Colson Whitehead is a novelist, essayist, and reviewer whose most recent works include 2019’s The Nickel Boys and 2016’s The Underground Railroad, a New York Times best seller which won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the National Book Award and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by theNew York Times Book Review. NPR hailed The Underground Railroad as “an American masterpiece, as much a searing document of a cruel history as a uniquely brilliant work of fiction.” Whitehead’s other books include The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and The Colossus of New York. He is a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, a Whiting Writers Award, the Dos Passos Prize, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. The 35th season…
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Celebrate the power of books to create a stronger community by attending the 2020 Everybody Reads author event with Tommy Orange. Literary Arts is proud to host an evening with award-winning author Tommy Orange as the culminating event of Multnomah County Library’s Everybody Reads program. This year’s programming will center on Orange’s debut novel, There There. Tickets start at $15, available at Portland5.com With the selection of There There, Everybody Reads 2020 centers around the experience of urban Native Americans in Oakland, California. Through a shared reading experience, we will explore a multitude of themes in the book, from identity and ownership to the urban-rural divide. About There There: Orange’s shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow,…
Comments closedSusan Orlean is an author and journalist, and has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992. She has written eight books, including, most recently, The Library Book, a New York Times best seller and a Washington Post Top 10 Book of the Year for 2018. Her other books include Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film Adaptation. Orlean has been called “a national treasure” by the Washington Post, and the New York Times has said that her work “has that elusive quality to it: exquisitely written, consistently entertaining and irreducible to anything so obvious and pedestrian as a theme.” The 35th season of Portland Arts & Lectures features some of the most engaging writers at work today. Our 2019/2020 season features George Packer, Amor Towles, Min Jin Lee, Susan Orlean, and Colson…
Comments closedMin Jin Lee’s novel Pachinko was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2017. The San Francisco Chronicle lauds it as “beautiful. . . Lee’s sweeping four-generation saga of a Korean family is an extraordinary epic.” It was on over 75 best books of the year lists, and will be translated into 27 languages. Her debut novel, 2007’s Free Food for Millionaires, was also a national best seller as well as a Top 10 Books of the Year for The Times of London, NPR’s Fresh Air, and USA Today. Lee is a recipient of fellowships in fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard. The 35th season of Portland Arts & Lectures features some of the most engaging…
Comments closedThe Moth returns to Portland this December! This extraordinary performance will sell out quickly, so reserve your seats early and experience unforgettable stories told live. Literary Arts and The Moth are bringing a new lineup of storytellers to Portland. Each Moth Mainstage show features five tellers who have developed their true stories about a given theme with help from The Moth’s directors. The Moth is a nonprofit dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling. Since launching in 1997, The Moth has presented over 35,000 true personal stories, told live, without notes, to standing-room-only audiences around the globe. Renowned for showcasing a broad range of human experiences, The Moth produces approximately 600 live shows each year and has an ongoing presence in 30 cities worldwide.…
Comments closedSearching for a space to create new work with fellow writers of color? This two-hour workshop meets once a month on Sundays. Writers can register for one or more sessions. A variety of prompts will be presented as avenues for generating and sharing new work in an informal setting. Open to writers of color at all levels writing in poetry, fiction, or nonfiction. You can also bring your own prompts and questions about the writing process, and explore them with the group. Emilly Prado is an award-winning multimedia journalist. A Chicana native of the San Francisco Bay Area, she has been writing and photographing since she was a child though studied education, social work, and library sciences after high school. Using an intersectional feminist framework,…
Comments closedAmor Towles is the author of A Gentleman in Moscow, a New York Times best seller which O, the Oprah Magazine praised as an “elegant period piece,” in which, “Towles continues to explore the question of how a person can lead an authentic life in a time when mere survival is a feat in itself,” and was named as one of the best books of 2016 by the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle, and NPR. He also penned Rules of Civility, a New York Times best seller which was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best books of 2011, and the novella Eve in Hollywood. Towles graduated from Yale College and received an MA…
Comments closedLimited to 10 students We all know that words carry weight, but some words—especially those in political speeches, sacred texts, and canonical literature—can seem overwhelming in their authority. We’ll choose texts that have influenced us—for better or for worse—and use them as scaffolding for constructing our own poems. In the process, we’ll see what happens when we give our words just as much heft as the texts that matter most to us. All levels. Jennifer Perrine is a 2019 Oregon Literary Fellowship recipient. She is the author of three books of poetry: No Confession, No Mass; In the Human Zoo; and The Body Is No Machine. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Valparaiso Fiction Review and Salt Hill, and in the Broadsided Press…
Comments closedWhen: November 9th and 10th:: 11:00am – 4:00pm Where: The Corporeal Center; 510 SW 3rd Ave, Portland, OR 97210 Cost: $400 What do magic and writing have in common? How do both practices influence one another, and how can they ground us or remove us from our bodies? In this workshop we will probe the mystery of writing, a type of magic, with a focus on memoir and the power of conjuring our stories and transforming our experience of our own lives. Practical concerns such as authority and craft will share space will conversations about the somatic effect of writing memoir on a writer’s body and psyche. This workshop will be beneficial for writers regardless of literary and magic experience! New material will be generated from prompts inspired…
Comments closedWe proudly present our Lit Crawl Portland 2019 event, Our Words Are a Bridge: An Evening with The Rumpus, Corporeal Writing, and YesYes Books! Where: Coporeal Writing 510 SW 3rd Ave #101 Portland, OR 97204 With readings from Diannely Antigua, Jennine Capó Crucet, Steph Cha, Brandon Courtney, Ross Gay, Matt Hart, and T Kira Madden. This event is free and open to the public! Original event artwork by Lisa Lee Herrick.
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