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A CONVERSATION WITH JOHN JENNINGS AND DAMIAN DUFFY

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Join Comics Studies and the Portland Center for the Humanities at PSU for a conversation with John Jennings and Damian Duffy, co-collaborators on Black Comix Returns and the graphic novelization of Octavia Butler's prescient dystopian novel Parable of the Sower. John Jennings is a Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside. Jennings is co-editor of the Eisner Award-winning collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of the Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art. Jennings is also a 2016 Nasir Jones Hip Hop Studies Fellow with the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. Jennings' current projects include the horror anthology Box of Bones, the coffee table book Black Comix Returns (with Damian Duffy), and the Eisner-winning, Bram Stoker Award-winning, New York…

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Free

Cut Paste Fold: A Zine Show

IPRC (Independent Publishing Resource Center) 318 SE Main Street #175, Portland, OR, United States

Curated by: A'misa Chiu, Jakelen Diaz, Nat Turner Project, Small Axe Projects Proof of Vaccination + Masks required Opening reception: 4-6pm Curators talk at 5pm

Free

David Duchovny in Conversation With Kristi Turnquist

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

David Duchovny’s The Reservoir (Akashic) follows an unexceptional man in an exceptional time. We see our present-day pandemic world and New York City through the eyes of a former Wall Street veteran, Ridley, as he, in his enforced quarantined solitude, looks back upon his life. He examines his wins, his failures, the gnawing questions — his career, his divorce, his estranged daughter — and wonders what it all means and who he really is. Sitting and brooding night after night, gazing out his huge picture window high above the Central Park Reservoir, Ridley spots a flashing light in an apartment across the park as if a lonely quarantined person is signaling him in Morse code. His determination to find out who this mystery woman is,…

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Maria Adelmann in Conversation With Steve Almond

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In present-day New York City, five women meet in a basement support group to process their traumas. Bernice grapples with the fallout of dating a psychopathic, blue-bearded billionaire. Ruby, once devoured by a wolf, now wears him as a coat. Gretel questions her memory of being held captive in a house made of candy. Ashlee, the winner of a Bachelor-esque dating show, wonders if she really got her promised fairy tale ending. And Raina's love story will shock them all. Though the women start out wary of one another, judging each other’s stories, gradually they begin to realize that they may have more in common than they supposed… What really brought them here? What secrets will they reveal? And is it too late for them…

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Free

Zach Mangan in Conversation With Jim Meehan

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

Explore the artistry of Japanese tea from cultivation to cup in Stories of Japanese Tea (Princeton Architectural Press), a comprehensive illustrated guide to the tea industry from Zach Mangan, founder of Kettl, a New York City- and Fukuoka, Japan-based tea and teaware company. Stories of Japanese Tea includes Japanese growers, their craft of tea-making, and how the tradition of tea has had an influence on cuisine, art, and health. Mangan’s visual exploration of one of the world's most popular beverages tells the stories of tea and tea-making in Japan: how it is grown, harvested, and processed, as well as how it is prepared and enjoyed. Through interviews with tea growers, information on health benefits from Dr. Andrew Weil, and amazing recipes from Japanese chefs and…

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Free

Lars Horn in Conversation With Elena Passarello

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

Lars Horn’s Voice of the Fish (Graywolf), the latest Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner, is an interwoven essay collection that explores the trans experience through themes of water, fish, and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a debilitating back injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak. In Horn’s adept hands, the collection takes shape as a unified book: short vignettes about fish, reliquaries, and antiquities serve as interludes between longer essays, knitting together a sinuous, wave-like form that flows across the book. Horn swims through a range of subjects, roving across marine history, theology, questions of the body and gender, sexuality, transmasculinity, and illness. From Horn’s upbringing with a mother who used them as a model in photos and art…

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Dan Chaon in Conversation With Shawn Vestal

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Sleepwalk (Henry Holt) is a high speed and darkly comic road trip through a near-future America with a big-hearted mercenary, from beloved and acclaimed novelist Dan Chaon. Sleepwalk’s hero, Will Bear, is a man with so many aliases that he simply thinks of himself as the Barely Blur. At 50 years old, he’s been living off the grid for over half his life. He’s never had a real job, never paid taxes, never been in a committed relationship. A good-natured henchman with a complicated and lonely past and a passion for LSD microdosing, he spends his time hopscotching across state lines in his beloved camper van, running sometimes shady often dangerous errands for a powerful and ruthless operation he’s never troubled himself to learn too…

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Standing Up Virtual Event

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Virtual Event with Ellen Bravo and Larry Miller and their book Standing Up. We welcome (virtually) Ellen Bravo and Larry Miller in conversation with moderator Margaret Butler, former director of Jobs with Justice and activist in the environmental justice movement. In Standing Up, Ellen Bravo and Larry Miller have taken inspiration from their five decades organizing for labor and social justice to craft a novel about the people who clean bloody hospital sheets, forge parts for sewer pipes, arrange flights, or process checks, all while caring for kids, holding relationships together, and wrestling with multiple forms of oppression. This book is about the people Imbolo Mbue calls “the deliberately unheard.” The ones we see every day but do not know their names, their joys or…

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Free

Sloane Crosley in Conversation With Arthur Bradford

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

One night in New York City's Chinatown, a woman is at a work reunion dinner with former colleagues when she excuses herself to buy a pack of cigarettes. On her way back, she runs into a former boyfriend. And then another. And… another. Nothing is quite what it seems as the city becomes awash with ghosts of heartbreaks past. What would normally pass for coincidence becomes something far stranger as the recently engaged Lola must contend not only with the viability of her current relationship, but the fact that both her best friend and her former boss, a magazine editor turned mystical guru, might have an unhealthy investment in the outcome. Memories of the past swirl and converge in ways both comic and eerie, as…

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J. M. Miro in Conversation With David D. Levine

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

England, 1882. In Victorian London, two children with mysterious powers are hunted by a figure of darkness — a man made of smoke. Sixteen-year-old Charlie Ovid, despite a brutal childhood in Mississippi, doesn't have a scar on him. His body heals itself, whether he wants it to or not. Marlowe, a foundling from a railway freight car, shines with a strange bluish light. He can melt or mend flesh. When a jaded female detective is recruited to escort them to safety, all three begin a journey into the nature of difference, and belonging, and the shadowy edges of the monstrous. What follows is a story of wonder and betrayal, from the gaslit streets of London, and the wooden theatres of Meiji-era Tokyo, to an eerie…

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