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Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves

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

Remember that moment when you first encountered a character who seemed to be written just for you? That feeling of belonging remains with readers for the rest of their lives – but it doesn’t happen as frequently for all of us. In her timely anthology, Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves (Ballantine), “well-read black girl” Glory Edim brings together original essays by some of our best black female writers and creative voices to shine a light on how important it is that everyone – regardless of gender, race, religion, or abilities – can find themselves in literature. Whether it’s learning about the complexities of femalehood from Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, finding a new type of love in The Color Purple, or…

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Free

Visiting Writers Series: Hanif Abdurraqib

Reed College - Eliot Hall Chapel 3203 SE Woodstock, Portland, OR, United States

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of a New York Times best-selling biography on A Tribe Called Quest called Go Ahead in the Rain (University of Texas Press, February 2019), The Crown Ain't Worth Much (Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press, 2016), nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Pitchfork, Oprah Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Slate, Esquire, GQ, and Publisher's Weekly, among others. He is a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow, a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine, and a member of the poetry collective Echo Hotel with poet/essayist Eve Ewing. Abdurraqib has two forthcoming books including a new…

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Free

Jonathan Taplin in Conversation With Robbie Robertson

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Jonathan Taplin’s extraordinary journey has put him at the crest of every major cultural wave in the past half century: he was tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band in the ’60s, producer of major films in the ’70s, an executive at Merrill Lynch in the ’80s, creator of the Internet’s first video-on-demand service in the ’90s, and a cultural critic and author writing about technology in the new millennium. His is a lifetime marked not only by good timing but by impeccable instincts — from the folk scene to Woodstock, Hollywood’s rebellious film movement, and beyond. Taplin is not just a witness but a lifelong producer, the right-hand man to some of the greatest talents of both pop culture and the underground. With…

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Free

Everyone’s a Critic

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Whether it’s the role of take-downs, accusations of smarm, writers rebutting their reviews, or the daily Twitter discourse, the role of criticism in our culture is complex, ever-changing, and seemingly always up for debate. The tools of criticism are evolving, too. Goodreads, Substack, and social media remove critics from an ivory tower and allow anyone to assume the mantle. New Yorker staff writer and former New York Times book critic Parul Seghal, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, and novelist-cum-critic Brandon Taylor will discuss these topics as well as their own pursuits of critical honesty and excellence. Moderated by Halimah Marcus. Their discussion will be followed by an audience Q&A. This event is part of Electric Lit’s Fall 2021 series, presented by Mount Saint…

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$10

William Deresiewicz in Conversation With Audrey Bilger

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

What is the internet doing to us? What is college for? What are the myths and metaphors we live by? These are the questions that William Deresiewicz has been pursuing over the course of his award-winning career. His new book, The End of Solitude (Henry Holt), brings together more than 40 of his finest essays. Ranging widely across the culture, they take up subjects as diverse as Mad Men and Harold Bloom, the significance of the hipster, and the purpose of art. Drawing on the past, they ask how we got where we are. Scrutinizing the present, they seek to understand how we can live more mindfully and freely, and they pose two fundamental questions: What does it mean to be an individual, and how…

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Free

Regan Penaluna

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

As a young woman growing up in small-town Iowa, Regan Penaluna daydreamed about the big questions: who are we and what is this strange world we find ourselves in? In college she fell in love with philosophy and chose to pursue it as an academician — the first step, she believed, toward becoming a self-determined person living a life of the mind. What Penaluna didn’t realize was that the Western philosophical canon taught in American universities, as well as the culture surrounding it, would slowly grind her down through its misogyny, its harassment, its devaluation of women and their intellect. Where were the women philosophers? One day, in an obscure monograph, Penaluna came across Damaris Cudworth Masham’s name. The daughter of philosopher Ralph Cudworth and…

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