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Portland Book Festival 2021

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Portland Book Festival 2021 will be a hybrid event. There will be virtual events from November 8–12, leading up to an in-person festival day on Saturday, November 13, 2021 at Portland Art Museum and Portland’5, as well as in-person writing workshops at our downtown Literary Arts space. We will announce this year’s lineup of authors and events and tickets will go on sale on September 22. Youth 17 and under (and/or with a valid high school I.D.) will receive free entry. Although this continues to be an uncertain time, Literary Arts remains committed to the safety of all readers and writers and will follow all health and safety guidelines. Whether you join us online or in-person, we are excited to build community and celebrate books, storytelling, and the power of…

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$15 – $25

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Featuring Igor Brezhnev

Art At The Cave 108 E Evergreen Blvd, Vancouver, WA, United States

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Featuring Igor Brezhnev Hosted by Christopher Luna and Morgan Paige LGBTQ+ FRIENDLY, PRO-SCIENCE, ANTI-FASCIST, ALL AGES, AND UNCENSORED SINCE 2004 7 pm Thursday, November 11 Art at the Cave 108 E Evergreen Blvd Vancouver, WA 98660 https://artatthecave.com/ $5 Suggested donation Igor Brezhnev is a poet and a book designer, among his other sins. His most recent body of published work is titled nights since. It is a series of 363 poems written every night from January 18th, 2019 to January 14th, 2020 documenting the emotional landscape of being without a home. Igor’s other work includes two full-length poetry books, dearest void (2016) and america is dry cookie and other love stories (2018) as well as a number of spoken-word albums…

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Free – $5

Jackson Bliss Reading

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Register here for the Jackson Bliss reading. You will receive a Zoom link upon registration. Jackson Bliss is the winner of the 2020 Noemi Press Award in Prose and the mixed-race/hapa author of Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments (Noemi Press, 2021), Amnesia of June Bugs (7.13 Books, 2022), Dream Pop Origami (Unsolicited Press, 2022), and the speculative fiction hypertext, Dukkha, My Love (2017). His short stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, Ploughshares, Guernica, Antioch Review, ZYZZYVA, Longreads, TriQuarterly, Columbia Journal, Kenyon Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Witness, Fiction, Santa Monica Review, Boston Review, Juked, Quarterly West, Arts & Letters, Joyland, Fiction International, Pleiades, Hobart, African American Review, Stand (UK), 3:am Magazine, The Good Men Project, The Daily Dot, and Multiethnic Literature in the US, among others. He has an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from USC. He is the Distinguished Visiting Writing at Bowling Green State University and lives in LA with his wife and their two…

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Free

Live Wire: Portland Book Festival Edition with Gary Shteyngart, Omar El Akkad, Atsuko Okatsuka, The Lowest Pair.

Alberta Rose Theatre 3000 NE Alberta St, Portland, OR, United States

GARY SHTEYNGART Gary Shteyngart is not afraid to get satirical when the situation calls for it. An American writer born in Leningrad, Shteyngart’s prose is filled with blistering humor and sharp societal observations powered by masterful storytelling. His work is acclaimed and awarded, best-selling and blurbed, read and translated into twenty-six languages. Our Country Friends is the story of eight friends, one country house, four romances, and six months in isolation to explore love, friendship, family, and betrayal. Twitter • Buy 'Our Country Friends' OMAR EL AKKAD Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He began his journalism career at the start of the war on terror, and, over the following decade, he reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and many other locations around the…

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$30 – $45

Debby Applegate in Conversation With Abbott Kahler

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Madam (Doubleday) — the new book from Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Most Famous Man in America — is the compulsively readable and sometimes jaw-dropping story of the life of a notorious madam who played hostess to every gangster, politician, writer, sports star, and Cafe Society swell worth knowing, and who as much as any single figure helped make the twenties roar. Simply put: Everybody came to Polly’s. Pearl “Polly” Adler (1900-1962) was a diminutive dynamo whose Manhattan brothels in the Roaring Twenties became places not just for men to have the company of women but were key gathering places where the culturati and celebrity elite mingled with high society and with violent figures of the underworld — and had a good time…

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Free

Livestream Reading: Joan Nockels Wilson

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Annie Bloom's welcomes Lewis & Clark College alum Joan Nockels Wilson for a reading from her new memoir, The Book of Timothy: A Sister's Pursuit. Joan will be in conversation with Lewis & Clark Law School Professor Janet Steverson and the book's subject, Timothy Nockels. Please register in advance for this Zoom event: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUpd-uqrTsqH9S2BFywd_xq31yi-BJXRfal About The Book of Timothy: Set in Rome, Chicago, and Anchorage, and spanning thirty years from crime to confrontation, The Book of Timothy: A Sister's Pursuit recounts in lyric movements a sister's journey, partly through trickery, but eventually through truth, to gain a long-absent admission from the priest who abused her brother. While on that journey, Nockels Wilson, a former prosecutor, confronts not only the priest, but her personal quest for…

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Free

Incite: Queer Writers Read – November

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Incite: Queer Writers Read is a curated, bimonthly reading series for Queer writers. Incite’s hope is to create conversation, connection, and greater understanding both within the Queer community and with other communities. Hosted by Vinnie Kinsella and Jennifer Perrine. The theme for November is “Bare.” Register for this event in advance. Andrew L. Huerta lives in Tucson, Arizona, where he has spent the last twenty-four years in Higher Education teaching/advising students who are the first in their families to attend college. With his MA in Creative Writing and PhD in Education, he just published a collection of short stories entitled A Different Man (Bold Stroke Books) and is now looking to complete his first novel, Raggedy Anthony. His short stories have appeared in Chelsea Station Magazine,…

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Free

Columbia Writers Series: Sloane Crosley

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Sloane Crosley is a fiercely funny author and essayist whose humor is lively and genuine. She is a relentless comedic force who the New York Times called, “an incisive observer of human nature.” Sloane Crosley is the author of The New York Times bestselling essay collections, I Was Told There’d Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number. The former was a finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor, and was described as “perfectly, relentlessly funny” by David Sedaris. Her debut novel, The Clasp, was a national bestseller, a New York Times editor’s choice, and it has been optioned for film by Universal Pictures. Sloane’s most recent book of essays, Look Alive Out There, was met with high praise. Steve Martin said of…

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Free

Susan DeFreitas with Lidia Yuknavitch, Michelle Ruiz Keil, David D. Levine, Leni Zumas & Curtis C. Chen

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Named for the anarchist utopia in Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction classic, The Dispossessed, Dispatches From Anarres (Forest Avenue Press) embodies the anarchic spirit of Le Guin’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, while paying tribute to her enduring vision. In stories that range from fantasy to sci-fi to realism, some of Portland's most vital voices have come together to celebrate Le Guin’s lasting legacy and influence on that most subversive of human faculties: the imagination. Editor Susan DeFreitas (Hot Season) will be joined by contributors Lidia Yuknavitch (Verge), Michelle Ruiz Keil (Summer in the City of Roses), David D. Levine (Arabella of Mars trilogy), Leni Zumas (Red Clocks), and Curtis C. Chen (the Kangaroo series). Register for the Zoom event  /  Buy the Book

Free

Casey Michel in Conversation With Alexander S. Vindman (Lt. Col., U.S. Army, Ret.)

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

For years, one country has acted as the greatest offshore haven in the world, attracting hundreds of billions of dollars in illicit finance tied directly to corrupt regimes, extremist networks, and the worst the world has to offer. But it hasn’t been the sand-splattered Caribbean islands, or even traditional financial secrecy havens like Switzerland or Panama, that have come to dominate the offshoring world. Instead, the country profiting the most also happens to be the one that still claims to be the moral leader of the free world, and the one that claims to be leading the fight against the crooked and the corrupt: the USA. Casey Michel’s American Kleptocracy (St. Martin’s) examines just how the United States’ implosion into a center of global offshoring…

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Free
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