The Archive Project

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TAP@PBF: Witches with A. K. Blakemore & Rivka Galchen Nov 09, 2021

Show notes

Historical fiction often blurs the lines between truth and story.

Authors A. K. Blakemore and Rivka Galchen each have new books out that explore the very real witch trials of the 17th century. But their approach to the subject matter and the characters at the center of each story feel like opposite sides of the same coin.

Blakemore’s The Manningtree Witches is set in 1643 and follows the young, single, and naïve Rebecca West, who is being pursued by the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General. Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch centers around elderly, illiterate widow Katharina, who is accused of witchcraft in 1618 in the German territory of Württemberg.

As part of Portland Book Festival, OPB host Crystal Ligori sat down with the writers to discuss the process of basing fiction on historical events, how individual experiences can be wrapped up in national and global circumstances, and what it really means to be a witch.

A. K. BLAKEMORE is the author of two collections of poetry: Humbert Summer and Fondue. She has also translated the work of Sichuanese poet Yu Yoyo. Her poetry and prose writing have been widely published and anthologized, appearing in the London Review of Books, Poetry, The Poetry Review, and The White Review, among other publications. The Manningtree Witches is is her debut novel. She lives in London, England.

Rivka Galchen received her MD from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, having spent a year in South America working on public health issues. Galchen completed her MFA at Columbia University, where she was a Robert Bingham Fellow. Her essay on the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics was published in The Believer, and she is the recipient of a 2006 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Galchen lives in New York City. She is the author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances.

Crystal Ligori is the Producer and News Anchor for OPB’s All Things Considered and produces the weekly radio program Literary Arts: The Archive Project. She also narrates the digital food series Superabundant. Before joining OPB, she spent six years on-air across the Pacific Northwest as a host and producer at KUFO in Portland, KZZU in Spokane, WA and at KBGA in Missoula, MT. Her work has also been heard on National Public Radio Newscasts, PRX’s Living on Earth, and NPR’s All Things Considered. Crystal is an alumni of the School of Journalism at the University of Montana and she shares a regional Emmy nomination for the documentary “Testing Times: Montana’s Struggle to Leave No Child Behind”, for which she was a segment producer and narrator.

TAP@PBF: Change with John Freeman Nov 08, 2021

Show notes

This special podcast-only episode of Literary Arts’ The Archive Project, features John Freeman, editor of Freeman’s, in conversation with French author and translator Jakuta Alikavazovic; Yugoslav-born writer Lana Bastašić; and novelists and memoirist Aleksandar Hemon. All three possess one connection or another to Bosnia. In this conversation, they discuss the Bosnian diaspora, writing works in translation, and the power of language and memory to create “home.”

“I’m still creating this language that I need to tell the story of myself.” – Lana Bastašić

Jakuta Alikavazovic is a French writer of Bosnian and Montenegrin origins. She was born in Paris, where she studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure and where she now lives. Her first novel, Corps Volatils (2008) won the Goncourt Prize for Best First Novel and her second and third novels, Le Londres-Luxor (2010) and La Blonde et Le Bunker (2012) won prizes in France and Italy. Her new novel, Night as it Falls (L’Avancee de la Nuit), was published by Faber in 2020. She is also the translator of Anna Burns and Ben Lerner amongst others and teaches at la Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Lana Bastašić is a Yugoslav-born writer. Her first novel Catch the Rabbit (Restless Books) won the European Union Prize in Literature in 2020 and has been translated into fifteen languages. Her last book is Milk Teeth, a collection of short stories published in Serbo-Croatian in 2020. She is one of the founders of Escola Bloom School of Literature in Barcelona. She’s based in Belgrade, but spends most of her time on the road.

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man, The Lazarus Project, Love and Obstacles, The Making of Zombie Wars, The Book of My Lives and My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You (memoir, May 2019). He is the winner of the 2020 Dos Passos Prize. Hemon co-wrote the script for The Matrix 4, with David Mitchell and Lana Wachowski. He is at work on How Did You Get Here?: Tales of Displacement (oral histories) forthcoming from FSG. How Did You Get Here? was the recipient of a PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History in 2017. His next novel, The World and All That It Holds will be published by FSG in 2022.

John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary annual published by Grove Press, and executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. He has written several books of nonfiction including, How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as three collections of poems, Maps , The Park, and the forthcoming Wind, Trees. Between 2014 and 2020, he edited a series of anthologies on inequality, concluding with Tales of Two Planets, which focuses on the climate crisis and global inequality. His latest books are The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story and, with Tracy K. Smith, There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love, in which poets, novelists and essayists create a space to respond to catastrophes and racialized violence of 2020. Freeman’s work has been translated into more than 20 languages and appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Zyzzyva. He lives in London.

Tales of Two Planets: Aimee Nezhukumatathil & Kawai Strong Washburn Nov 08, 2021

Show notes

In this episode, we feature an event from the 2021 Portland Book Festival, moderated by author and editor, John Freeman. The event title keyed off of Freeman’s anthology of the same name: Tales of Two Planets: Stories of Climate Change and Inequality in a Divided World. Freeman sat down with authors Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Kawai Strong Washburn to talk about writing and the environment, and the conversation naturally turns to language and its relationship to history, connection, identity and the natural world. How and why do we write about a natural world in crisis? What are the ethics of doing so? What lesson can we draw on from biodiversity for our own cultures?

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is an acclaimed poet and author of the illustrated essay collection World of Wonders. It’s a book about the natural world and the way its inhabitants can teach, support, and inspire us. Kawai Strong Washburn’s debut novel Sharks in the Time of Saviors is about the supernatural events that force a family to reckon with the meaning of heritage and the cost of survival.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author World of Wonders, an illustrated essay collection, as well as of four books of poetry, most recently, Oceanic, winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Other awards for her writing include fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Mississippi Arts Council, and MacDowell. Her writing appears in Poetry, the New York Times Magazine, ESPN, and Tin House. She serves as poetry faculty for the Writing Workshops in Greece and is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.

Kawai Strong Washburn was born and raised on the Hamakua coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘i. His work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney’s, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, among other outlets. He was a 2015 Tin House Summer Scholar and 2015 Bread Loaf work-study scholar. Today, he lives with his wife and daughters in Minneapolis. Sharks in the Time of Saviors is his first novel.

Hidden Valley Road & The Beauty in Breaking (Rebroadcast) Nov 01, 2021

Show notes

In this episode, we feature two conversations from the 2020 Portland Book Festival that both wrestle with the question of how we look after each other when mental and physical health have been compromised. What do we owe each other, and when do we walk away?

In the first segment of the show we feature Robert Kolker who joined us to talk about his new work of nonfiction Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of An American Family. The book is the heartrending story of a midcentury American family, the Galvins, with twelve children, six of whom were diagnosed with schizophrenia. It is a story of immense trauma and also genuine hope. Kolker is in conversation with journalist Eli Saslow.

In the second segment of the show we feature Dr. Michele Harper who is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir The Beauty in Breaking, about her experiences as a female, African American emergency room physician and her own journey to self-healing. Dr. Harper is in conversation with author Ruth Dickey, who has just this month (March 2021) been appointed the Director of the National Book Foundation.

Ruth E. Dickey is the Director of the National Book Foundation. Dickey has spent 25 years working at the intersection of community building, writing, and art. The recipient of a Mayor’s Arts Award from Washington DC, and an individual artist grant from the DC Commission and Arts and Humanities, Ruth’s poems and essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won three Larry Neal Writing Awards. She is the author of the chapbook, Paper Houses, Sky Ceilings (Pudding House Press 2006), and her work has appeared widely, including in Alimentum, The Baltimore Review, Cincinnati Review, Ocean State Review, The Potomac Review, and Sonora Review. Ruth holds an MFA in poetry from UNC-Greensboro, and a BS in Foreign Service and an MA in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University, and was a 2017 fellow with the National Arts Strategies Chief Executive Program.

Michele Harper has worked as an emergency room physician for more than a decade at various institutions, including as chief resident at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx and in the emergency department at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Philadelphia. She is a graduate of Harvard University and the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University. The Beauty in Breaking is her first book.

Robert Kolker is the author of Hidden Valley Road, an instant #1 New York Times nonfiction best-seller and official selection of Oprah’s Book Club. His previous book, Lost Girls, was also a New York Times best-seller and one of the Times‘s 100 Notable Books of 2013, as well as one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Top Ten Books of the Year, one of Time’s best true crime books ever, and one of Slate’s best nonfiction books of the last 25 years. Kolker’s journalism has appeared in New York Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, Wired, GQ, O Magazine, and The Marshall Project. He is a National Magazine Award finalist and a recipient of the 2011 Harry Frank Guggenheim Award for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Eli Saslow is a Washington Post staff writer and author of Ten Letters: The Stories Americans Tell Their President and Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2014 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2013, 2016 and 2017. He lives in Oregon with his wife and children.

Book of Revelations: Rumaan Alam & Jonathan Lethem (Rebroadcast) Oct 25, 2021

Show notes

In this episode, we feature a conversation between novelists Rumaan Alam and Jonathan Lethem from the 2020 Portland Book Festival.

There is a rich tradition of the apocalyptic novel. As Alam and Lethem touch on, the urgency in this tradition allows writers to explore what really matters to their characters, and asks what we will keep and what we will forget when push comes to shove. The scope of these works range from, as Lethem says, “wide screen” narratives of entire societies being transformed, to the more intimate stories of how individuals, relationships, and families are shaped by these tragedies. The latter is the primary preoccupation of both these writers in their most recent novels.

In Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, which was a finalist for the Nation Book Award, a blackout on the Eastern seaboard forces two families together in an isolated rural house, cut off from the outside world. In award-winning author Jonathan Lethem’s The Arrest, two siblings find themselves in a world where most of what we take for granted—cars, computers, airplanes—have quit working and their lives are further upended by a man with a nuclear-powered super car.

Rumaan Alam is the author of Rich and Pretty, That Kind of Mother, and Leave the World Behind. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Elle, New York Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, The Rumpus, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. He studied at Oberlin College, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of twelve novels, including The Feral Detective, The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Arrest is his twelfth novel. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.

Family Ties: Brit Bennett & Bryan Washington (Rebroadcast) Oct 18, 2021

Show notes

Portland Book Festival will present virtual programming, brought to you by Bank of America, the week of November 8–12, 2021, and in-person events on Saturday, November 13, 2021. Get your passes now!

In this episode, we feature a conversation with Brit Bennett and Bryan Washington, moderated by Jennifer Baker, at the Portland Book Festival in November 2020.

In the New York Times best-selling The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett weaves together multiple strands and generations of a family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990’s. It’s a story that considers the lasting influence of the past as it shares her character’s decisions, desires, and expectations. In Bryan Washington’s Memorial, Mike and Benson are young men whose world is turned inside out as they find themselves living apart and forced to discover their own truths.

Jennifer Baker guides the conversation both into questions of craft—such as how and why these writers created novels with multiple narrators and just how much of their books are discovered in the writing—and she into the central themes of both these books: race, love, family, inheritance, choice, consequence, and how the dynamics of relationships are shaped by them.

“That was the sort of book that I wanted to write: Where characters are free to make mistakes, but also free to attempt to come back together to one another. It comes back to the idea for me that every character should have the capacity to love.” – Bryan Washington

Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction. In 2014, she received the Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and her debut novel The Mothers was a New York Times bestseller. Her second novel The Vanishing Half was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. Her essays have been featured in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel.

Bryan Washington is a National Book Award 5 Under 35 honoree, and winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His first book, the story collection Lot, was a finalist for the NBCC’s John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. Lot was a New York Times Notable Book, one of Dwight Garner’s top ten books of the year, and on best-of-the-year lists from Time, NPR, Vanity Fair, BuzzFeed, and many more. Washington’s debut novel is Memorial. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, BuzzFeed, Vulture, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appétit, GQ, The Awl, and Catapult. He lives in Houston.

Jennifer Baker is a publishing professional, creator/host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, and contributing editor to Electric Literature. Jennifer is also the editor of the all PoC-short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life. Her fiction, nonfiction, and criticism has appeared in various print and online publications.

Isabel Wilkerson, interviewed by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Rebroadcast) Oct 11, 2021

Show notes

Portland Book Festival will present virtual programming, brought to you by Bank of America, the week of November 8–12, 2021, and in-person events on Saturday, November 13, 2021. Get your passes now!

In this episode, we feature Isabel Wilkerson, interviewed by Viet Thanh Nguyen, from the 2020 Portland Book Festival. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Isabel Wilkerson the National Humanities Medal for “her masterful combination of intimate human narratives with broader societal trends” and for “championing an unsung history.” This was for her first book The Warmth of Other Suns, which chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: The decades-long migration of Black citizens who fled the south for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. It went on to spend months on The New York Times Best Sellers list and has been hailed as a modern classic.

Wilkerson joined us at the Portland Book Festival to talk about her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. It is an astonishing re-framing of American history and our founding myths that is vital to understanding what is happening in the country today – socially and politically. Wilkerson is in conversation with writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer.

“We can’t fix what we don’t know. We can’t fix what we cannot name. We can’t repair what we have not yet fully understood. We can’t heal what we haven’t diagnosed.”

“‘Caste’ as an idea, as a phenomenon, is thousands upon thousands of years old. It pre-dates the idea of ‘race’. And any hierarchy that’s set up could choose any number of metrics in order to apportion, to divide, and to rank people. In this country, this fairly new concept known as ‘race,’ which only goes back four or five hundred years, was the metric that was used in order to identify, characterize, apportion, and assign people to a fixed place in what was ultimately going to become the United States. We live with the after-effects of that to the current day.”

“These are longstanding assumptions, stereotypes, and power relationships that transcend any one election, any one campaign, any one politician. This hierarchy, this caste system… is part of the foundation of what we have inherited as Americans. It’s about the enduring legacy that we’ve inherited, and the ways it manifests itself. Many of the things we might be seeing [today] are merely manifestations of the inheritance that has not been dealt with up until now.”

“People who are from the historically subjugated group in this country—who have to bear the brunt of this caste system on a daily basis—are not the group that the [United States] should be leaning on now. The people who were born to the subjugated group already bear the brunt and have born the burden for far too long. It is up to others in this country to do the work.”

Isabel Wilkerson’s first book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lynton History Prize, the Heartland Award and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. It was named one of the 10 best books of the year by The New York Times, USA Today, O: The Oprah Magazine, The New Yorker, The Washington Post and many others. In 2019, Time Magazine named The Warmth of Other Suns to its list of the 10 best nonfiction books of the decade. Wilkerson is the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism and the first African-American to win for individual reporting. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal for “her masterful combination of intimate human narratives with broader societal trends” and for “championing an unsung history.” Her most recent book is Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He has written the novels The Refugees and The Sympathizer, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as five other awards. He is also the author of the nonfiction books The Displaced, Nothing Ever Dies, and Race and Resistance. He has also released the children’s book Chicken of the Sea, co-written with his son, Ellison Nguyen. The Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, he lives in Los Angeles.

Yaa Gyasi (Rebroadcast) Oct 04, 2021

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a talk and conversation with novelist Yaa Gyasi. In 2016, Gyasi’s first novel, Homegoing, was published and immediately became a New York Times’ bestseller, was awarded numerous prizes, and was praised by Zadie Smith as “spectacular,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates as “an inspiration,” and widely hailed as one of the best books of that year. This spring, Gyasi joined us for Portland Arts & Lectures to talk about her second book, Transcendent Kingdom, published in 2020. Like Homegoing, the book explores the constant presence of the past. But, where that book spanned centuries and continents, Transcendent Kingdom unfolds on a more granular, intimate scale.

In many ways, this talk is less about writing than it is the power of reading, an act that is so powerful that people died so that others might experience it, so powerful that it can force the reader to contend with the humanity of someone they do not know and will never meet, from another place or time. We learn of the profound impact of Toni Morrison on Gyasi, her journey to becoming a writer, and how she grapples in her fiction with what she calls the “afterlife of slavery,” asking the question, “Is slavery even over?”

In the second half of the episode, she is joined by Andrew Proctor for a conversation about both her books, and the influences that shaped them.

“My work is largely concerned with the ways that the ancestors walk with us; the ways history, familial and societal, continues to show up in our lives.”

Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. She holds a BA in English from Stanford University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she held a Dean’s Graduate Research Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn.

Andrew Proctor has been the director of Literary Arts since 2009. Born and raised in Canada, Proctor, earned a bachelor’s degree in English and Music at Concordia University in Montreal, and later worked in London for the Cultural Attaché to the Canadian High Commission. In the UK, he also earned an MA in English Literature at the University of East Anglia under the supervision of England’s then Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. From 2000-2004 Proctor worked as an editor for HarperCollins in New York City and then as the Membership and Operations Director of the PEN American Center, a global literary and human rights organization focused on the welfare of writers and editors. In total, Proctor has worked in the literary world for over twenty years in the governmental, for profit, and nonprofit sectors.

Joy Harjo, in conversation with Anis Mojgani (Rebroadcast) Sep 27, 2021

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature poet Joy Harjo. Harjo became the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States when she was appointed in 2019, and is currently serving her third term in that post.

She joined us as part of Portland Arts & Lectures from her home in Tulsa, Oklahoma. During her Laureateship, she edited two landmark anthologies: When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, and Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry. Harjo uses these two projects as a basis to structure her talk, which takes us deep into the history of Native American poetry, from periods when it was an oral tradition, to the first appearance of written poetry in the seventeenth century, all the way to the current day. These anthologies gather together work from hundreds of languages, nations and tribes to present to the reader the breadth and depth of a tradition that continues to flourish, but that was left out, erased, or otherwise made invisible by editors, publishers, and academics over the centuries. Harjo’s work re-surfacing these poems and poets is vital to our understanding of ourselves as a nation because, as Harjo says, a nation is defined by its literature.

In the second half of this episode, Harjo will be in conversation with Oregon’s Poet Laurate and Literary Arts Board Member, Anis Mojgani. Mojgani is an international poetry slam champion, and the author of five books of poetry, most recently In the Pockets of Small Gods. His first children’s book is forthcoming from Chronicle Books, and his poem “Closer” was included in the recently published anthology, African American Poetry, edited by Kevin Young.

“Words are living beings.”

“Those of us who read and listen to poetry want our ears and perception bent for unique insight, and want to see how the impossible becomes momentarily possible in the arrangement of language and meaning.”

Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently An American Sunrise, and one previous memoir, Crazy Brave. She edited the anthologies When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through and Living Nations, Living Words. Named poet laureate of the United States in 2019, she lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she is a Tulsa Artist Fellow.

Anis Mojgani is Oregon’s current Poet Laureate and the author of five books of poetry. His work has appeared on HBO, NPR, and in journals Bat City Review, Rattle, Buzzfeed Reader, Thrush, and Forklift Ohio, amongst others. A two time National Poetry Slam Champion and winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam, Anis has done commissioned work for the Getty Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Portland Timbers, and has been awarded artist residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, AIR Serenbe, and the Bloedel Nature Reserve. Originally from New Orleans, Anis currently lives in Portland, OR, where he serves on the Board of Directors for Literary Arts.

“I’m holding the door open and saying ‘Look at all these poets.’ We have so many poets, and this is the time that we go to the poets. This is the time we need the poets and poetry, because the poets are the truth tellers.”

Alison Bechdel, in conversation with Cheryl Strayed (Rebroadcast) Sep 20, 2021

Show notes

In this episode, we feature Alison Bechdel in conversation with Oregon’s own Cheryl Strayed. Strayed talks with Bechdel about her newest book The Secret to Superhuman Strength. The graphic memoir is ostensibly about Bechdel’s lifelong pursuit of exercise in one form or another. But like so much of Bechdel’s work, the book is not necessarily about what it’s about. Bechdel’s obsession with exercise is driven by her desire to be physically strong and resilient, but it is also a tool to clear her mind and fuel her creativity, and it is rebuke of the misogyny she was surrounded by her whole life.

Their conversation also takes us down fascinating side trips including a tour of literary history from English Romantics, to the American Transcendentalists right though the Beat Poets of the 1950s–all radical in their time, who perused enlightenment in the outdoors, and who, though separated by hundreds of years, are also dealing with remarkably similar ideas. Strayed and Bechdel are also both candid and humble in this conversation which concludes with a discussion about creativity and anxiety, and their struggles to produce new work under the spotlight of their incredible successes.

This event was originally presented by WestxMidwest, a collaboration between Black Mountain Institute, Literary Arts, The Loft’s Wordplay and the Wisconsin Book Festival.

“That’s what I love about memoir: This puzzle of trying to find a story in the randomness of our lives.”

Alison Bechdel is the author of the bestselling memoir FUN HOME: A Family Tragicomic, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, New York Times, People, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, and San Francisco Chronicle, among others. For 25 years, she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a visual chronicle of modern life—queer and otherwise—considered “one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period.” Bechdel was guest editor of Best American Comics 2011 and has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney’s, Entertainment Weekly, Granta, and the New York Times Book Review.

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times–bestselling memoir Wild, the New York Times–bestsellers Tiny Beautiful Things and Brave Enough, and the novel Torch. Strayed is the host of the New York Times hit podcast “Sugar Calling” and also “Dear Sugars,” which she co-hosted with Steve Almond. Her essays have been published in the Best American Essays, the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, Salon, the Sun, Tin House, the New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. Strayed holds an MFA in fiction writing from Syracuse University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

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Portland Book Festival will present virtual programming, brought to you by Bank of America, the week of November 8–12, 2021, and in-person events on Saturday, November 13, 2021. Get your passes now!

Portland Book Festival will present virtual programming, brought to you by Bank of America, the week of November 8–12, 2021, and in-person events on Saturday, November 13, 2021. Get your passes now!

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