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Garth Greenwell in Conversation With Omar El Akkad

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

Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. In this atmosphere of disquiet, an American teacher navigates a life transformed by the discovery and loss of love. As he prepares to leave the place he’s come to call home, he grapples with the intimate encounters that have marked his years abroad, each bearing uncanny reminders of his past. Cleanness (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) revisits and expands the world of Garth Greenwell’s award-winning debut, What Belongs to You. In exacting, elegant prose, he transcribes the strange dialects of desire, cementing his stature as one of our most vital living writers. Greenwell will be joined in conversation by Omar El Akkad, author of American War.

Free

Ezra Klein in Conversation With Omar El Akkad

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

America’s political system isn’t broken. The truth is scarier: it’s working exactly as designed. In Why We’re Polarized (Avid Reader/Simon & Schuster), journalist Ezra Klein reveals how that system is polarizing us – and how we are polarizing it – with disastrous results. Neither a polemic nor a lament, Why We’re Polarized offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture. Klein will be joined in conversation by Omar El Akkad, author of American War.

Free

Literary Arts presents the 2020 Oregon Book Awards

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Due to the ongoing public health crisis, we will not be hosting our 33rd Annual Oregon Book Awards Ceremony at Portland Center Stage at The Armory on June 22. However, we are excited to announce that the Oregon Book Awards Ceremony will take place in a different format. “The 2020 Oregon Book Awards” a special from Literary Arts: The Archive Project Monday, June 22, 2020 7:00 to 7:30 p.m. OPB Radio (where to listen) This year’s finalists are listed here.  This special, statewide broadcast will celebrate the finalists and announce the winners of the 2020 Oregon Book Awards. It will be hosted, as originally planned, by writers Omar El Akkad and Elena Passarello. We are thrilled to be able to celebrate these awards in a way…

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Free

Sarah Mirk With Omar El Akkad, Kane Lynch & Hazel Newlevant

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In January 2002, the United States sent a group of Muslim men they suspected of terrorism to a prison in Guantánamo Bay. They were the first of roughly 780 prisoners who would be held there — and 40 inmates still remain. Eighteen years later, very few of them have been ever charged with a crime. In Guantánamo Voices (Abrams ComicArts), journalist Sarah Mirk and her team of diverse, talented graphic novel artists tell the stories of 10 people whose lives have been shaped and affected by the prison, including former prisoners, lawyers, social workers, and service members. Mirk’s collection of illustrated interviews explores the history of Guantánamo and the world post-9/11, presenting this complicated partisan issue through a new lens. Mirk will be joined in…

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Free

Oregon Book Awards Show: The Archive Project

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The 2021 Oregon Book Award winners will be announced on May 2, 2021, on a special episode of The Archive Project, airing on OPB Radio at 7:00 p.m. The hour-long show will be hosted by Omar El Akkad and Elena Passarello, and will feature readings from Oregon Book Awards winners, archival audio from previous Oregon Book Awards ceremonies, and an interview with CES Wood recipient Molly Gloss. Omar El Akkad was born in Cairo, Egypt and grew up in Doha, Qatar until he moved to Canada with his family. He is an award-winning journalist and author who has traveled around the world to cover many of the most important news stories of the last decade. His reporting includes dispatches from the NATO-led war in Afghanistan,…

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Free

Beginnings and Before Beginnings – A Study of Novel Form and Style w/ Omar El-Akkad

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Beginnings and Before Beginnings – A Study of Novel Form and Style WITH: Omar El-Akkad WHEN: Begins May 8th. WHERE: This class will be hosted on our rich interactive online platform WetInk, with four lessons stretched over four weeks. In addition, Omar will host a weekly ‘office hours’ Zoom where students are welcome to come and discuss the ideas in the class and all things writing-related. (Zooms will be on Saturdays, May 15, 22, 29, and June 5, from 5PM-6PM PST.) HOW MUCH: $350. Payment plans are available, contact Daniel Elder at registration@corporealwriting.com SCHOLARSHIPS: Click here to apply. Beginnings and Before Beginnings Zadie Smith once said she spends about 80 per cent of her efforts on the first 50 or 60 pages of a book,…

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$350

Omar El Akkad in Conversation With Roy Scranton

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

From Omar El Akkad, the widely acclaimed author of American War, comes What Strange Paradise (Knopf), a beautifully written, unrelentingly dramatic, and profoundly moving new novel that brings the global refugee crisis down to the level of a child’s eyes. More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another overfilled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives in their homelands. And only one has made the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who has the good fortune to fall into the hands not of the officials but of Vänna: a teenage girl, native to the island, who lives inside her own sense…

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Free

Live Wire: Sarah Marshall, Dino Archie, Omar El Akkad, MAITA

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

SARAH MARSHALL Sarah Marshall is a writer, podcaster, and media critic focused on setting straight our collective memory—or at least getting to the bottom of why we believe and in turn define ourselves by popular narrative and myth. Why is the maligned woman a staple of our news media? Why do we believe that serial killers are brilliant? How do we keep stumbling into all these moral panics? These are some of the questions that propel Sarah forward. She is the co-host of the popular modern history podcast You’re Wrong About, which has been highlighted in the New Yorker, the Guardian and Time Magazine. Website • Twitter DINO ARCHIE Dino Archie is a stand-up comedian who has been featured on Comedy Central’s Adam Devine’s House…

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$30 – $45

Reading: Fire & Water: Stories from the Anthropocene

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

Annie Bloom's welcomes Portland writers Mary Fifield and Kristin Thiel, editors of Fire & Water: Stories from the Anthropocene, for a group reading and discussion. The co-editors will be joined by fellow contributors Jan Underwood and Jack Kirne. Omar El Akkad, who blurbed the book, will be reading from a story by contributor Carlos Labbé. About Fire & Water: A Sámi woman studying Alaska fish populations sees our past and future through their present signs of stress and her ancestral knowledge. A teenager faces a permanent drought in Australia and her own sexual desire. An unemployed man in Wisconsin marvels as a motley parade of animals makes his trailer their portal to a world untrammeled by humans. Featuring short fiction from authors around the globe, Fire…

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Free

Ben Hodgson & Laura Moulton in Conversation With Omar El Akkad

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In 2011, Laura Moulton founded Street Books, a mobile library serving people living outside in Portland, Oregon. That summer, Ben Hodgson became one of her most dedicated regulars, setting the still-unbroken single season record for borrowing. Then Ben's routines changed, and he didn’t cross paths again with Laura for almost two years. Loaners: The Making of a Street Library (Perfect Day) is the story they began to tell when they reconnected, offering a street-level perspective of a community whose stories are seldom told, alternating between their two unforgettable points of view in this addictively readable, occasionally sublime memoir. Hodgson and Moulton will be joined in conversation by Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise and American War. Register for the Zoom event  /  Buy the Book

Free
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