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Abby Lawlor in Conversation With Vanessa Veselka

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

Rules to Win By: Participation and Power in Union Negotiations (Oxford) is a book for anyone who wants to understand how to build the power required to effectively challenge and reverse income inequality and attacks on democracy. Drawing insights from recent hard-won unionization and contract negotiation fights, Abby Lawlor (and co-author Jane McAlevey) uses lessons from some of the toughest fights today — preparing a durable, all-out strike in a union-hostile environment — to provide a master class in participatory social change, indispensable both within and beyond the workplaces where we spend half of our waking lives. In an era of polarization, big lies, and massive legislative setbacks, changemakers in every arena need to learn the skills and lessons honed in pitched battles against experienced…

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Free

Reading: Mitzi Zilka: Water Fire Steam

Annie Bloom's Books 7834 SW Capitol Hwy, Portland, OR, United States

Annie Bloom's welcomes Pacific Northwest author Mitzi Zilka for an in-store reading from her novel, Water Fire Steam. About Water Fire Steam: The year is 1884. Rolla Alan Jones, an ambitious dreamer fresh out of an East Coast engineering school, is commissioned to design and build the first water system in Spokane Falls, Washington, a booming town of twenty-thousand. He is everyone's golden boy for five years until the city burns down on August 4, 1889. The once-celebrated engineer is scapegoated for the catastrophe, alleging his system yielded inadequate water pressure. Asked to resign, betrayed by his friends, shunned by the community, and abandoned by his pregnant wife and three-year-old son, Rolla must find the strength to reinvent himself or return to New York as…

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Free

Eli Francovich in Conversation With Erica Berry

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

The gray wolf has made an astonishing comeback in Washington. Nearly eradicated by the 1990s, conservationists and environmentalists have cheered its robust return to the state over the last two decades. But Washington ranchers are not so joyous. When wolves prey on livestock, ranchers view their livelihood as under attack. In The Return of Wolves (Timber Press), journalist Eli Francovich investigates how we might mend this divide while keeping wolf populations thriving. He finds an answer in the time-honored tradition of range riding and one passionate range rider, Daniel Curry, who has jumped directly into the fray by patrolling the rural Washington landscape on horseback. Curry engages directly with farmers, seeking to protect livestock from wolves while also protecting and proliferating wolf populations. In The…

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Free

Verselandia! 2023

Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 1037 SW Broadway, Portland, OR, United States

Youth Poetry Slam Championship Celebrate Portland’s youth poets during Literary Arts’ annual Verselandia! Youth Poetry Slam Championship. Cheer on students from Portland and East Multnomah County public high schools competing for poetic glory at this energetic and inspiring event. Support provided by: To support this event as a sponsor, please contact Lydah DeBin at lydah@literary-arts.org or call 503-989-7110.  

$10 – $70

Anastacia-Reneé in Conversation With Jamila Osman

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

Anastacia-Reneé’s Side Notes from the Archivist (Amistad Press) is a preservation of Black culture viewed through a feminist lens. The Archivist leads readers through poems that epitomize youthful renditions of a Black girl coming of age in Philadelphia’s pre-funk ’80s; episodic adventures of “the Black Girl” whose life is depicted through the white gaze; and selections of verse evincing affection for self and testimony to the magnificence within Black femme culture at-large. Every poem in Side Notes elevates and honestly illustrates the buoyancy of Blackness and the calamity of Black lives on earth. In her uniquely embracing and experimental style, Anastacia-Reneé documents these truths as celebrations of diverse subjects, from Solid Gold to halal hotdogs; as homages and reflections on iconic images, from Marsha P.…

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Free

Endi Bogue Hartigan & Flávia Rocha in Conversation

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

Join us in celebration of the launch of oh orchid o’clock (Omnidawn Publishing, 2023) by Endi Bogue Hartigan who will introduce her new collection. She will be joined by Brazilian poet Flávia Rocha, who will read from her most recent book Exosfera. Enjoy an evening of lyric investigations into space, time, our time, and orchids, followed by a short discussion and Q&A. This collection speaks the language of the clock as a living instrument, exposing the sensory impacts of our obsession with time. In oh orchid o’clock, lyrics wind through histories like a nervous system through a body. The poems speak to how we let our days become over-clocked, over-transactional, and over-weaponed. With an instrumental sensibility, Endi Bogue Hartigan investigates what it is to be…

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Free

Kids’ Storytime

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

Join us every Saturday for kids' storytime. Today we're reading All the Ways to Be Smart by Davina Bell. Buy the Book

Free

Spare Room Annual Marathon Reading: Gertrude Stein & Jackson Mac Low

Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660, Portland, OR, United States

Spare Room and Passages Bookshop present a marathon reading IDA  by  Gertrude Stein Pieces o’ Six  by  Jackson Mac Low Sunday, April 30 12:00 pm until finish (probably around 8:00-8:30 pm) Admission free Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660 Portland, OR 97209 503-388-7665 = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = The Spare Room Reading Series hosts an annual marathon reading, in which local writers, artists, and friends read aloud one or more booklength texts. This year's marathon features Gertrude Stein's short novel Ida (1945) and Jackson Mac Low's thirty-three "poems in prose"…

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Free

Ram Shankar Siva Kumar & Hyrum Anderson

Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd, Beaverton, OR, United States

In Not With A Bug, But With A Sticker (Wiley), adversarial machine learning researchers Ram Shankar Siva Kumar and Hyrum Anderson deliver a riveting account of the most significant risk to artificial intelligence systems: cybersecurity threats. The authors take you on a sweeping tour — from inside secretive government organizations to academic workshops at ski chalets to Google’s cafeteria — recounting how major AI systems remain vulnerable to the exploits of bad actors of all stripes. Siva Kumar and Anderson outline the different ways any AI system — from Alexa to Tesla — can be manipulated by adversaries. Their book is aimed at a general audience, and, in playful language and anecdotes, attempts to answer a multitude of questions: How to subvert these AI systems?…

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Free

WORKS ON PAPER: EXPERIMENTS IN LANGUAGE & SOUND PRESENTS MARK SO

Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660, Portland, OR, United States

Works on Paper: Experiments in Language and Sound presents an evening of tapes, readings, and text-objects by MARK SO Saturday, May 6 4:00 pm – 10:00 pm, come and go as you wish $10-20 suggested donation; no one turned away Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660 503-388-7665 ======================================= A six-hour multichannel playback of So’s experimental taped through-reading of John Ashbery's booklength poem Flow Chart provides a lively scrim for several discrete but related nucleii of his work to appear and coincide: • a group of his Ashbery scores which composer Manfred Werder performed for a month at a time, marked only by his sparse overtyping and occasional polaroids • several typescripts from late in the Ashbery series, no longer scores but radical transcriptions of…

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Free – $20
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