Morgan Thomas in Conversation With Genevieve Hudson

Tuesday, January 31 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

The nine stories in Morgan Thomas’s shimmering debut collection witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, whatever the cost. As Thomas’s subjects trace 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 with the purchase of a pregnancy bump; a young Virginian flees their relationship, choosing instead to immerse themself in the life of an intersex person from Colonial-era Jamestown. A 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 resound 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 (Picador) introduces a storyteller of uncommon range and talent. Thomas will be joined in conversation by Genevieve Hudson, author of Boys of Alabama.

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Miriam Toews in Conversation With Chelsea Bieker

Wednesday, February 1 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

From Miriam Toews, author of Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows, comes a compassionate, darkly humorous, and deeply wise novel about three generations of women. “You’re a small thing,” Grandma writes, “and you must learn to fight.” Swiv’s Grandma, Elvira, has been fighting all her life. From her upbringing in a strict religious community, she has fought those who wanted to take away her joy, her independence, and her spirit. She has fought to make peace with her loved ones when they have chosen to leave her. And now, even as her health fails, Grandma is fighting for her family: for her daughter, partnerless and in the third term of a pregnancy; and for her granddaughter Swiv, a spirited 9-year-old who has been suspended from school. Cramped together in their Toronto home, on the precipice of extraordinary change, Grandma and Swiv undertake a vital new project, setting out to explain their lives in letters they will never send. Alternating between the exuberant, precocious voice of young Swiv and her irrepressible, tenacious Grandma, Fight Night (Bloomsbury) is a love letter to mothers and grandmothers, and to all the women who are still fighting — painfully, ferociously — for a way to live on their own terms. Toews will be joined in conversation by Chelsea Bieker, author of Heartbroke and Godshot.

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Noah Galuten in Conversation With Joshua McFadden

Thursday, February 2 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

The Don't Panic Pantry Cookbook (Knopf) is the book that seeks to answer the eternal question: “What am I supposed to eat?” Chef and writer Noah Galuten, host of the charmingly self-deprecating YouTube series “Don’t Panic Pantry,” serves up convenient, healthily delicious, mostly vegetarian comfort food, teaching you how to prepare meals and snacks you're genuinely excited to eat. As the world changes around us, we are constantly vacillating between two different versions of ourselves: the one who wants to be healthier and the one who wants to be excited, or comforted, by the food that we eat. We all want to eat “better,” but what does that mean? The Don't Panic Pantry Cookbook is here to say: don’t panic. Don’t panic about learning how to cook; or environmental sustainability; or nutrition. Don’t panic about what to make for breakfast or dinner or midnight snacks, because Noah Galuten has your back! In Noah’s kitchen, trying really matters, perfection is overrated, and better is good enough. Noah gives you the tools to create kitchen staples and vegetable-and-bean-centric dishes (with just a little meat too) that will become the beloved, simple, everyday meals you will make over and over in your home. Galuten will be joined in conversation by Joshua McFadden, author of Grains for Every Season and Six Seasons.

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Ariel Gore in Conversation With Laura Stanfill, Vanessa Veselka & Leni Zumas

Friday, February 3 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

When your dream and creative passion is to write, how do you succeed without selling out or selling yourself short? Ariel Gore has spent her life solving this puzzle, writing and organizing her way towards a creative utopian vision, where storytelling is a form of resistance and writing is an outsider art. In The Wayward Writer (Microcosm), the follow-up to How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead, Gore offers a lyrical call to literary revolution paired with practical exercises. Through her own experiences and interviews with other authors, publishers, and agents, she shows you how to chart your own creative education, vanquish shame and imposter syndrome, cast off oppression, cast a spell on your readers, step into your unique powers, and build your own literary community where respect and honesty reign — and where you can be a writer and survive. Gore presents an alternative narrative structure to the patriarchal hero's journey, with a focus on tapping into myths and hidden places. She urges us to not be precious about where or when we write, or to apologize for who and what we are, or to stop short of telling the truth about our lives. The result is an impossible-to-ignore rallying cry for writing dangerously to create a liberatory literary utopia — and a helpful guide through the thorny landscape of publishing your work. Gore will be joined in conversation by Laura Stanfill, Forest Avenue Press publisher and author of Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary; Vanessa Veselka, author of The Great Offshore Grounds; and Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks.

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Kids’ Storytime

Saturday, February 4 @ 10:30am (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Join us every Saturday for kids' storytime. Today we're reading The Kiss by Eoin McLaughlin.

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Chuck Klosterman

Tuesday, February 7 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: the Berlin Wall fell, and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader. Landlines fell to cell phones, the internet exploded, and pop culture accelerated without the aid of technology that remembered everything. It was the last era with a real mainstream to either identify with or oppose. The '90s brought about a revolution in the human condition, and a shift in consciousness, that we’re still struggling to understand. Happily, Chuck Klosterman is more than up to the job. In The Nineties (Penguin), Klosterman dissects the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the pre-9/11 politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the yin/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan, and (almost) everything else. The result is a multidimensional masterpiece, a work of synthesis so smart and delightful that future historians might well refer to this entire period as Klostermanian.

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Jeff Guinn

Wednesday, February 8 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and a Legacy of Rage (Simon & Schuster) is the definitive account of the disastrous siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, featuring never-before-seen documents, photographs, and interviews, from former investigative reporter Jeff Guinn, author of Manson and The Road to Jonestown. For the first time in 30 years, more than a dozen former ATF agents who participated in the initial February 28, 1993, raid speak on the record about the poor decisions of their commanders that led to this deadly confrontation. Revelations in Guinn’s new book include why the FBI chose to end the siege with the use of CS gas; how both ATF and FBI officials tried and failed to cover up their agencies' mistakes; where David Koresh plagiarized his infamous prophecies; and direct links between the Branch Davidian tragedy and the modern militia movement in America. Notorious conspiracist Alex Jones is a part of the Waco story. So much is new, and stunning. Guinn puts you alongside the ATF agents as they embarked on the disastrous initial assault, unaware that the Davidians knew they were coming and were armed and prepared to resist. Drawing on this new information, including several eyewitness accounts, Guinn again does what he did with his bestselling books about Charles Manson and Jim Jones, shedding new light on a story that we thought we knew.

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Anna Quinn in Conversation With Rene Denfeld and Gemma Whelan

Thursday, February 9 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

After surviving a tragedy that killed her entire family, 16-year-old Meg joins a cloistered convent, believing it is her life’s work to pray full time for the suffering of others. Taking the name Sister Angeline, she spends her days and nights in silence, moving from one prayerful hour to the next. She prays for the hardships of others, the sick and poor, the loved ones she lost, and her own atonement. When the Archdiocese of Chicago runs out of money to keep the convent open, she is torn from her carefully constructed life and sent to a progressive convent on a rocky island in the Pacific Northwest. There, at the Light of the Sea, five radical feminist nuns have their own vision of faithful service. They do not follow canonical law, they do not live a cloistered life, and they believe in using their voices for change. As Sister Angeline struggles to adapt to her new home, she must navigate her grief, fears, and confusions, while being drawn into the lives of a child in crisis, an angry teen, an EMT suffering survivor’s guilt, and the parish priest who is losing his congregation to the Sisters’ all-inclusive Sunday masses. Through all of this, something seems to have awakened in her, a healing power she has not experienced in years that could be her saving grace, or her downfall. In Angeline (Blackstone), Anna Quinn, author of The Night Child, explores the complexity of our past selves and the discovery of our present truth, the enduring imprints left by our losses, forgiveness and acceptance, and why we believe what we believe. Quinn will be joined in conversation by Rene Denfeld, author of The Butterfly Girl, and Gemma Whelan, author of Painting Through the Dark.

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Christie Tate in Conversation With Lidia Yuknavitch

Friday, February 10 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

After more than a decade of dead-end dates and dysfunctional relationships, Christie Tate has reclaimed her voice and settled down. Her days of agonizing in group therapy over guys who won’t commit are over, the grueling emotional work required to attach to another person tucked neatly into the past. Or so she thought. Weeks after giddily sharing stories of her new boyfriend at Saturday morning recovery meetings, Christie receives a gift from a friend. Meredith, 20 years older and always impeccably accessorized, gives Christie a box of holiday-themed scarves as well as a gentle suggestion: maybe now is the perfect time to examine why friendships give her trouble. “The work never ends, right?” she says with a wink. Christie isn’t so sure, but she soon realizes that the feeling of “apartness” that has plagued her since childhood isn’t magically going away now that she’s in a healthy romantic relationship. With Meredith by her side, she embarks on a brutally honest exploration of her friendships past and present, sorting through the ways that debilitating shame and jealousy have kept the lasting bonds she craves out of reach — and how she can overcome a history of letting go too soon. But when Meredith becomes ill and Christie’s baggage threatens to muddy their final days, she’s forced to face her deepest fears in honor of the woman who finally showed her how to be a friend. Poignant, laugh-out-loud funny, and emotionally satisfying, B.F.F. (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster) explores what happens when we finally break the habits that impair our ability to connect with others, and the ways that one life — however messy and imperfect — can change another. Tate will be joined in conversation by Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Thrust.

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Kids’ Storytime

Saturday, February 11 @ 10:30am (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Join us every Saturday for kids' storytime. Today we're reading Keyana Loves Her Family by Natasha Anastasia Tarpley.

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Sonora Jha in Conversation With Omar El Akkad

Thursday, February 16 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Dr. Oliver Harding, a tenured professor of English, is long settled into the routines of a divorced, aging academic. But his quiet, staid life is upended by his new colleague, Ruhaba Khan, a dynamic Pakistani Muslim law professor. Ruhaba unexpectedly ignites Oliver’s long-dormant passions, a secret desire that quickly tips towards obsession after her teenaged nephew, Adil Alam, arrives from France to stay with her. Drawn to them, Oliver tries to reconcile his discomfort with the worlds from which they come, and to quiet his sense of dismay at the encroaching change they represent — both in background and in Ruhaba’s spirited engagement with the student movements on campus. After protests break out demanding diversity across the university, Oliver finds himself and his beliefs under fire, even as his past reveals a picture more complicated than it seems. As Ruhaba seems attainable yet not, and as the women of his past taunt his memory, Oliver reacts in ways shocking and devastating. An explosive, tense, and illuminating work of fiction, Sonora Jha’s The Laughter (HarperVia) is a fascinating portrait of privilege, radicalization, class, and modern academia that forces us to confront the assumptions we make, as both readers and as citizens. Jha will be joined in conversation by Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise.

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Daniel Winkler

Friday, February 17 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

With details for harvesting everything from the ever-popular golden chanterelles to the red-cracked bolete, Fruits of the Forest (Mountaineers) will appeal to both the novice and the avid mushroom hunter. Lifelong mushroom educator and expert Daniel Winkler presents more than 200 edible wild mushrooms that flourish across our region, from Northern California to British Columbia. Comprehensive yet accessible and full of personality, Winkler’s full-color field guide features habitat and seasonality, how to store and prep different varieties, tips for differentiating look-alike species, and much more. Not only does Winkler have vast experience finding, identifying, and collecting mushrooms, he has also spent decades preparing various species in all sorts of meals. He presents a few dozen recipes, ranging from Chanterelles in Cream Sauce to Bold Bolete Quiche, Breaded Saffron Milkcaps to Candy Cap Butter Cookies. Winkler shares notes on mushroom culture around the world, tips on foraging, ideas for preserving mushrooms, and suggestions for medicinal teas and extracts. With Fruits of the Forest in hand, a delicious world of fungi tastes awaits!

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Kids' Storytime With Marcia Berneger

Saturday, February 18 @ 10:30am (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Marcia Berneger’s Busy Feet (Starry Forest) makes wiggling around and learning opposites a blast. Little ones will be itching to join the party as the characters dance, hop, and march along! Feet wake up, Time to play. Happy feet, Out all day! Follow along as adorable baby feet move through a busy day. Where do these feet go? How do they get there? What exciting activities will they get up to? See just how busy little feet can be at playtime, bath time, and more!

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Joe Biel in Conversation With Kent Ford

Sunday, February 19 @ 2pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In the 1960s through the 1980s, the Black Panther Party rose up throughout the United States, envisioning a world without systemic racism and police violence. Joe Biel’s The Enduring Legacy of Portland's Black Panthers (Microcosm) is the story of Portland, Oregon's chapter of the Party, told from original interviews, first-hand accounts, and extensive research, including police surveillance documents. This account shows a vivid picture of neighborhood activists determined to improve their community by creating their own social services, and wildly succeeding — despite the best attempts of police, city officials, and media to paint them as violent extremists, and to spy on, infiltrate, and violently suppress their activities. Portland's Black Panther chapter innovated healthy free breakfasts for children in poverty, the longest-running Panther free health clinic, the Panthers' first dental clinic, and a powerful system of self-directing neighborhood associations. Biel's account shows that the Portland chapter's successes resound to this day, with current programs for free breakfasts in schools, Portland's strong neighborhood association systems, and even the Oregon Health Plan owing their existence to Black Panther initiatives. Despite a racist city hall and police force, Black Panthers in Portland persisted, outlasting most branches in the United States and permanently changing the city for the better. Biel will be joined in conversation by Kent Ford, former Captain of the Portland branch of the Black Panther Party. All author proceeds are being donated to the movement.

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Erica Berry in Conversation With Casey Parks

Tuesday, February 21 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

For fans of Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk and Mary Roach, Erica Berry’s Wolfish (Flaitron) blends science, history, and cultural criticism in a years-long journey to understand our myths about wolves, and track one legendary wolf, OR-7, from the Wallowa Mountains of Oregon. “This is one of those stories that begins with a female body. Hers was crumpled, roadside, in the ash-colored slush between asphalt and snowbank.” So begins Berry’s kaleidoscopic exploration of wolves, both real and symbolic. At the center of this lyrical inquiry is the legendary OR-7, who roams away from his familial pack in northeastern Oregon. While charting OR-7’s record-breaking journey out of the Wallowa Mountains, Berry simultaneously details her own coming-of-age as she moves away from home and wrestles with inherited beliefs about fear, danger, femininity, and the body. As Berry chronicles her own migration — from crying wolf as a child on her grandfather’s sheep farm to accidentally eating mandrake in Sicily — she searches for new expressions for how to be a brave woman, human, and animal in our warming world. What do stories so long told about wolves tell us about our relationship to fear? How can our society peel back the layers of what scares us? By strategically unspooling the strands of our cultural constructions of predator and prey, and what it means to navigate a world in which we can be both, Berry bridges the gap between human fear and grief through the lens of a wrongfully misunderstood species. Wolfish is for anybody trying to navigate a world that is often scary; a powerful, timeless, and necessary book for our current and future generations. Berry will be joined in conversation by Casey Parks, author of Diary of a Misfit. This event is sponsored by Oregon Wild.

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Matt Ruff

Wednesday, February 22 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Summer, 1957. Atticus Turner and his father, Montrose, travel to North Carolina, where they plan to mark the centennial of their ancestor’s escape from slavery by retracing the route he took into the Great Dismal Swamp. But an encounter with an old nemesis turns their historical reenactment into a real life-and-death pursuit. Back in Chicago, George Berry fights for his own life. Diagnosed with cancer, he strikes a devil’s bargain with the ghost of Hiram Winthrop, who promises a miracle cure — but to receive it, George will first have to bring Winthrop back from the dead. Meanwhile, 15-year-old Horace Berry, reeling from the killing of a close friend, joins his mother, Hippolyta, and her friend Letitia Dandridge on a research trip to Nevada for The Safe Negro Travel Guide. But Hippolyta has a secret — and far more dangerous — agenda that will take her and Horace to the far end of the universe and bring a new threat home to Letitia’s doorstep. Hippolyta isn’t the only one keeping secrets. Letitia’s sister, Ruby, has been leading a double life as her white alter ego, Hillary Hyde. Now, the supply of magic potion she needs to transform herself is nearly gone, and a surprise visitor throws her already tenuous situation into complete chaos. Yet these troubles are soon eclipsed by the return of Caleb Braithwhite. Stripped of his magic and banished from Chicago at the end of Lovecraft Country, he’s found a way back into power and is ready to pick up where he left off. But first he has a score to settle… In The Destroyer of Worlds (Harper) — a blend of enthralling historical fiction and fantastical horror — Matt Ruff returns to the world of Lovecraft Country and explores the meaning of death, the hold of the past on the present, and the power of hope in the face of uncertainty.

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Lisa Dodson in Conversation With Andrea Paluso

Thursday, February 23 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Many Americans take comfort and convenience for granted. We eat at nice restaurants, order groceries online, and hire nannies to care for kids. Getting Me Cheap (The New Press) is a riveting portrait of the lives of the low-wage workers — primarily women — who make this lifestyle possible. Sociologists Lisa Dodson and Amanda Freeman follow women in the food, health care, home care, and other low-wage industries as they struggle to balance mothering with bad jobs and without public aid. While these women tend to the needs of well-off families, their own children frequently step into premature adult roles, providing care for siblings and aging family members. Based on years of in-depth field work and hundreds of eye-opening interviews, Getting Me Cheap explores how America traps millions of women and their children into lives of stunted opportunity and poverty in service of giving others of us the lives we seek. Destined to rank with works like Evicted and Nickle and Dimed for its revelatory glimpse into how our society functions behind the scenes, Getting Me Cheap also offers a way forward — with both policy solutions and a keen moral vision for organizing women across class lines. Dodson will be joined in conversation by organizer and community activist Andrea Paluso.

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Jake Bittle in Conversation With Monica Samayoa

Friday, February 24 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

When the subject of migration that will be caused by global climate change comes up in the media or in conversation, we often think of international refugees — those from foreign countries who will emigrate to the United States to escape disasters like rising shorelines and famine. What many people don’t realize though, is that climate migration is happening now — and within the borders of the United States. A human-centered narrative with national scope, Jake Bittle’s The Great Displacement (Simon & Schuster) is the first book to report on climate migration in the US. From half-drowned Louisiana to fire-scorched California, from the dried-up cotton fields of Arizona to the soaked watersheds of inland North Carolina, people are moving. In the last decade alone, the federal government has sponsored the relocation of tens of thousands of families away from flood zones, and tens of thousands more have moved of their own accord in the aftermath of natural disasters. Insurance and mortgage markets are already shifting to reflect mounting climate risk, pushing more people away from their homes. Rising seas have already begun to sink eastern coastal cities, while extreme heat, unprecedented drought, and unstoppable wildfires plague the west. Over the next 50 years, millions of Americans will be caught up in this churn of displacement created by climate change, forced inland and northward in what will be the largest national migration we’ve yet to experience. The Great Displacement compassionately tells the stories of those who are already experiencing life on the move, while detailing just how radically climate change will transform our lives — forcing us out of the country’s hardest-hit areas, uprooting countless communities, and prompting a massive migration that will fundamentally reshape the United States. Bittle will be joined in conversation by Monica Samayoa, climate and environmental journalist at OPB.

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Lincoln Peirce

Friday, February 24 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

The newest pranks, adventures, and school drama from Big Nate, now an animated series on Paramount+ and Nickelodeon! Big Nate is a legend at P.S. 38, where he and friends Francis, Teddy, Dee Dee, Chad, and others manage to make sixth grade interesting with all kinds of pranks, drama, sports, and good times. The all-time leader in detentions, Nate is never far from the spotlight, whether it's for a freak injury on the soccer field, Halloween costume fail, or stirring up a new episode in his long-running rivalry with grade-grubbing Gina or his teacher nemesis, Mrs. Godfrey. Big Nate: Nailed It! (Andrews McMeel) is the new collection of Big Nate comics from Lincoln Peirce, full of abundant laughs for the whole family.

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Kids’ Storytime

Saturday, February 25 @ 10:30am (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Join us for every Saturday for kids' storytime. Today we're reading The Kindest Red by Ibtihaj Muhammad.

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Kathleen McLaughlin in Conversation With Leah Sottile

Tuesday, February 28 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

The Invisible Kingdom meets Empire of Pain in an explosive and shocking account of a multi-billion dollar underground medical industry and the American underclass it drains for blood and profit. Journalist Kathleen McLaughlin knew she’d found a treatment that worked on her rare autoimmune disorder. She had no idea it had been drawn from the veins of America’s most vulnerable. So begins McLaughlin’s ten-year investigation researching and reporting on the $20-billion-a-year business she found at the other end of her medication, revealing an industry that targets America’s most economically vulnerable for immense profit. Blood Money (Atria/One Signal) shares McLaughlin’s decade-long mission to learn the full story of where her medicine comes from. She travels the United States in search of the truth about human blood plasma and learns that 20 million Americans each year sell their plasma for profit — a human-derived commodity extracted inside our borders to be processed and packaged for retail across the globe. She investigates the thin evidence pharmaceutical companies have used to push plasma as a wonder drug for everything from COVID-19 to wrinkled skin. And she unearths an American economic crisis hidden in plain sight: single mothers, college students, laid-off Rust Belt auto workers, and a booming blood market at America’s southern border, where collection agencies target Mexican citizens willing to cross over and sell their plasma for substandard pay. McLaughlin’s findings push her to ask difficult questions about her own complicity in this wheel of exploitation, as both a patient in need and a customer who stands to benefit from the suffering of others. Blood Money weaves together McLaughlin’s personal battle to overcome illness as a working American with an electrifying exposé of capitalism run amok in a searing portrait that shows what happens when big business is allowed to feed unchecked on those least empowered to fight back. McLaughlin will be joined in conversation by Leah Sottile, author of When the Moon Turns to Blood.

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Dana Schwartz in Conversation With Sarah Marshall

Wednesday, March 1 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

Immortality (Wednesday Books) is the eagerly anticipated sequel to Dana Schwartz's bestselling gothic romance, Anatomy: A Love Story. Hazel Sinnett is alone and half-convinced the events of the year before — the immortality, Beecham’s vial — were a figment of her imagination. She doesn’t even know if Jack is alive or dead. All she can really do now is treat patients and maintain Hawthornden Castle as it starts to decay around her. When saving a life leads to her arrest, Hazel seems doomed to rot in prison until a message intervenes: Hazel has been specifically requested to be the personal physician of Princess Charlotte, the sickly daughter of King George IV. Soon Hazel is dragged into the glamor and romance of a court where everyone has something to hide, especially the enigmatic, brilliant members of a social club known as the Companions to the Death. As Hazel’s work entangles her more and more with the British court, she realizes that her own future as a surgeon isn't the only thing at stake for her. Malicious forces are at work in the monarchy, and Hazel may be the only one capable of setting things right. Schwartz will be joined in conversation by writer, podcaster, and media critic Sarah Marshall.

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Liselle Sambury in Conversation With Aiden Thomas

Thursday, March 2 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

Daisy sees dead people — something impossible to forget in bustling, ghost-packed Toronto. She usually manages to deal with her unwanted ability, but she’s completely unprepared to be dumped by her boyfriend. So when her mother inherits a secluded mansion in northern Ontario where she spent her childhood summers, Daisy jumps at the chance to escape. But the house is nothing like Daisy expects, and she begins to realize that her experience with the supernatural might be no match for her mother’s secrets, nor what lurks within these walls. A decade later, Brittney is desperate to get out from under the thumb of her abusive mother, a bestselling author who claims her stay at “Miracle Mansion” allowed her to see the error of her ways. But Brittney knows that’s nothing but a sham. She decides the new season of her popular Haunted web series will uncover what happened to a young Black girl in the mansion ten years prior and finally expose her mother’s lies. But as she gets more wrapped up in the investigation, she’ll have to decide: if she can only bring one story to light, which one matters most — Daisy’s or her own? As Brittney investigates the mansion in the present, Daisy’s story runs parallel in the past, both timelines propelling the girls to face the most dangerous monsters of all: those that hide in plain sight. The Haunting of Hill House meets Sadie in Delicious Monsters (Margaret K. McElderry), Liselle Sambury’s evocative and mind-bending new psychological thriller. Sambury will be joined in conversation by Aiden Thomas, author of The Sunbearer Trials.

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Cindy Baldwin

Friday, March 3 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

Penny Rooney is stumped when she’s given the assignment to write a poem about herself. She thinks of herself as half of a whole with her best friend, Cricket — until she’s blindsided by the news that Cricket’s family is moving away in a matter of weeks. Then Penny and her sister see something impossible in the creek behind their house: a dolphin. Penny feels an immediate connection with the dolphin, who she names Rose. At the same time, Penny’s cystic fibrosis begins to flare up. The only thing that reassures her is Rose, who is also sick — she was diagnosed with pneumonia by a local marine biologist and is given antibiotics not unlike those Penny inhales every day. As much as Penny takes solace in her connection to Rose, she might also be the only person who can get Rose back to her pod. The longer Rose lingers in the river creek, the more danger she’s in. Will Penny be able to do what’s right, even if it means losing Rose? Cindy Baldwin’s No Matter the Distance (Quill Tree) is the first novel for young readers centered on a character with cystic fibrosis and written by an author who also has CF.

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George Lakey

Friday, March 10 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

From his first arrest in the Civil Rights era to his most recent during a climate justice march at the age of 83, George Lakey has committed his life to a mission of building a better world through movements for justice. Lakey draws readers into the center of history-making events, telling often serious stories with playfulness and intimacy. In his new memoir, Dancing with History: A Life for Peace and Justice (Seven Stories Press), Lakey describes the personal, political, and theoretical — coming out as bisexual to his Quaker community while known as a church leader and family man, protesting against the war in Vietnam by delivering medical supplies through the naval blockade in the South China Sea, and applying his academic study of nonviolent resistance to creative tactics in direct action campaigns. From strategies he learned as a young man facing violence in the streets to risking his life as an unarmed bodyguard for Sri Lankan human rights lawyers, Lakey recounts his experience living out the tension between commitment to family and mission. Drawing strength from his community to fight cancer, survive painful parenting struggles, and create networks to help prevent activist burnout, Dancing with History shows readers how to find hope in even the darkest times through strategic, joyful activism.

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Kids' Storytime With Zoey Abbott

Saturday, March 11 @ 10:30am (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Zoey Abbott’s Banana (Tundra) is a quirky and hilarious picture book parable about parental distraction and a daughter's clever solution. My dad is the best. We love hanging out together. Recently, he got this banana. At first, we had a great time with the banana — it does cool stuff and it’s really fun. But lately he’s spending too much time with the banana. He’s distracted, and he’s not enjoying the things he used to enjoy, like hanging out with me. I don’t think this banana is good for him. It’s time to take action. With Abbott’s trademark wit and engaging illustrations, she introduces a very wise kid and a not-so-wise parent who eventually see eye to eye in a story that will delight readers of all ages.

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Lucy Jane Bledsoe in Conversation With Devi S. Laskar

Thursday, March 16 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Delia Barnes and Ernest Wrangham met as teens at Celebration Camp, a church-supported conversion therapy program — a dubious, unscientific Christian practice meant to change a person’s sexuality. After witnessing a close friend suffer a devastating tragedy in the hands of the camp counselors, they escaped in the night, only to take separate roads to their distant homes. They have no idea how each have fared through the years. Delia is a college basketball coach who prides herself on being an empowering and self-possessed role model for her players. But when she gets fired from her elite East Coast college and loses her wife to another woman in rapid succession, she returns to her hometown of Rockside, Oregon to coach the girls’ basketball team at her high school alma mater. Ernest, meanwhile, is a renowned poet in New York City who’s left behind his loving husband for a temporary teaching job in Portland, Oregon. His work has always been boundary-pushing, fearless. But the poem he’s most wanted to write — about his dangerous escape from Celebration Camp — remains stubbornly out of reach. Both remain on a mission to overcome the consequences and inhumane costs of conversion therapy. As events find them hurtling toward each other once again, they both grapple with the necessity of remaining steadfast in one’s truth — no matter how slippery that can be. Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s Tell the Rest (Akashic) is a powerful novel about coming to terms — with family, history, violence, loss, sexuality, and ultimately, with love. Bledsoe will be joined in conversation by Devi S. Laskar, author of Circa.

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Michelle Dowd in Conversation With Liz Prato

Monday, March 20 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In the tradition of Educated and The Glass Castle, Michelle Dowd’s Forager (Algonquin) is a shattering and poetic memoir telling the story of her experience in an apocalyptic cult, and how understanding the natural world was her key to escape — and survival. As a child, Dowd grew up on a mountain in the Angeles National Forest. She was born into an ultra-religious cult — or the Field as they called it — started in the 1930s by her grandfather, a mercurial, domineering, and charismatic man who convinced generations of young male followers that he would live 500 years and ascend to the heavens when doomsday came. Comfort and care are sins, Dowd is told. As a result, she was forced to learn the skills necessary to battle hunger, thirst, and cold; she learned to trust animals more than humans; and most importantly, she learned how to survive in the natural world. At the Field, a young Dowd lives a life of abuse, poverty, and isolation, as she obeys her family’s rigorous religious and patriarchal rules — which are so extreme that Dowd is convinced her mother would sacrifice her, like Abraham and Isaac, if instructed by God. She often wears the same clothes for months at a time; she is often ill and always hungry for both love and food. She is taught not to trust Outsiders, and especially not Quitters, nor her own body and its warnings. But as Dowd gets older, she realizes she has the strength to break free. Using stories of individual edible plants and their uses to anchor each chapter, Forager is both a searing coming-of-age story and a meditation on the ways in which understanding nature can lead to freedom, even joy. Dowd will be joined in conversation by Liz Prato, author of Kids in America: A Gen X Reckoning.

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Scott Nadelson in Conversation With Justin Taylor

Tuesday, March 21 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Scott Nadelson’s award-winning short story collection, While It Lasts (University of Georgia Press), brings us moments of tenuousness, in which characters seek out or struggle to hold on to what’s most precious in the face of change and loss. The stories take us from suburban New Jersey to prewar Vienna to Western Oregon, chronicling the lives of, among others, a suburban teenage boy taking revenge with a stolen Revolutionary War bayonet; a woman adrift, literally and figuratively, amid a workplace affair; a nearly forgotten and destitute musician attempting to reclaim his creative spark; and a young Mark Rothko finding his way after several early failures. While It Lasts speaks to how we are all bound by limited time to achieve what we must despite our own knowledge of how everything is fleeting. Nadelson will be joined in conversation by Justin Taylor, author of Riding with the Ghost.

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Tove Danovich in Conversation With Kale Williams

Tuesday, March 28 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Since first domesticating the chicken thousands of years ago, humans have become exceptionally adept at raising them for food. Yet most people rarely interact with chickens or know much about them. In Under the Henfluence (Agate Surrey), culture reporter Tove Danovich explores the lives of these quirky, mysterious birds who stole her heart the moment her first box of chicks arrived at the post office. From a hatchery in Iowa to a chicken show in Ohio to a rooster rescue in Minnesota, Danovich interviews the people breeding, training, healing, and, most importantly, adoring chickens. With more than 60 billion chickens living on industrial farms around the world, they’re easy to dismiss as just another dinner ingredient. Yet Danovich’s reporting reveals the hidden cleverness, quiet sweetness, and irresistible personalities of these birds, as well as the complex human-chicken relationship that has evolved over centuries. This glimpse into the lives of backyard chickens doesn’t just help us to understand chickens better — it also casts light back on ourselves and what we’ve ignored throughout the explosive growth of industrial agriculture. Woven with delightful and sometimes heartbreaking anecdotes from Danovich’s own henhouse, Under the Henfluence proves that chickens are so much more than what they bring to the table. Danovich will be joined in conversation by Kale Williams, environmental reporter and author of The Loneliest Polar Bear.

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Craig Seligman in Conversation With Silvana Nova

Thursday, March 30 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In the 1970s, gay men and lesbians were openly despised and drag queens scared the public. Yet that was the era when Doris Fish (born Philip Mills in 1952) painted and padded his way to stardom. He was a leader of the generation that prepared the world not just for drag queens on TV but for a society that welcomes and even celebrates queer people. How did we get from there to here? In Who Does That Bitch Think She Is?: Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag (PublicAffairs) Craig Seligman looks at Doris’s short but overstuffed life as a way to provide some answers. There were effectively three Dorises — the quiet visual artist, the glorious drag queen, and the hunky male prostitute who supported the other two. He started performing in Sydney in 1972 as a member of Sylvia and the Synthetics, a psycho troupe that represented the first anarchic flowering of queer creative energy in the post-Stonewall era. After moving to San Francisco in the mid-’70s, he became the driving force behind years of sidesplitting drag shows that were loved as much as you can love throwaway trash — which is what everybody thought they were. No one, Doris included, perceived them as political theater, when in fact they were accomplishing satire’s deepest dream: not just to rail against society, but to change it. Seligman recounts this dynamic period in queer history — from Stonewall to AIDS — giving insight into how our ideas about gender have broadened to make drag the phenomenon we know it as today. In a book filled with interviews and letters about a life that ricocheted between hilarity and tragedy, Seligman revisits the places and people Doris knew in order to shed light on the multihued era that his remarkable life encapsulated. Seligman will be joined in conversation by Silvana Nova, Seligman’s husband, activist, performance artist, and former drag queen.

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Ari Shapiro in Conversation With Thomas Lauderdale / TICKETED EVENT

Sunday, April 2 @ 7:30pm (PT) / Revolution Hall

In his first book, broadcaster Ari Shapiro — the beloved host of NPR's All Things Considered — takes us around the globe to reveal the stories behind narratives that are sometimes heartwarming, sometimes heartbreaking, but always poignant. He details his time traveling on Air Force One with President Obama, or following the path of Syrian refugees fleeing war, or learning from those fighting for social justice both at home and abroad. As the self-reinforcing bubbles we live in become more impenetrable, Shapiro keeps seeking ways to help people listen to one another; to find connection and commonality with those who may seem different; to remind us that, before religion, or nationality, or politics, we are all human. Shapiro's stirring memoir-in-essays, The Best Strangers in the World (HarperOne), is a testament to one journalist’s passion for Considering All Things — and sharing what he finds with the rest of us. Shapiro will be joined in conversation by Pink Martini bandleader Thomas Lauderdale.
 
Please note: Tickets for this event are $38.99 (before service charges) and include admission, as well as one hardcover copy of Shapiro’s The Best Strangers in the World. Books distributed at event.

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Kids' Storytime With Danielle Krysa

Saturday, April 8 @ 10:30am (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Art and Joy: Best Friends Forever (Prestel Junior) is the story of two best friends — Art and Joy — and how they overcome the insidious “Art Bully” that criticizes their creative endeavors. Danielle Krysa knows that kids have an inner critic too — the kind that tells them their artworks are stupid, messy, the wrong color, or just plain wrong. Employing the same arch humor that make her books for adults so relatable and helpful, Krysa illustrates this uplifting tale with her brilliantly colored collages and witty typography. As Art and Joy learn how to tap into their imaginations and shrug off the Art Bully, they also discover some clever ways to get their creative juices flowing using color, shape, line and found objects.

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Nicole Chung in Conversation With Lydia Kiesling

Thursday, April 20 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

From the bestselling author of All You Can Ever Know comes a searing memoir of class, inequality, and grief — a daughter’s search to understand the lives her adoptive parents led, the life she forged as an adult, and the lives she’s lost. When Nicole Chung graduated from high school, she couldn’t hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast and no longer the only Korean she knew, she found a sense of community she had always craved as an Asian American adoptee — and a path to the life she’d long wanted. But the middle-class world she begins to raise a family in — where there are big homes and college funds — looks very different from the middle-class world she thought she grew up in, where paychecks have to stretch to the end of the week and there are no safety nets. When her father dies at only 67, killed by the kidney disease that took the life of his mother before him, Nicole feels deep grief as well as rage, knowing that years of financial instability and lack of access to health care contributed to his premature death. And then the unthinkable happens — less than a year later, her beloved mother is diagnosed with cancer, and the physical distance between them becomes insurmountable as COVID descends upon the world. Exploring the enduring strength of family bonds in the face of hardship and tragedy, A Living Remedy (Ecco) examines what it takes to reconcile the distance between one life, one home, and another — and sheds needed light on some of the most persistent and tragic inequalities in American society. Chung will be joined in conversation by Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State.

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Classical Up Close

Saturday, April 22 @ 1pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Musicians from the Oregon Symphony return to Powell’s City of Books for a Pop-Up Performance as part of the 10th season of Classical Up Close — a festival of free chamber music concerts held all over the Portland Metro area. This is your chance to see classical music made in an intimate, casual environment with some of our region’s most talented musicians. Audience members are encouraged to ask the musicians questions and interact on a personal level in this unique concert environment. Everyone welcome!

David Goodrich in Conversation With George Rede

Wednesday, May 3 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

The traces of the Underground Railroad hide in plain sight: a great church in Philadelphia; a humble old house backing up to the New Jersey Turnpike; an industrial outbuilding in Ohio. Over the course of four years, climate scientist David Goodrich rode his bicycle 3,000 miles east of the Mississippi to travel the routes of the Underground Railroad and delve into the history and stories in the places where they happened. He followed the most famous of conductors, Harriet Tubman, from where she was enslaved in Maryland, on the eastern shore, all the way to her family sanctuary at a tiny chapel in Ontario, Canada. Travelling South, he rode from New Orleans, where the enslaved were bought and sold, through Mississippi and the heart of the Delta Blues. As we pedal along with him, Goodrich brings us to the Borderland along the Ohio River, a kind of no-mans-land between North and South in the years before the Civil War. Here, slave hunters roamed both banks of the river, trying to catch people as they fled for freedom. We travel to Oberlin, Ohio, a town that staunchly defended freedom seekers, embodied in the life of Lewis Leary, who was lost in the fires of Harpers Ferry, but his spirit was reborn in the Harlem Renaissance. On Freedom Road (Pegasus) enables us to see familiar places in a very different light: from the vantage point of desperate people seeking to outrun the reach of slavery. Join in this journey to find the heroes and stories, both known and hidden, of the Underground Railroad. Goodrich will be joined in conversation by George Rede, veteran Oregon journalist and retired adjunct instructor.

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