The Archive Project

This episode features a conversation between Margaret Atwood and Portland’s own Karen Russell, which took place during the virtual 2020 Portland Book Festival. With a career spanning decades, genres, and forms, Margaret Atwood is easily one of the most important writers alive today. She has been published in 45 countries, and written seminal works of fiction that have become a part of the cultural fabric and touchstones for millions of readers. But while many are familiar with Atwood’s fiction, she has also been, from the beginning of her career, one of our most significant contemporary poets. We welcomed Atwood to the Portland Book Festival to talk about her first collection of poetry in over a decade, entitled Dearly.

What is so engrossing about this conversation is that it ranges Atwood’s entire career and cuts across her broad sets of interests, from her first book, a collection of poetry called The Circle Game, to the primitive book tours of the 1960s, to vampires, Shakespeare, and the way poetry has evolved through the decades. Atwood gets to all of these subjects and more with incredible insight, humor, and vision.

“If an artform doesn’t reinvent itself, it will die. If it doesn’t keep moving to new kinds of creators and new kinds of audiences, it will die. The arts move. They don’t just sit there being arts.”

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series, her novels include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; The MaddAddam Trilogy; The Heart Goes Last; and Hag-Seed. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. In 2019, The Testaments won the Booker Prize and was long-listed for The Giller Prize. She lives in Toronto.

Karen Russell won the 2012 and the 2018 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her first novel, Swamplandia! (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has also written Orange World and, most recently, Sleep Donation. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, the “5 under 35” prize from the National Book Foundation, the NYPL Young Lions Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and is a former fellow of the Cullman Center and the American Academy in Berlin. She currently holds the Endowed Chair at Texas State University’s MFA program, and lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and son.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a talk and conversation with novelist Yaa Gyasi. In 2016, Gyasi’s first novel, Homegoing, was published and immediately became a New York Times’ bestseller, was awarded numerous prizes, and was praised by Zadie Smith as “spectacular,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates as “an inspiration,” and widely hailed as one of the best books of that year. This spring, Gyasi joined us for Portland Arts & Lectures to talk about her second book, Transcendent Kingdom, published in 2020. Like Homegoing, the book explores the constant presence of the past. But, where that book spanned centuries and continents, Transcendent Kingdom unfolds on a more granular, intimate scale.

In many ways, this talk is less about writing than it is the power of reading, an act that is so powerful that people died so that others might experience it, so powerful that it can force the reader to contend with the humanity of someone they do not know and will never meet, from another place or time. We learn of the profound impact of Toni Morrison on Gyasi, her journey to becoming a writer, and how she grapples in her fiction with what she calls the “afterlife of slavery,” asking the question, “Is slavery even over?”

In the second half of the episode, she is joined by Andrew Proctor for a conversation about both her books, and the influences that shaped them.

“My work is largely concerned with the ways that the ancestors walk with us; the ways history, familial and societal, continues to show up in our lives.”

Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. She holds a BA in English from Stanford University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she held a Dean’s Graduate Research Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn.

Andrew Proctor has been the director of Literary Arts since 2009. Born and raised in Canada, Proctor, earned a bachelor’s degree in English and Music at Concordia University in Montreal, and later worked in London for the Cultural Attaché to the Canadian High Commission. In the UK, he also earned an MA in English Literature at the University of East Anglia under the supervision of England’s then Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. From 2000-2004 Proctor worked as an editor for HarperCollins in New York City and then as the Membership and Operations Director of the PEN American Center, a global literary and human rights organization focused on the welfare of writers and editors. In total, Proctor has worked in the literary world for over twenty years in the governmental, for profit, and nonprofit sectors.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature poet Joy Harjo. Harjo became the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States when she was appointed in 2019, and is currently serving her third term in that post.

She joined us as part of Portland Arts & Lectures from her home in Tulsa, Oklahoma. During her Laureateship, she edited two landmark anthologies: When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, and Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry.  Harjo uses these two projects as a basis to structure her talk, which takes us deep into the history of Native American poetry, from periods when it was an oral tradition, to the first appearance of written poetry in the seventeenth century, all the way to the current day. These anthologies gather together work from hundreds of languages, nations and tribes to present to the reader the breadth and depth of a tradition that continues to flourish, but that was left out, erased, or otherwise made invisible by editors, publishers, and academics over the centuries.  Harjo’s work re-surfacing these poems and poets is vital to our understanding of ourselves as a nation because, as Harjo says, a nation is defined by its literature.

In the second half of this episode, Harjo will be in conversation with Oregon’s Poet Laurate and Literary Arts Board Member, Anis Mojgani.  Mojgani is an international poetry slam champion, and the author of five books of poetry, most recently In the Pockets of Small Gods. His first children’s book is forthcoming from Chronicle Books, and his poem “Closer” was included in the recently published anthology, African American Poetry, edited by Kevin Young.

“Words are living beings.”

“Those of us who read and listen to poetry want our ears and perception bent for unique insight, and want to see how the impossible becomes momentarily possible in the arrangement of language and meaning.”

Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently An American Sunrise, and one previous memoir, Crazy Brave. She edited the anthologies When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through and Living Nations, Living Words. Named poet laureate of the United States in 2019, she lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she is a Tulsa Artist Fellow.

Anis Mojgani is Oregon’s current Poet Laureate and the author of five books of poetry. His work has appeared on HBO, NPR, and in journals Bat City Review, Rattle, Buzzfeed Reader, Thrush, and Forklift Ohio, amongst others. A two time National Poetry Slam Champion and winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam, Anis has done commissioned work for the Getty Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Portland Timbers, and has been awarded artist residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, AIR Serenbe, and the Bloedel Nature Reserve. Originally from New Orleans, Anis currently lives in Portland, OR, where he serves on the Board of Directors for Literary Arts.

“I’m holding the door open and saying ‘Look at all these poets.’ We have so many poets, and this is the time that we go to the poets. This is the time we need the poets and poetry, because the poets are the truth tellers.”

In this episode, we feature Alison Bechdel in conversation with Oregon’s own Cheryl Strayed. Strayed talks with Bechdel about her newest book The Secret to Superhuman Strength. The graphic memoir is ostensibly about Bechdel’s lifelong pursuit of exercise in one form or another. But like so much of Bechdel’s work, the book is not necessarily about what it’s about. Bechdel’s obsession with exercise is driven by her desire to be physically strong and resilient, but it is also a tool to clear her mind and fuel her creativity, and it is rebuke of the misogyny she was surrounded by her whole life.

Their conversation also takes us down fascinating side trips including a tour of literary history from English Romantics, to the American Transcendentalists right though the Beat Poets of the 1950s–all radical in their time, who perused enlightenment in the outdoors, and who, though separated by hundreds of years, are also dealing with remarkably similar ideas. Strayed and Bechdel are also both candid and humble in this conversation which concludes with a discussion about creativity and anxiety, and their struggles to produce new work under the spotlight of their incredible successes.

This event was originally presented by WestxMidwest, a collaboration between Black Mountain Institute, Literary Arts, The Loft’s Wordplay and the Wisconsin Book Festival.

“That’s what I love about memoir: This puzzle of trying to find a story in the randomness of our lives.”

Alison Bechdel is the author of the bestselling memoir FUN HOME: A Family Tragicomic, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, New York Times, People, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, and San Francisco Chronicle, among others. For 25 years, she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a visual chronicle of modern life—queer and otherwise—considered “one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period.” Bechdel was guest editor of Best American Comics 2011 and has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney’s, Entertainment Weekly, Granta, and the New York Times Book Review.

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times–bestselling memoir Wild, the New York Times–bestsellers Tiny Beautiful Things and Brave Enough, and the novel Torch. Strayed is the host of the New York Times hit podcast “Sugar Calling” and also “Dear Sugars,” which she co-hosted with Steve Almond. Her essays have been published in the Best American Essays, the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, Salon, the Sun, Tin House, the New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. Strayed holds an MFA in fiction writing from Syracuse University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

In this episode, we bring you writer Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights. We hosted Gay in the culminating event of Multnomah County Library’s 2021 Everybody Reads program—an annual shared reading experience that includes city-wide events for readers of all ages. This year, because of the public health restrictions, we brought Ross Gay to Portland virtually. He gave an incredible lecture and then engaged in a thoughtful, funny, and heartfelt conversation with Oregon-based writer Lidia Yuknavitch.

In his talk, Ross Gay takes us back to his hardscrabble childhood in Philadelphia and traces his coming-of-age story from newspaper boy to internationally recognized poet and writer. The Book of Delights, an essay collection, contains “essayettes,” as Gay refers to them, written over one year, recording the small joys of life: Nicknames, being called “baby” by a waitress, birds in the Detroit airport, writing by hand. And as he catalogs his delight, Gay does not avoid the harshness and unfairness that accompanies life in twenty-first century America, including racism, grief, climate disaster, and more. But Gay shows us that it is possible to notice delight amid grief and upheaval, and how this delight connects us, not only to the world around us, be to each other.

“We are all of us in the field of each other’s becoming. We are the field of each other’s becoming.”

Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019. Gay is also the co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook “Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens,” in addition to being co-author, with Rosechard Wehrenberg, of the chapbook, “River.”  He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin’, in addition to being an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press. Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. He also works on The Tenderness Project with Shayla Lawson and Essence London. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ross teaches at Indiana University.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the nationally bestselling author of the novels The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, Dora: A Headcase, the memoir The Chronology of Water and The Misfit’s Manifesto, based on her TED talk “On the Beauty of Being a Misfit,” which has been viewed over 3.5 million times. She is the recipient of two Oregon Book Awards and a Willamette Writers Award, and has been a finalist for the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize and the PEN Center Creative Nonfiction Award. She is the founder of the literary innovation laboratory Corporeal Writing. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

This episode of The Archive Project is part of an ongoing series featuring conversations curated and lead by Oregon’s Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani. Anis invited two writers to join him in conversation. Both are primarily poets, but have recently authored books of nonfiction about the intersection of American history, culture, and the African-American experience.

Hanif Abdurraqib is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, in addition to a chapbook. He is perhaps most famous for Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and was a New York Times Bestseller. In this conversation, he is talking about his most recent book, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance.

Clint Smith is the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent and is a staff writer at The Atlantic.  His new book is How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America.

This conversation is special because it is among poets, and these poets bring to their subjects an unusual perspective and surprising insights that we don’t always get from traditional historians or cultural critics. In their exploration of foundational or pivotal aspects of American history and culture, both Abdurraqib and Smith’s perspectives are vital to the national conversation we are having about race right now.

“The book became richer when my own experiences and sensibilities and questions were put in conversation with that of others.” – Clint Smith

“There are some places in the book where I got to be more playful. …I think that was a part of me feeling some freedom that I hadn’t maybe felt before, feeling some confidence in my voice that I hadn’t really felt before… The ability to be playful and funny while still making sure that people knew that I was writing about something that I took very seriously.” – Hanif Abdurraqib

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in PEN American, Muzzle, Vinyl, and other journals, and his essays and criticism have been published in The New Yorker, Pitchfork, The New York Times, and Fader. His first full-length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much , was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer book award and nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us was named a book of the year by NPR, Esquire, BuzzFeed, O: The Oprah Magazine, Pitchfork and Chicago Tribune, among others. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest was a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize finalist and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune for Your Disaster, won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent. The book won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He has received fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art For Justice Fund, Cave Canem, and the National Science Foundation. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review and elsewhere. Born and raised in New Orleans, he received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and his Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University.

Anis Mojgani is Oregon’s current Poet Laureate and the author of five books of poetry. His work has appeared on HBO, NPR, and in journals Bat City Review, Rattle, Buzzfeed Reader, Thrush, and Forklift Ohio, amongst others. A two time National Poetry Slam Champion and winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam, Anis has done commissioned work for the Getty Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Portland Timbers, and has been awarded artist residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, AIR Serenbe, and the Bloedel Nature Reserve. Originally from New Orleans, Anis currently lives in Portland, OR, where he serves on the Board of Directors for Literary Arts.

“I don’t want this book to be Ptolemaic, I don’t want it to be didactic. I’m not interested in going in to try to shame or belittle people. I’m going in because I’m curious. I’m going in because the beauty of journalism, at its best, is that it pushes me to have discussions and conversations with people who I would otherwise never be in conversation with.” – Clint Smith

Our 34th annual Oregon Book Awards is presented in this special, state-wide broadcast and podcast episode, with special thanks to our partners at Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Since 1987, the Oregon Book Awards have celebrated the work of our state’s authors. This year, 173 books from 41 towns across Oregon were submitted. Out-of-state judges determined the finalists and winners. In this episode of The Archive Project, you’ll hear excerpts read by the winning authors themselves. We’re also thrilled to share an interview with Molly Gloss, this year’s CES Wood Award recipient, and archival audio of treasured Oregon writer Barry Lopez, who hosted the Awards in 2006 and received the CES Wood Award in 2008.

Our guest hosts for this special episode are Elena Passarello and Omar El Akkad, both of whom are previous Oregon Book Award winners themselves.

Elena Passarello is an actor, essayist, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Paris Review, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018, and has been translated into German, Italian, French, and Mandarin. She is the author of the essay collections Let Me Clear My Throat and Animals Strike Curious Poses, the latter of which won the 2018 Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction and made the Best Books of 2017 lists in the New York Times, Guardian, and Publisher’s Weekly. Passarello teaches creative writing at Oregon State University and appears weekly on the nationally-syndicated PRI radio variety show LiveWire!.

Omar El Akkad was born in Cairo, Egypt and grew up in Doha, Qatar until he moved to Canada with his family. He is an award-winning journalist and author who has traveled around the world to cover many of the most important news stories of the last decade. His reporting includes dispatches from the NATO-led war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantànamo Bay, the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt and the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Missouri. He is a recipient of Canada’s National Newspaper Award for investigative reporting and the Goff Penny Memorial Prize for Young Canadian Journalists, as well as three National Magazine Award honorable mentions. His debut novel is American War, for which he won the Oregon Book Award for Fiction. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Molly Gloss is the author of several novels including The Jump-Off Creek, The Dazzle of Day, Wild Life, The Hearts of Horses and Falling From Horses, as well as the story collection Unforeseen. She writes both realistic fiction and science fiction, and her work has received, among other honors, a PEN West Fiction Prize, an Oregon Book Award, two Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and a Whiting Writers Award. A fourth-generation Oregonian, she lives in Portland.

Barry Lopez was the author of three collections of essays, including Horizon; several story collections; Arctic Dreams, for which he received the National Book Award; Of Wolves and Men, a National Book Award finalist; and Crow and Weasel, a novella-length fable. He contributed regularly to both American and foreign journals and traveled to more than seventy countries to conduct research. He was the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Lannan, and National Science Foundations and was honored by a number of institutions for his literary, humanitarian, and environmental work. He died in 2020.

Artists Repertory Theatre (also known as Artists Rep or ART) is the oldest running theatre company in Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1982, Artists Rep is in its 39th year of making intimate, provocative theatre. As is true for most organizations and businesses, Artists Rep was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. They had to shutter its regularly scheduled performances and pivot to alternative programming, including audio dramas, video, and film projects. Through interviews and clips, this special collaboration episode of The Archive Project highlights three such projects: Magellanica, Forget Me Not America, and See Me. These projects shine a light on Artists Rep’s innovative creativity, resilience, and their commitment to centering artists first.

Kisha Jarrett is the Managing Director at Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, Oregon. She is a creative change-maker with a background in marketing and development throughout her ten-year career in Arts Management that has helped raise over $50 million dollars for various organizations and has a cumulative earned revenue of over $5 million. A Virginia native, she has lived all over the country but now calls Portland home. Kisha is also a writer, director, producer, actor, musician, and storyteller. Currently, she is working on her second feature-length screenplay, pre-production for a feature-length documentary (Black Girl in the Woods, documenting a hike-thru of the Pacific Northwest Trail) and an educational piece for the Oregon Bar Association (about the four black suffragettes in Oregon who deserve to have their stories told), post-production on the first devised DNA:Oxygen short film (See Me), and writing her first novel. Kisha is proud to be a co-founder of the DNA: Oxygen program at ART.

Shawn Lee recently co-directed the short film Better Maybe in Mercury Company I. Additional directing credits include Small Mouth Sounds and American Hero by Bess Wohl. In 2017, he directed Christopher Chen’s Caught, which was a multi-media theatre/art installation and collaboration with Portland visual artist, Horatio Law. He directed and co-produced the international tour of E. M. Lewis’ The Gun Show, starring Artists Rep Resident Artist, Vin Shambry, which premiered in CoHo Productions’ 21st season. After a sold out run, The Gun Show was remounted at Artists Rep before touring to the Logan Festival of Solo Performance at 1st Stage in Virginia, the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, Portland Public Schools, and Willamette University. Shawn is the Producing Director at Artists Rep and is now in his sixth season. In 2001, he co-founded the Furious Theatre Company in Los Angeles where he served as co-Artistic Director before moving to Portland in 2014.

E. M. Lewis is an award-winning playwright, teacher, and opera librettist. Her work has been produced around the world, and published by Samuel French. Lewis received the Steinberg Award for both How the Light Gets In and Song of Extinction, and the Primus Prize for Heads from the American Theater Critics Association, the Ted Schmitt Award from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle for outstanding writing of a world premiere play, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a playwriting fellowship from the New Jersey State Arts Commission, the 2016 Oregon Literary Fellowship in Drama, and an Edgerton Award for her epic Antarctic play Magellanica.

Dawn Jones Redstone is an award-winning queer, Latinx writer/director whose films have screened around the globe. Her work often features women of color and explores themes of resistance, feminism and the internal machinations that help us transform into the people we want to become. She was named a Woman of Vision by Oregon Daily Journal of Commerce and has been awarded grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council, Northwest Film Center and MRG Foundation and more. In 2017, she was selected to shadow director Debra Granik on the set of Leave No Trace as part of the 5to50 program in Oregon. She believes in using her writing/hiring decisions to lift people up and help create a filmmaking community that reflects and brings needed perspective to the world we live in. She is preparing to make her first feature film.

Dámaso Rodríguez is in his eighth season as Artistic Director of Artists Repertory Theatre, Portland’s longest-running professional theatre company, which became a member of the League of Resident Theatres (LORT) under his leadership. Plays developed during his tenure have been produced in New York, Chicago, London, and throughout the U.S. Acclaim for Artists Rep developed projects includes the Dramatists Guild Foundation Award, the Edgerton New Play Award, NEA Funding, American Theatre Magazine’s Most Produced Plays list, and coverage in the New Yorker and The New York Times.

Currently living in Portland, Josie Seid is a resident artist with Artists Repertory Theater. She’s an international creator of theater arts, who moves in several circles.  As proud member of the LineStorm Play Writes Collective, she is the author of Petite Dames, which was nominated for the Kilroy list in 2015 and was recently workshopped at Lewis and Clark’s Ray Warren Symposium on Race and Revolutionary Struggle. Other works include but are not limited to: Path of Glory, The Great God of the Dark Storm Cloud, Jordan’s Wisdom, Overdue, Stand by Me, and This is Message Number 13. Her short play, A Wing and a Prayer was recently featured in the nationwide Play At Home project. As an actor and musical theater performer, she’s been seen in shows on Portland area stages such as: An Octoroon with Artists Repertory Theater, Men on Boats with Third Rail, and Into the Woods with Broadway Rose. She is also an international arts envoy who as performed in Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt. Josie has also directed productions in Portland to include two world premieres: Hazardous Beauty with PassinArt and A Dark Sky Full of Stars with Vertigo. Her most recent film, Forget Me Not, America, in association with the ART Mercury company has taken Josie to new creative places and she is excited to imagine what’s next!

Andrea Vernae is a native of Miami, Florida. She is also a former Portland Playhouse Apprentice. She was last seen in Building the Wall with Triangle Productions, Pen/Man/Ship with Portland Playhouse, The Every 28 Hours Plays with Confrontation Theatre, Antigone Project with Profile Theatre, and at Portland Playhouse in Peter and the Starcatcher. When not onstage, Andrea is proud to serve as Managing Director of Confrontation Theatre.

In this episode, we feature some of the incredible slam poets who performed as part of Verselandia! 2019: The annual city-wide youth poetry slam, presented by Literary Arts. High school students across the city spend the year writing and competing with their peers, and each April about twenty finalists compete for the title of Portland Slam Champ.

These young poets are a thrill to hear. They will give you the chills and perhaps bring tears to your eyes. And at this moment when it feels like our society is cleaved with deep divisions, it is so important to take the time to really listen to young voices who are, after all, the future. These young writers come from all walks of life in Portland, and have incredible stories to tell.

In addition to hearing some of these stunning performances, we will hear from the emcee of the evening, Mighty Mike McGee, and also directly from students as they talk about their art and connection to slam poetry.

Mighty Mike McGee is a well-traveled “stand-up poet” and storyteller from San José, California. In the world of poetry slam, he is the first to win both the 2003 National Poetry Slam Individual Grand Championship and the 2006 Individual World Poetry Slam Grand Championship. He has toured very extensively throughout United States, Canada and Europe. Since 2002, he’s covered several hundred thousand miles performing his brand of poetry and humor. McGee has been featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, CBC Radio and Television, and NPR’s Snap Judgment. He was one of the first Americans to perform spoken word at the University of Paris, la Sorbonne in 2005. He was appointed Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley) for 2018 & 2019.