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Book Talk: Fencing With the King | Diana Abu Jaber & Omar El Akkad

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Please join the Middle East Studies Center for our next installment of the Scholarly Lecture Series. Author and Portland State University English Faculty Diana Abu Jaber will be discussing her new novel Fencing With the King with award-winning author Omar El Akkad. Zoom Registration About the Book A mesmerizing breakthrough novel of family myths and inheritances by the award-winning author of Crescent. Amani is hooked on a mystery—a poem on airmail paper that slips out of one of her father’s books. It seems to have been written by her grandmother, a refugee who arrived in Jordan during the First World War. Soon the perfect occasion to investigate arises: her Uncle Hafez, an advisor to the King of Jordan, invites her father to celebrate the king’s sixtieth birthday—and to fence…

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Free

Overcoming Rejection for Writers

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

FEATURING: Jami Attenberg Deesha Philyaw Tommy Pico Moderated by Denne Michele Norris Sponsored by GrubStreet's Muse & the Marketplace conference Whether you’re just starting out or a seasoned pro, all writers face rejection—but how we cope with that rejection plays a huge role in shaping our literary future. Rebounding can be tough, but rather than allowing rejection to stop us in our tracks, we can reframe it into a motivational and instructional tool. Some rejections actually make us stronger—as writers, editors, applicants, and people—while others just need to be ignored. Poet and TV writer Tommy Pico (JUNK, Reservation Dogs), memoirist Jami Attenberg (I Came All This Way to Meet You), and award-winning short story writer Deesha Philyaw (The Secret Lives of Church Ladies) will share…

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$10

Busting Myths About Parenting and Writing

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

FEATURING: Claire Vaye Watkins Kaitlyn Greenidge Matthew Salesses Moderated by Kelly Luce Sponsored by GrubStreet's Muse & the Marketplace conference The idea that parenthood is a barrier to art creation is outdated, even dangerous—that we create in spite of having children rather than making complex work productively informed by parenthood in all its glory, sorrow, and ambivalence. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought parenting issues to the forefront of the national conversation, and the result has been that the discussions around parenthood specific to writing have evolved, too. Novelists Claire Vaye Watkins (I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness), Kaitlyn Greenidge (Libertie), and novelist and essayist Matthew Salesses (Craft in the Real World) will talk about the struggles, triumphs, stereotypes, and assumptions of writing as parents…

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$10

How to Pitch Electric Lit: Updated with Our New Editors!

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

FEATURING: Denne Michele Norris Michelle Chikaonda Sponsored by GrubStreet's Muse & the Marketplace conference Writing an essay, opinion piece, or feature doesn’t start with the first sentence. You have talent and a compelling idea, but how can you get an editor to pay attention? A pitch is the writer’s chance to package their work so that it catches an editor’s eye. In this conversation, Denne Michele Norris, Electric Literature's editor-in-chief, and Michelle Chikaonda, contributing editor, will answer some key questions so you can take your idea from successful pitch to published piece. We’ll discuss things like what makes a good pitch, common mistakes and misconceptions, and why Electric Lit even asks for pitches in the first place. This event is an update to our previous…

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$10

Submission Roulette III

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

FEATURING: Halimah Marcus Alyssa Songsiridej Sponsored by GrubStreet's Muse & the Marketplace conference Tired of opaque form rejections that offer zero insights into why your submission “wasn’t a fit” or “doesn’t meet our publication’s needs”? Then join Submission Roulette III for, finally, some candid answers. Recommended Reading editors Halimah Marcus and Alyssa Songsiridej will review your anonymously submitted first pages, reading them for the first time live on screen, and share their immediate reactions as they go. What leads an editor to pass after just a few paragraphs, and what entices them to keep reading? And, since the chat has been so lively during past roulettes, we’ve added a fun new twist: we’ll all drink (or hydrate with a non-alcoholic beverage) every time we spot…

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$10

Jacob Frank in His Time and Ours: Prof. Pawel Maciejko on the Historical Contexts of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The 2022 Lorry I. Lokey Program at Portland State University Presents: Jacob Frank in His Time and Ours: Prof. Pawel Maciejko on the Historical Contexts of Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob  In 2014, the Polish Nobel-prizewinning author Olga Tokarczuk published her epic novel The Books of Jacob about Jacob Frank, a real-life messianic leader in eighteenth-century Poland. Pawel Maciejko is an internationally recognized authority on the history of Jacob Frank. Join us for Prof. Maciejko’s scholarly response to the question: How does history inform Tokarczuk’s novel and our reading of it? There will be a question and answer period following Prof. Maciejko’s talk. Jacob Frank was a religious charismatic who claimed to be the messiah. In 1759 he led his Jewish followers into Catholic…

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Free

Frank Wilderson on Afropessimism

PSU - Lincoln Hall 1620 SW Park Ave, Portland, OR, United States

PSU's Black Studies Department invites you to a discussion with Frank B. Wilderson III on his recent book Afropessimism. Wednesday April 13, 2022 | 6-8pm Why does race seem to color almost every feature of our moral and political universe? Why does a perpetual cycle of slavery―in all its political, intellectual, and cultural forms―continue to define the Black experience? And why is anti-Black violence such a predominant feature not only in the United States but around the world? These are just some of the compelling questions that animate Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III’s seminal work on the philosophy of Blackness. Radical in conception, remarkably poignant, and with soaring flights of lyrical prose, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity in the fractured world we inhabit. It positions Wilderson as a paradigmatic thinker…

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Free

The George Floyd Rebellion and the Power of Black Lives Matter

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Please join us for a talk by Cedric Johnson, faculty in Black Studies and Political Science at University of Illinois, Chicago. Professor Johnson will be discussing his new book, The Panthers Can't Save Us Now: Debating Left Politics and Black Lives Matter (Verso). Cedric Johnson is Professor of Black Studies and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  His teaching and research interests include African American political thought, neoliberal politics, and class analysis and race. His most recent book, The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now (Verso, 2022), reprises the debate surrounding his eponymous essay, which cautioned against the perils of nostalgia and ethnic politics during Black Lives Matter’s first wave.  Johnson’s book, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (University of Minnesota…

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Free

Solve for X: How X-Men Comics Got a New Identity

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The X-Men comic books of the past three years—the "Krakoan era"—have reinvented the long-running, impossibly rococo superhero franchise, devising ingenious solutions to its longstanding narrative and design problems. Douglas Wolk will present a whistle-stop tour of six decades' worth of Marvel's mutant comics, and discuss how "Head of X" Jonathan Hickman, designer Tom Muller, artists Pepe Larraz and R.B. Silva, colorist Marte Gracia and their collaborators overhauled the X-Men line in 2019. Douglas Wolk is the author of All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told, and teaches comics history at Portland State University. He’s written about comics and music for magazines, newspapers and web sites including Time, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The Believer, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice,…

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Free

Hawai’i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific

PSU Native American Student and Community Center 710 SW Jackson St, Portland, OR, United States

Please join us for a talk by Nitasha Tamar Sharma, Professor of African American Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. Professor Sharma will be discussing her new book Hawai'i is my Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific (Duke University Press, 2021). A comparative race studies scholar, Nitasha Tamar Sharma is a professor of African American Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University, where she was the Charles Deering Professor of Teaching Excellence. Hawai'i is my Haven is an ethnography that maps the context and contours of Black life in the Hawaiian Islands to highlight the paradox of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial paradise and site of unacknowledged antiBlack racism. Dr. Sharma is also the author of Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global…

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Free
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