoir like Solito.”   

Solito isn’t simply a story of a migrant’s harrowing journey, it’s the story of a writer becoming a writer. It is also one of the most important American stories of our time.  

“Poetry and history were the first tools I had to begin to explain my life so far away from the land that watched me be born and grow up for the first nine years of my life.”

Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador in 1990. When he was a year old, his father fled El Salvador due to the US-funded Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992). His mother followed her husband’s footsteps in 1995 when Javier was about to turn five. Zamora was left at the care of his grandparents who helped raise him until he migrated to the US when he was nine. His first poetry collection, Unaccompanied, explores some of these themes.   

In his debut New York Times bestselling memoir, SOLITO, Javier retells his nine-week odyssey across Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually through the Sonoran Desert. He travelled unaccompanied by boat, bus, and foot. After a coyote abandoned his group in Oaxaca, Javier managed to make it to Arizona with the aid of other migrants.  

Zamora is the winner of a 2024 Whiting Fellowship and the 2022 LA Times-Christopher Isherwood Prize. He holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University (Olive B. O’Connor), MacDowell, Macondo, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation (Ruth Lilly), Stanford University (Stegner), and Yaddo. He is the recipient of a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University, a 2017 Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2017 Narrative Prize, the 2016 Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award for his work in the Undocupoets Campaign. Javier lives in Tucson, AZ, where he volunteers with Salvavision, The Kino Border Initiative, and The Florence Project.  

A life-long Northwesterner, Egan has spent much of his career exploring his home region. One might even say he is the quintessential Pacific Northwest writer. He served as the first Pacific Northwest correspondent for the New York Times and he also wrote one of the definitive books about our region in 1990, The Good Rain.

During his eighteen-year tenure at the New York Times, Egan covered everything from the Exxon Valdez disaster to the OJ Simpson trial. In 2001, he and a team of reporters received a Pulitzer Prize for the series, How Race is Lived in America. Somehow, between reporting trips, he also found time to write multiple award-winning, best-selling books. He won the National Book Award in 2006 for The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those who Survived the Great American Dustbowl, which was a New York Times bestseller and led to a Ken Burns documentary.

Egan joined us to talk about his most recent book is A Fever in the Heartland: The Klu Klux’s Plot to Take Over American, and the Woman who Stopped Them.  Once again, Egan turns his attention to an American disaster—this time, a social and political disaster of monstrous moral proportions, tracing the swift rise and eventual collapse of the Klu Klux Klan in 1920’s Indiana. A place and time, he notes, “where one in three white males swore on a Bible to uphold white supremacy.”

A Fever in the Heartland is rigorously researched, and deeply — overwhelmingly — troubling. As a reader, it is not hard to draw parallels between these events that occurred a century ago, and all that is happening now. Egan himself said, in a recent interview, “I’m a big believer in the line that history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes.”  But, to explore such a dark chapter in our history requires a firm belief in our potential as a country and as a species. The only way to rise to that potential is to see ourselves clearly and learn from our past.

Timothy Egan is an American journalist and author of ten books. The most recent, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, was an immediate New York Times bestseller. Egan worked for The New York Times for 18 years, first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent, and then as a national enterprise reporter. As part of a team of reporters Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2001 for writing a series called How Race is Lived in America. Egan lives in Seattle with his family.

This week’s episode features one of the most highly anticipated conversations from the 2024 Portland Book Festival. Author Rachel Kushner joined the festival with her most recent novel, the Booker Prize finalist Creation Lake, her take on a noir spy thriller. We paired her with Danzy Senna, whose new novel is Colored Television, the story of a struggling novelist attempting to break into Hollywood. We invited Oregon-based writer Mat Johnson, whose most recent book is the fantastic Invisible Things, to moderate their conversation.  

This conversation was titled “Deceit and Dark Humor.” Both novels featuring protagonists who are knowingly lying to the people around them: Kushner’s narrator is a spy tasked with infiltrating an anarchist cooperative in France and is actively deceiving everyone she encounters, while Senna’s protagonist, Jane, spirals into more and more lies as she tries to create a television show with a big-shot Hollywood producer.  

We have a special treat at the end of the episode. Another feature of Portland Book Festival is the annual launch of our Writers in the Schools anthology, featuring creative writing from Portland-area public high school students. We’ll hear from two students:  

William Nobles, Franklin HS, short story Ceiling Man  

Ari Romero, junior at Lincoln HS, piece called Missing the Mark  

Rachel Kushner is the author of Creation Lake, her latest novel, The Hard Crowd, her acclaimed essay collection, and the internationally bestselling novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books are translated into twenty-seven languages.  

Danzy Senna is the author of four previous works of fiction, including the bestselling Caucasia and, most recently, Colored Television, as well as a memoir. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, she teaches writing at the University of Southern California.  

Mat Johnson is a Philip H. Knight Chair of the Humanities at the University of Oregon. His publications include the novels Invisible Things, Loving Day, and Pym, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot, and the graphic novel Incognegro. Johnson is the recipient of the American Book Award, the United States Artists James Baldwin Fellowship, The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. 

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.