Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including The Art of Death, a National Book Critics Circle finalist; Claire of the Sea Light, a New York Times Notable Book; Brother, I’m Dying, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist; The Dew Breaker, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the inaugural Story Prize; The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah’s Book Club selection; and Krik? Krak!, also a National Book Award finalist. A 2018 Neustadt International Prize for Literature winner and the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” grant, she has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere.
(Bio excerpt and photo from Literary Arts.) For more detail about the author see: https://edwidgedanticat.com.

Event details: Attendees will receive a virtual ticket to attend the event online, Thursday, May 21, 2022 from 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm PDT.

Registration Required

Richard Powers is the author of thirteen novels, including The Overstory, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and spent over one year on the New York Times bestseller list. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award in 2006 for his novel The Echo Maker. Powers has taught at the University of Illinois and Stanford University. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains. (Bio excerpt and photo from Literary Arts.) For more detail about the author see: http://www.richardpowers.net.

Event details: Attendees will receive a virtual ticket to attend the event online, Thursday, April 21, 2022 from 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm PDT.

Registration Required

Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. Her debut novel The Mothers was a New York Times bestseller, and her second novel The Vanishing Half was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and in 2021, she was chosen as one of Time’s Next 100 Influential People. Her essays have been featured in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel. (Bio excerpt and photo from Literary Arts.) For more detail about the author see: https://britbennett.com.

Event details: Attendees will receive a virtual ticket to attend the event online, Thursday, Feb 17, 2022 from 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm PDT.

Registration Required

Cathy Park Hong is the author of three poetry collections and Minor Feelings, a New York Times bestselling book of creative nonfiction which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. Hong is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and other journals. She is the poetry editor of The New Republic and full professor at Rutgers University–Newark. (Bio excerpt and photo from Literary Arts.) For more detail about the author see: http://www.cathyparkhong.com.

Event details: Attendees will receive a virtual ticket to attend the event online, Thursday, January 27, 2022 from 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm PDT.

Registration Required

Daniel James Brown is the author of Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II, The Indifferent Stars Above, Under a Flaming Sky, which was a finalist for the B&N Discover Great New Writers Award, and The Boys in the Boat, a New York Times bestselling book that was awarded the ALA’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. He has taught writing at San José State University and Stanford University. He lives outside Seattle. (Bio excerpt and photo from Literary Arts.) For more detail about the author see: https://www.danieljamesbrown.com/.

Event details: Attendees will receive a virtual ticket to attend the event online, Thursday, October 14 from 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm PDT.

Registration Required

Yaa Gyasi is the author of the forthcoming novel, Transcendent Kingdom. Her best-selling debut novel, Homegoing (2016), is an intergenerational saga following two split branches of a Ghanaian family through three hundred years of history. Homegoing won numerous awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for best first book.

Book Club details: Lecture only. Lecture with the author is on Tuesday, May 18, 2021 (6:00pm) online.

Registration Required

Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and was named the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States in 2019. Her many honors include the Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, a PEN USA Literary Award, Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund Writers’ Award, a Rasmuson US Artist Fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. (Bio from joyharjo.com) Crazy Brave is a “transcendent memoir, grounded in tribal myth and ancestry, music and poetry, Joy Harjo details her journey to becoming a poet. Born in Oklahoma, the end place of the Trail of Tears, Harjo grew up learning to dodge an abusive stepfather by finding shelter in her imagination, a deep spiritual life, and connection with the natural world. Narrating the complexities of betrayal and love, Crazy Brave is a haunting, visionary memoir about family and the breaking apart necessary in finding a voice.” https://wwnorton.com/books/crazy-brave/

Book Club details: Students will read Crazy Brave, have a book discussion on Zoom (date TBD) and will attend a lecture with the author on Tuesday, April 20, 2021 (6:00pm) online. Details: https://literary-arts.org/event/2020-21-portland-arts-lectures-joy-harjo/

Registration Required

Ibram X. Kendi is one of America’s foremost historians and leading antiracist voices. He is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and the Founding Director of The Antiracist Research & Policy Center at American University in Washington, DC. A professor of history and international relations, Kendi is a contributor at The Atlantic and CBS News. He is the author of The Black Campus Movement which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize, and Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016. At 34 years old, Kendi was the youngest ever winner of the NBA for Nonfiction. His third book, How to be an Antiracist, debuted at #2 on the New York Times Bestseller List in August 2019 and made several Best Books of 2019 lists. His much anticipated fourth book with Jason Reynolds, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, debuted at # 1 on the New York Times Bestseller List in March 2020. (Bio excerpt from ibramxkendi.com)

Book Club details: Students will read Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You. There will be a book discussion on Zoom (date TBD) and a lecture with the author on Thursday, February 18, 2021 (6:00pm) online. Details: https://literary-arts.org/event/2020-21-portland-arts-lectures-ibram-x-kendi/

Registration Required

Madeline Miller’s novel, Circe, was an instant number 1 New York Times bestseller, and won the Indies Choice Best Adult Fiction of the Year Award and the Indies Choice Best Audiobook of the Year Award, as well as being shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction.The New York TImes called Circe “A bold and subversive retelling of the goddess’s story that manages to be both epic and intimate in its scope, recasting the most infamous female figure from the Odyssey as a hero in her own right.” O Magazine wrote “Spellbinding…. in Miller’s conception, Circe is the hero of her own epic…. Miller has created a daring feminist take on a classic narrative; although the setting is a mystical world of gods, monsters, and nymphs, the protagonist at its heart is like any of us. A free woman, the author seems to be saying, must be willing to forsake the trappings of birthright and rank in order to claim her destiny, whether thousands of years ago or today.”

Book Club details: Students will read Circe, have a book discussion on Zoom (date TBD) and will attend a lecture with the author on Thursday, January 28, 2021 (7:30pm) at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall or online. Details: https://literary-arts.org/event/2020-21-portland-arts-lectures-madeline-miller/.

Book Club Lead: Rita Pinchot

Registration Required

Colson Whitehead’s novel, The Underground Railroad, was the winner of both the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. One of the most critically acclaimed novels in recent years, the book was a #1 New York Times bestseller, an Oprah’s Book Club 2016 selection, and Amazon’s #1 book of 2016, in addition to being included on numerous 2016 best books lists, including The New York Times‘ and The Washington Post’s top ten books of the year. Describing the book, Oprah Winfrey writes, “From the first page of Colson Whitehead’s extraordinary novel The Underground Railroad I knew I was reading something ground-shifting.” The Underground Railroad is a magnificent tour de force that chronicles a young slave’s journey during a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. The novel is a shattering meditation on the United States’ complicated political and racial history. “The Underground Railroad reanimates the slave narrative, disrupts our settled sense of the past and stretches the ligaments of history right into our own era.” (The Washington Post). In April 2017 Whitehead was named one of Time Magazine‘s “100 Most Influential People.”

A dynamic speaker, Whitehead lectures with his characteristic honesty and wit. He is a winsome storyteller and captivates audiences with inspiring anecdotes about his diverse bibliography, irreverent “Rules for Writing,” and how he came to write his powerful new novel.

Whitehead’s 2019 book, The Nickel Boys, is an exploration of life under Jim Crow told from the perspective of two boys in one of the country’s most notorious juvenile correction institutions, the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, located in the Florida panhandle. This meticulously researched and searing book was an instant New York Times bestseller and won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. It was also longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award and nominated for The National Book Critics Circle Award. Colson Whitehead will be receiving the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction during the 2020 Library of Congress National Book Festival. (https://literary-arts.org/bio/colson-whitehead/)

No Book Club discussion; Lecture only: Thursday, September 24, 2020, 6 PM.

Registration Required to get a link to the live lecture.