Powell’s is excited to offer virtual events featuring authors from around the world. We’re using Zoom Webinar as our virtual event platform (as it comes with enhanced security features).
Missed an event? Watch past virtual events on our YouTube channel.
Questions about how to attend our virtual events? Click here for our FAQ.
Friday, January 14 @ 5pm (PT)
It all began at a cocktail party at Wallace Stegner's for the Stanford writing class of 1958. Ken Kesey and Ken Babbs became cronies, embarking on a frolicking, rambunctious adventure that lasted over 40 years. Babbs calls the 70 stories in his new book "burlesques" because, after 85 years of living, much of it in the wide friendly center of an evolving, at times psychedelic culture, memory no longer can, or even should include an exact retelling, but only a tasty sprinkling of the truth, mixed with an endless enigma, all topped with the best of humor and heart. The troupe of characters in Cronies, a Burlesque (Tsunami Press) include Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Timothy Leary, Jerry Garcia, Pigpen, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Mountain Girl, Sonny Barger, Larry McMurtry, Wavy Gravy, Hunter S. Thompson, Kirk Douglas, Paul Newman, Jan Kerouac, Bill Walton, Wendell Berry, a pick-up bed-sized sturgeon, and always the many free-spirited, creative, friendly men and women who made up the Merry Band of Pranksters. Come along for the ride on the famous bus trip to Manhattan. Join the Hells Angels at their partying best. Drop in for the early Acid Tests. Experience the Berkeley Vietnam anti-war rally. Relish the stories of Kesey's pot busts and "suicide." Climb aboard — "Board!" — for six months on the lam in Mexico. Take the Further tours with the Grateful Dead. Make the ultimate move to Oregon, where Babbs and Kesey grew a magical friendship and collaboration until Kesey passed in 2001. Irreverent, unencumbered by social norms, literary and poetic, Cronies is a poignant view of the Sixties and beyond from someone who was there, and remembers it well. Kind of... Babbs will be joined in conversation by Bill Walton, former NBA champion and author of Back From the Dead.
Register for the Zoom event / Buy the Book
Monday, January 17 @ 6pm (PT)
She calls herself Hope Miller, but she has no idea who she actually is. Fifteen years ago, she was found in a small New Jersey town thrown from an overturned vehicle, with no clue to her identity. Doctors assumed her amnesia was a temporary side effect of her injuries, but she never regained her memory. Hope eventually started a new life with a new name in a new town that welcomed her, yet always wondered what she may have left behind — or been running from. Now, she’s leaving New Jersey to start over once again. Manhattan defense lawyer Lindsay Kelly, Hope’s best friend and the one who found her after the accident, understands why Hope wants a new beginning. But she worries how her friend will fare in her new East Hampton home, far away from everything familiar. Lindsay’s worst fears are confirmed when she discovers Hope has vanished without a trace — the only lead a drop of blood found where she was last seen. Even more ominously, the blood matches a DNA sample with a connection to a notorious Kansas murderer. With nowhere else to turn, Lindsay calls NYPD homicide detective Ellie Hatcher, the daughter of the cop who dedicated his life to hunting the Kansas killer. Ellie has always believed there was more to the story of her father’s death 20 years earlier — and she now fears that Hope’s recent disappearance could be related. In pursuit of answers, the women search for the truth beneath long-buried secrets. And when their searches converge, what they find will upend everything they’ve ever known. Find Me (Harper) is the new twisty mystery about female friendships from Alafair Burke, author of The Better Sister and The Wife. Burke will be joined in conversation by Angie Kim, author of Miracle Creek, and Janelle Brown, author of Pretty Things and Watch Me Disappear.
Register for the Zoom event / Buy the Book
Tuesday, January 18 @ 5pm (PT)
Michelle Tam knows that the healthiest meal is the one you make yourself, so she’s all about getting you off your butts and into the kitchen. Whether you’re cooking for yourself, whipping up a family dinner, or preparing a special-occasion feast, Nom Nom Paleo: Let’s Go! (Andrews McMeel) — co-written with Henry Fong — will inspire you with deliciously nourishing meals. Weeknight suppers should be healthy and flavor-packed but also fast and simple. Weekends and celebrations, on the other hand, are the perfect excuse to craft elevated (but easy!) crowd-pleasers. Nom Nom Paleo: Let’s Go! offers crazy-delicious recipes for all occasions, and every single one is free of grains, gluten, dairy, and refined sugar. Better yet? No one in your family will notice what’s missing! As always, Nom Nom Paleo’s recipes reflect the diverse cuisines Tam grew up with and culinary ideas from her travels. Often Asian-inspired, Tam's unfussy recipes maximize flavor, optimize whole foods, and are presented with photos of each step so they’re absolutely foolproof — even for novice cooks! Tam will be joined in conversation by Gregory Gourdet, Kann chef and owner and author of Everyone's Table: Global Recipes for Modern Health.
Register for the Zoom event / Buy the Book
Wednesday, January 19 @ 5pm (PT)
From a childhood reading of A Wrinkle in Time to discovering a new species of star, award-winning astronomer Emily Levesque has spent her life exploring the universe, and now she wants to share that exploration with the world. Humans from the earliest civilizations through today have craned their necks each night, using the stars to orient themselves in the large, strange world around them. Stargazing is a pursuit that continues to fascinate us: from Copernicus to Carl Sagan, astronomers throughout history have spent their lives trying to answer the biggest questions in the universe. In The Last Stargazers (Sourcebooks), Emily Levesque shares the stories of modern-day stargazers, the people willing to adventure across high mountaintops and to some of the most remote corners of the planet, all in the name of science. From the lonely quiet of midnight stargazing to tall tales of wild bears loose in the observatory, The Last Stargazers is a love letter to astronomy and an affirmation of the crucial role that humans can and must play in the future of scientific discovery. In her sweeping work of narrative science, Levesque shows how astronomers in this scrappy and evolving field are going beyond the machines to infuse creativity and passion into the stars and space — and inspire us all to peer skyward in pursuit of the universe's secrets. Levesque will be joined in conversation by Jonathan McDowell, astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Register for the Zoom event / Buy the Book
Thursday, January 20 @ 5pm (PT)
Akata Woman (Viking Books for Young Readers) is the electrifying third book in the series that started with Akata Witch — named one of TIME magazine’s “100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time” and “100 Best YA Books of All Time” — from award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor. From the moment Sunny Nwazue discovered she had mystical energy flowing in her blood, she sought to understand and control her powers. Throughout her adventures in Akata Witch and Akata Warrior, she had to navigate the balance between nearly everything in her life — America and Nigeria, the “normal” world and the one infused with juju, human and spirit, good daughter and powerful Leopard Person. Now, those hard lessons and abilities are put to the test in a quest so dangerous and fantastical, it would be madness to go… but may destroy the world if she does not. With the help of her friends, Sunny embarks on a mission to find a precious object hidden deep in an otherworldly realm. Defeating the guardians of the prize will take more from Sunny than she has to give, and triumph will mean she will be forever changed. Okorafor will be joined in conversation by filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu, co-founder of AFROBUBBLEGUM.
Register for the Zoom event / Buy the Book
Tuesday, January 25 @ 5pm (PT)
The nine stories in Morgan Thomas’s shimmering debut collection, Manywhere (MCD), witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, at whatever cost. As each character traces deceit and violence through Southern tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, and history, and the sometimes ruthless awakenings of self-discovery. A trans woman finds her independence through the purchase of a pregnancy bump. A young Virginian flees their relationship, choosing instead to immerse themselves in the life of an intersex person from Colonial-era Jamestown. A young writer tries to evade the murky and violent legacy of an ancestor who supposedly disappeared into a midwifery bag. And in the uncanny title story, a young trans person brings home a replacement daughter for their elderly father. Winding between reinvention and remembrance, transition and transcendence, these origin stories rebound across centuries. With warm, meticulous emotional intelligence, Thomas uncovers how the stories we borrow to understand ourselves in turn shape the people we become. Ushering in a new form of queer mythmaking, Manywhere introduces a storyteller of uncommon range and talent. Thomas will be joined in conversation by Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth and Mostly Dead Things.
Register for the Zoom event / Buy the Book
Friday, January 28 @ 5pm (PT)
When Alex and Elana move from small-town Virginia to El Paso, they are just a young married couple, intent on a new beginning. Mexican by birth but adopted by white American Pentecostal parents, Alex is hungry to learn about the place where he was born. He spends every free moment across the border in Juárez — perfecting his Spanish, hanging with a collective of young activists, and studying lucha libre (Mexican wrestling) for his graduate work in sociology. Meanwhile Elana, busy fighting her own demons, feels disillusioned by academia and has stopped going to class. And though they are best friends, Elana has no idea that Alex has fallen in love with Mateo, a lucha libre fighter. When Alex goes missing and Elana can’t determine whether he left of his own accord or was kidnapped, it’s clear that neither of them has been honest about who they are. Spanning their journey from Virginia to Texas to Mexico, Mesha Maren’s thrilling follow-up to Sugar Run takes us from missionaries to wrestling matches to a luxurious cartel compound, and deep into the psychic choices that shape our identities. A sweeping novel that tells us as much about our perceptions of the United States and Mexico as it does about our own natures and desires, Perpetual West (Algonquin) is a fiercely intelligent and engaging look at the false divide between high and low culture, and a suspenseful story of how harrowing events can bring our true selves to the surface. Maren will be joined in conversation by Gabriel Bump, author of Everywhere You Don't Belong.
Register for the Zoom event / Buy the Book
Tuesday, February 1 @ 5pm (PT)
Something strange is happening to the teens in Adena, Ohio. A mysterious force is seeking inroads: vulnerabilities to exploit, friendships to hijack, untapped rage to harness toward its own ends. Who will serve it best? Claire is abrasive and aimless, embarrassed by her privileged upbringing. Weak-willed David is consumed by a recent breakup and harbors fantasies of violent, cultish orgies. Greg silently wages war against the voices in his head, while his sister Beth goes quietly mad, surrounded by lights. And at the center is the empathetic, naïve, sensitive Sarah. The force wants her most of all. The question is whether she will be the key to its success or to its destruction. Eerie, hypnotic, and shot through with dark comedy, Simon Jacobs’s String Follow (MCD x FSG) is a razor-sharp suburban Gothic that cuts deep, exposing the sweating, bleeding truth of how kids become adults in 21st-century America. In spellbinding, incisive prose, Jacobs blends the startlingly original and the uncannily familiar, revealing the dark chaos that lurks under the surface of Midwestern suburbia. Jacobs will be joined in conversation by Mona Awad, author of All’s Well, Bunny, and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl.
Register for the Zoom event / Buy the Book
Wednesday, February 2 @ 5pm (PT)
For fans of Denis Johnson and Ocean Vuong comes a captivating, searing, and ultimately redemptive debut novel about coming of age on Florida’s drug-riddled Gulf Coast and the enigmatic connection between memory and self. David has a mind that never stops running. He reads Dante and Moby Dick, he sinks into Hemingway and battles with Milton. But on Florida’s Gulf Coast, one can slip into deep water unconsciously; at the age of 14, David runs away from home to pursue a girl and, on his journey, tries crack cocaine for the first time. He’s hooked instantly. Over the course of the next decade, he fights his way out of jail and rehab, trying to make sense of the world around him — a sunken world where faith in anything is a privilege. He makes his way to a tenuous sobriety, but it isn't until he takes a literature class at a community college that something within him ignites. All Day Is a Long Time (Harper) is a spectacular, raw account of growing up and managing, against every expectation, to carve out a place for hope. We see what it means, and what it takes, to come back from a place of little control — to map ourselves on the world around, and beyond, us. David Sanchez’s debut resounds with real force and demonstrates the redemptive power of the written word. Sanchez will be joined in conversation by Karen Russell, author of Orange World and Other Stories and Swamplandia!.
Register for the Zoom event / Buy the Book
Thursday, February 3 @ 5pm (PT)
What’s Good: Notes on Rap and Language (City Lights) is a work of passionate lyrical analysis, a set of freewheeling liner notes, and a love letter to the most vital American art form of the last half-century. Over a series of short chapters, each centered on a different lyric, Daniel Levin Becker — early contributor to the groundbreaking lyrics site Rap Genius (now known as Genius) and author of Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature — considers how rap’s use of language operates and evolves at levels ranging from the local (slang, rhyme) to the analytical (quotation, transcription) to the philosophical (morality, criticism, irony), celebrating the pleasures and perils of any attempt to decipher its meaning-making technologies. Ranging from Sugarhill Gang to UGK to Young M.A, Rakim to Rick Ross to Rae Sremmurd, Jay-Z to Drake to Snoop Dogg, What’s Good reads with the momentum of a deftly curated mixtape, drawing you into the conversation and teaching you to read it as it goes. A book for committed hip-hop heads, curious neophytes, armchair linguists, and everyone in between. Levin Becker will be joined in conversation by Casey Jarman, author of Death: An Oral History.
Register for the Zoom event / Buy the Book
Monday, February 7 @ 5pm (PT)
When Laura Coates joined the Department of Justice as a prosecutor, she wanted to advocate for the most vulnerable among us. But she quickly realized that even with the best intentions, “the pursuit of justice creates injustice.” Through Coates’s experiences, we see that no matter how fair you try to fight, being Black, a woman, and a mother are identities often at odds in the justice system. She and her colleagues face seemingly impossible situations as they teeter between what is right and what is just. On the front lines of our legal system, Coates saw how Black communities are policed differently; Black cases are prosecuted differently; Black defendants are judged differently. How the court system seems to be the one place where minorities are overrepresented, an unrelenting parade of Black and Brown defendants in numbers that belie their percentage in the population and overfill American prisons. She also witnessed how others in the system either abused power or were abused by it — for example, when an undocumented witness was arrested by ICE, when a white colleague taught Coates how to unfairly interrogate a young Black defendant, or when a judge victim-blamed a young sexual assault survivor based on her courtroom attire. Through the revelatory and captivating courtroom scenes in Just Pursuit (Simon & Schuster), Coates explores the tension between the idealism of the law and the reality of working within the parameters of our flawed legal system, exposing the chasm between what is right and what is lawful. Coates will be joined in conversation by Soledad O'Brien, award-winning documentarian, journalist, speaker, author, and philanthropist.
Register for the Zoom event / Buy the Book
Tuesday, February 8 @ 5pm (PT)
The ’90s brought about a revolution in the human condition we’re still groping to understand. Beyond epiphenomena like “Cop Killer” and Titanic and Zima, there were wholesale shifts in how society was perceived: the rise of the Internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the paradoxical belief that nothing was more humiliating than trying too hard. Pop culture accelerated without the aid of a machine that remembered everything, generating an odd comfort in never being certain about anything. It was the last era that held to the idea of a true, hegemonic mainstream before it all began to fracture, whether you found a home in it or defined yourself against it. In The Nineties (Penguin Press), Chuck Klosterman makes a home in all of it: the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the yin/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan. Klosterman has written a multidimensional masterpiece, a work of synthesis so smart and delightful that future historians might well refer to this entire period as Klostermanian.
Register for the Zoom event / Buy the Book
Thursday, February 24 @ 5pm (PT)
From debut author Kit Mayquist comes a propulsive and atmospheric modern Gothic with all the splendor of The Great Gatsby... and all the secrets, lies, and darkness that opulence can hide. Med school dropout Lena is desperate for a job, any job, to help her parents, who are approaching bankruptcy after her father was injured and laid off nearly simultaneously. So when she is offered a position, against all odds, working for one of Boston's most elite families, the illustrious and secretive Verdeaus, she knows she must accept it — no matter how bizarre the interview or how vague the job description. By day, she is assistant to the family doctor and his charge, Jonathan, the sickly, poetic, drunken heir to the family empire, who is as difficult as his illness is mysterious. By night, Lena discovers the more sinister side of the family, as she works overtime at their lavish parties, helping to hide their self-destructive tendencies... and trying not to fall for Jonathan's alluring sister, Audrey. But when she stumbles upon the knowledge that the Verdeau patriarch is the one responsible for the ruin of her own family, Lena vows to get revenge — a poison-filled quest that leads her further into this hedonistic world than she ever bargained for, forcing her to decide how much — and whom — she's willing to sacrifice for payback. The perfect next read for fans of Mexican Gothic, Mayquist’s Tripping Arcadia (Dutton) is a page-turning and shocking tale with an unforgettable protagonist that explores family legacy and inheritance, the sacrifices we must make to get by in today's world, and the intoxicating, dangerous power of wealth. Mayquist will be joined in conversation by Hannah Whitten, author of For the Wolf.
Register for the Zoom event / Buy the Book
Monday, February 28 @ 5pm (PT)
Garrett Hongo’s passion for audio dates back to the Empire 398 turntable his father paired with a Dynakit tube amplifier in their modest tract home in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. But his adult quest begins in the CD-changer era, as he seeks out speakers and amps both powerful and refined enough to honor the top notes of the greatest opera sopranos. In recounting this search, he describes a journey of identity where meaning, fulfillment, and even liberation were often most available to him through music and its astonishingly varied delivery systems. In The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo (Pantheon), Hongo writes about the sound of surf being his first music as a kid in Hawaiʻi, about doo-wop and soul reaching out to him while growing up among Black and Asian classmates in LA, about Rilke and Joni Mitchell as the twin poets of his adolescence, and about feeling the pulse of John Coltrane’s jazz and the rhythmic chords of Billy Joel’s piano from his car radio while driving the freeways as a young man trying to become a poet. Journeying further, he visits devoted collectors of decades-old audio gear as well as designers of the latest tube equipment, listens to sublime arias performed at La Scala, hears a ghostly lute at the grave of English Romantic poet John Keats in Rome, drinks in wisdom from blues musicians and a diversity of poetic elders while turning his ear toward the memory-rich strains of the music that has shaped him: Hawaiian steel guitar and canefield songs; Bach and the Band; Mingus, Puccini, and Duke Ellington. And in the decades-long process of perfecting his stereo setup, Hongo also discovers his own now-celebrated poetic voice. Hongo will be joined in conversation by Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels and The Hummingbird's Daughter.
Register for the Zoom event / Buy the Book
Thursday, March 24 @ 5pm (PT)
In a stunning debut — both a beautiful memoir and a brilliant work of investigative journalism that joins that ranks of works by Mary Karr, Leslie Jamison, and Kay Redfield Jamison – the former editor of The Paris Review explores the ways we pathologize human experiences, and offers a searing critique of the handbook of modern psychiatry. Over the course of 25 years, doctors diagnosed Sarah Fay with six different conditions — anorexia, major depressive disorder (MDD), anxiety disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and bipolar disorder. Pathological (HarperOne) is the gripping story of the factors that led to those diagnoses, and the impact each had on her life. But it is also a rigorously researched investigation into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — psychiatry’s “bible,” the manual from which all mental illness diagnoses come. Yet as Fay found out, this revered standard is fiction. Fay contemplates what it means to live with mental illness and what it has meant for her life, and for many others in similar circumstances. So many people have been misdiagnosed and over-diagnosed with multiple (sometimes competing) conditions, causing massive confusion, immense anguish, and unnecessary suffering. As Fay learned, with knowledge comes the ability to understand what invented terms like “clinical depression” or “anxiety disorder” or “bipolar disorder” or any other DSM diagnosis really means. In telling her story, Fay uses a surprising literary device, a fresh and entertaining survey of the rules and history of punctuation, to illuminate how, like pathology, punctuation orders and categorizes, and tries to make sense of what’s otherwise disordered. Fay will be joined in conversation by Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead and Exit A.
Register for the Zoom event / Buy the Book
Tuesday, April 19 @ 5pm (PT)
Do we need bookstores in the 21st century? If so, what makes a good one? In his beautifully written book, In Praise of Good Bookstores (Princeton), Jeff Deutsch — director of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores, one of the finest bookstores in the world — pays loving tribute to one of our most important and endangered civic institutions. He considers how qualities like space, time, abundance, and community find expression in a good bookstore. Along the way, he also predicts — perhaps audaciously — a future in which the bookstore not only endures, but realizes its highest aspirations. In exploring why good bookstores matter, Deutsch draws on his lifelong experience as a bookseller, but also his upbringing as an Orthodox Jew. This spiritual and cultural heritage instilled in him a reverence for reading, not as a means to a living, but as an essential part of a meaningful life. Central among Deutsch's arguments for the necessity of bookstores is the incalculable value of browsing — since, when we are deep in the act of looking at the shelves, we move through space as though we are inside the mind itself, immersed in self-reflection. In the age of one-click shopping, this is no ordinary defense of bookstores, but rather an urgent account of why they are essential places of discovery, refuge, and fulfillment that enrich the communities that are lucky enough to have them. Deutsch will be joined in conversation by Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can’t Sleep and Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give.
Register for the Zoom event / Buy the Book
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I attend a Powell’s virtual event?
You’ll be able to access our virtual event programming via your home computer, laptop, tablet, mobile phone, or other Internet-ready device. If you’re new to Zoom, please visit their Getting Started guide.
Are Powell’s virtual events free to attend?
As with our prior in-store programming, nearly all of our events are free to attend. On occasion, we will host a special event for which tickets or a book purchase are required for virtual admission — but details will be shared for those specific events separately.
How do I buy an event author’s new book?
Each event listing will include a link to purchase a copy of an author’s new book. A purchase link will be shared by us during the event itself, as well. Purchasing a copy of an author’s new book helps support both the author and Powell’s event programming.
Will I be able to get my book signed?
Unfortunately, we’re not able to offer signed editions or personalizations at this time. In some cases, signed bookplates will be available on a limited first come, first served basis.
How can I keep up with all of Powell’s upcoming virtual events?
Please sign up for our marketing emails using the field at the bottom of this page. All of our upcoming events will be listed above on our online calendar. Please also consider following us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
I’m having my problems with my Zoom account. Can you help me?
Zoom offers a troubleshooting guide which is helpful in solving whatever problems you may be experiencing with the platform. Zoom FAQs are available here.