Kids’ Storytime

Saturday, May 27 @ 10:30am (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Join us every Saturday for kids' storytime. Today we're reading Love Makes a Garden Grow by Taeeun Yoo.

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Kwame Alexander in Conversation With Gregory Gourdet

Tuesday, May 30 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In a powerfully intimate and non-traditional (or "new-fashioned") memoir, Newbery Medalist Kwame Alexander shares snapshots of a man learning how to love. He takes us through stories of his parents: from being awkward newlyweds in the sticky Chicago summer of 1967, to the sometimes-confusing ways they showed their love to each other, and for him. He explores his own relationships — his difficulties as a newly wedded, 22-year-old father, and the precariousness of his early marriage working in a jazz club with his second wife. Alexander attempts to deal with the unravelling of his marriage and the grief of his mother's recent passing while sharing the solace he found in learning how to perfect her famous fried chicken dish. With an open heart, Alexander weaves together memories of his past to try and understand his greatest love: his daughters. Full of heartfelt reminisces, family recipes, love poems, and personal letters, Why Fathers Cry at Night (Little, Brown) inspires bravery and vulnerability in every reader who has experienced the reckless passion, heartbreak, failure, and joy that define the whirlwind woes and wonders of love. Alexander will be joined in conversation by Gregory Gourdet, chef/founder of Kann and author of Everyone's Table.

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Simon Sebag Montefiore

Tuesday, May 30 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

Around 950,000 years ago, a family of five walked along the beach and left behind the oldest family footprints ever discovered. For award-winning historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The Romanovs, these poignant, familiar fossils serve as an inspiration for a new kind of world history, one that is genuinely global, spans all eras and all continents, and focuses on the family ties that connect every one of us. In his epic, ever-surprising book, The World: A Family History of Humanity (Knopf), Montefiore chronicles the world’s great dynasties across human history through palace intrigues, love affairs, and family lives, linking grand themes of war, migration, plague, religion, and technology to the people at the heart of the human drama. It features a cast of extraordinary diversity: in addition to rulers and conquerors, there are priests, charlatans, artists, scientists, tycoons, gangsters, lovers, husbands, wives, and children. There is Hongwu, the beggar who founded the Ming dynasty; Ewuare, the Leopard-King of Benin; Henry Christophe, King of Haiti; Kamehameha, the conqueror of Hawaii; Zenobia, the Arab empress who defied Rome; Lady Murasaki, the first female novelist; Sayyida al-Hurra, the Moroccan pirate-queen. Here too are moderns such as Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and Volodymyr Zelensky. Here are the Caesars, Medicis and Incas, Ottomans and Mughals, Bonapartes, Habsburgs and Zulus, Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Krupps, Churchills, Kennedys, Castros, Nehrus, Pahlavis and Kenyattas, Saudis, Kims and Assads. These powerful families represent the breadth of human endeavor, with bloody succession battles, treacherous conspiracies, and shocking megalomania alongside flourishing culture, moving romances, and enlightened benevolence. A dazzling achievement as spellbinding as fiction, The World captures the whole human story in a single, masterful narrative.

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Brandon Taylor in Conversation With Karen Russell

Wednesday, May 31 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

The author of the Booker Prize finalist Real Life and the bestselling Filthy Animals returns with a deeply involving new novel of young men and women at a crossroads. In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. At the group’s center are Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography; Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicates her relationships with friends and a trusted mentor; and Noah, who “didn’t seek sex out so much as it came up to him like an anxious dog in need of affection.” These three are buffeted by a cast of poets, artists, landlords, meat-packing workers, and mathematicians who populate the cafes, classrooms, and food-service kitchens of Iowa City, sometimes to violent and electrifying consequence. Finally, as each prepares for an uncertain future, the group heads to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives — a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered. A novel of intimacy and precarity, friendship and chosen family, The Late Americans (Riverhead) is Brandon Taylor’s richest and most involving work of fiction to date, confirming his position as one of our most perceptive chroniclers of contemporary life. Taylor will be joined in conversation by Karen Russell, author of Orange World and Other Stories.

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First Thursday: Portland Modern Quilt Guild's Rainbow Quilt Show

Thursday, June 1 @ 6:30pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

The Portland Modern Quilt Guild issued a challenge to its members to design a quilt using the colors of the rainbow and here is the manifestation of their work. We hope you are dazzled by the many perspectives brought to the rainbow by our wonderful members.

The Bigfoot Regional Poetry Slam

Friday, June 2 @ 5pm & 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

The Bigfoot Regional Poetry Slam is a tournament featuring teams of spoken word poets from all over the Pacific Northwest (and beyond!). At this event, four teams of poets will compete in a battle of words at 5 p.m., followed by a different set of four teams at 7 p.m. Audience members selected at random will determine the winner. Come see this dynamic event for yourself!

Emmeline Duncan & Angela M. Sanders

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

With its hipster-run Portland food truck pod and focus on real-world social issues like homelessness, gentrification, school affordability, and bicycle commuting, Emmeline Duncan’s new Ground Rules Mystery, Flat White Fatality (Kensington), is a fresh, modern cozy featuring coffee barista Sage Caplin. To top off her coffee business, Sage is now helping out with her boyfriend Bax’s gaming company. Conveniently for Sage, it’s located next door to her Ground Rules Roastery. That makes it easy for her to pitch in with Bax’s employee team-building event. The plan is to boost morale with a scavenger hunt. And it seems to be going well — until Robbie, a programmer known for being a prankster, turns up dead in Sage’s roastery. There are two suspects so far: Sage, who has no idea how the victim ended up in her space; and Bax, who was allegedly spotted arguing with Robbie the day before. But could it be a disgruntled employee? After all, Robbie’s sense of humor was known to have rubbed some coworkers the wrong way. Now, it’s up to Sage to find the culprit — before another life grinds to a halt.
 
Witch Upon a Star (Kensington), the latest in Angela M. Sanders’s witty, charming Witch Way Librarian series, features a spellbinding librarian, a clever cat familiar, an unfortunately non-magical sister — and of course, murder. Big things are happening in small-town Wilfred, Oregon! Josie Way is eager to show off Wilfred’s delights to her visiting sister, Jean — even though Josie must conceal her magic from her. In any case, Jean is excited to attend Cookie Masterson’s trademark “Ready-Set-Go!” workshop on becoming a life coach. Then there’s the grand reopening of Darla’s Café, where the doors are thrown open to reveal… a dead man, stabbed in the back. Even more worrisome, the sheriff receives a report of a fresh corpse at the retreat center. Maybe murder isn’t so uncommon in Wilfred anymore, but two unfamiliar bodies within an hour certainly is! Josie’s willing to let law enforcement take the lead — after all, she’s gotten into some trouble from the hints the library’s spellbound books keep feeding her about the patrons. But when her sister receives the killer’s chilling calling card, she’ll use everything within her otherworldly powers to divine just who in town has homicide as his new slogan.

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Kids’ Storytime

Saturday, June 3 @ 10:30am (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Join us every Saturday for kids' storytime. Today we're reading Twenty Questions by Mac Barnett.

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Lindz Amer

Saturday, June 3 @ 2pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In the face of so many injustices across society for LGBTQ+ people, it can be easy for parents of young children to feel helpless and hopeless. While they may not be able to address every problem across the country, there's a simple place to start: right at home. Rainbow Parenting (St. Martin’s Griffin) is an essential stepping stone for adults who want to raise and teach kids in a queer-affirming way, but might not know how. Lindz Amer, the founder of Queer Kid Stuff, an award-winning LGBTQ+ educational webseries for children and families, is an indispensable guide, leading readers through practical applications, important LGBTQ+ history, key lessons in intersectionality, pronouns, social justice, and more. Divided by sections that address kids' individual ages — from infancy to kindergarten — this joyful and approachable book shares a bit of hope and starts with the understanding that anyone can spread queer joy. By giving parents and their kids a vocabulary to express themselves, Rainbow Parenting ultimately aims to create more empathetic adults — and spreads a message of radical acceptance in a world where it's sometimes dangerous to just be yourself.

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Dan Kaplan, Bill Carty & Jae Nichelle

Sunday, June 4 @ 2pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Dan Kaplan’s 2.4.18 (Spuyten Duyvil) is an erasure of the February 4, 2018 issue of The New York Times, a book that distorts fact, erodes context, and considers what may (not) be newsworthy. Poet Simone Muench describes the book as “...the brilliant oddball at the party who shows up donned in a ‘costume of bubbles’ inquiring about the ‘geometry of a wing.’ It’s the person you keep conversing with long after the party’s over.” We Sailed on the Lake (Bunny Presse), Bill Carty’s second collection of poetry, consists of lyrics of spiraling awareness. As a signal lamp, unused, mirrors the sky, these poems reflect approaching storms, near-misses, and the violence inherent in nature, country, and economy. Rising star and spoken word poet Jae Nichelle debuts her luminous thoughts in God Themselves (Andrews McMeel), a new collection of stirring poetry. Nichelle taps into her experiences of growing up in the South as a queer Black woman to courageously confront the effects of a forced religion and the inherent dangers of living life in a female body.

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Ocean Vuong in Conversation With Anis Mojgani

Monday, June 5 @ 6pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

In his deeply intimate second poetry collection, Time Is a Mother (Penguin), Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong’s poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break. The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize, and a 2019 MacArthur fellow, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment. These poems represent a more innovative and daring experimentation with language and form, illuminating how the themes we perennially live in and question are truly inexhaustible. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time Is a Mother is a return and a forging forth all at once. Vuong will be joined in conversation by Anis Mojgani, Oregon Poet Laureate and author of In the Pocket of Small Gods.

Please note: This event will NOT include a public signing. All copies of Time Is a Mother will be signed in advance.

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Brianna Wiest in Conversation With Bianca Sparacino

Monday, June 5 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

If you’re in a pivot period — if you’re still bridging the space between where you are and where you want to be — remember that the person you’re becoming is already within you. The journey is convincing your mind to act consistently on what your heart already knows it wants to do. Brianna Wiest’s The Pivot Year (Thought Catalog) is a book of 365 daily meditations on finding the courage to become who you’ve always wanted to be — from the author of 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think and The Mountain Is You. Wiest will be joined in conversation by Bianca Sparacino, author of A Gentle Reminder.

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Moe Bowstern, Mic Crenshaw & Erin Yanke in Conversation With Jonathan Mozzochi & China

Tuesday, June 6 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Portland, Oregon, 1988: the brutal murder of Ethiopian immigrant Mulugeta Seraw by racist skinheads shocked the city. In response, disparate groups quickly came together to organize against white nationalist violence and right-wing organizing throughout the Rose City and the Pacific Northwest. It Did Happen Here (PM Press) compiles interviews with dozens of people who worked together during the waning decades of the 20th century to reveal an inspiring collaboration between groups of immigrants, civil rights activists, militant youth, and queer organizers. This oral history focuses on participants in three core groups: the Portland chapters of Anti-Racist Action and Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, and the Coalition for Human Dignity. Using a diversity of tactics — from out-and-out brawls on the streets and at punk shows, to behind-the-scenes intelligence gathering — brave antiracists unified on their home ground over and over, directly attacking right-wing fascists and exposing white nationalist organizations and neo-Nazi skinheads. Embattled by police and unsupported by the city, these citizen activists eventually drove the boneheads out of the music scene and off the streets of Portland. It Did Happen Here shares their stories about what worked, what didn’t, and ideas on how to continue the fight. Co-authors Moe Bowstern, Mic Crenshaw, and Erin Yanke will be joined in conversation by Jonathan Mozzochi, founding member of the Portland-based Coalition for Human Dignity; and China, dedicated activist, community organizer, doula, and educator.

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John Vaillant in Conversation With Michelle Nijhuis

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

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration — the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina — John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world. For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways. With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant — author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce — takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. Vaillant’s urgent work, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (Knopf), is a book for — and from — our new century of fire, which has only just begun. Vaillant will be joined in conversation by Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction.

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Emily Lynn Paulson

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

She signed up for the sisterhood, free cars, and the promise of a successful business of her own. Instead, she ended up with an addiction, broken friendships, and the rubble of a toppled pyramid… scheme. Hey, Hun: Sales, Sisterhood, Supremacy, and the Other Lies Behind Multilevel Marketing (Row Park) is the eye-opening, funny, and dangerous personal story of author Emily Lynn Paulson rising to the top of the pyramid in the multilevel marketing (MLM) world, only to recognize that its culture and business practices went beyond a trendy marketing scheme and into the heart of white supremacy in America. A significant polemic on how MLMs operate, Hey, Hun expertly lays out their role in the cultural epidemic of isolation and the cult-like ideologies that course through their trainings, marketing, and one-on-one interactions. Equally entertaining and smart, Paulson’s first-person accounts, acerbic wit, and biting commentary will leave you with a new perspective on those “Hey Hun” messages flooding your inbox.

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Santi Elijah Holley in Conversation With Mic Crenshaw

Thursday, June 8 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

They have been celebrated, glorified, and mythologized. They have been hailed as heroes, liberators, and freedom fighters. They have been condemned, pursued, imprisoned, exiled, and killed. But the true and complete story of the Shakur family — one of the most famous names in contemporary Black American history — has never been told. For over 50 years, the Shakurs have inspired generations of activists, scholars, and music fans. Many people are only familiar with Assata Shakur, the popular author and thinker, living for three decades in Cuban exile; or the late rapper Tupac. But the branches of the Shakur family tree extend widely, and the roots reach into the most furtive and hidden depths of the underground. Santi Elijah Holley’s An Amerikan Family (Mariner) is a history of the long struggle for Black liberation in the United States, as experienced and shaped by the Shakur family. It is the story of hope and betrayal, addiction and murder, persecution and revolution. An Amerikan Family is not only family genealogy, it is the story of Black America’s long struggle for racial justice and the nation’s covert and repressive tactics to defeat that struggle. It is the story of a small but determined community, taking extreme, unconventional, and often perilous measures in the quest for freedom. In short, the story of the Shakurs is the story of America. Holley will be joined in conversation by Mic Crenshaw, independent hip hop artist, emcee, poet, educator, and activist.

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Matt Baume in Conversation With Mary O’Hara

Friday, June 9 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

For decades, amidst the bright lights, studio-audience laughs, and absurdly large apartment sets, the real-life story of American LGBTQ+ liberation unfolded in plain sight in front of millions of viewers, most of whom were laughing too hard to mind. From flamboyant relatives on Bewitched to closely-guarded secrets on All in the Family, from network-censor fights over Soap to behind-the-scenes activism on the set of The Golden Girls, from Ellen’s culture clash to Modern Family’s primetime power-couple, Matt Baume’s Hi Honey, I’m Homo!: Sitcoms, Specials, and the Queering of American Culture (Smart Pop) is the story not only of how subversive queer comedy transformed the American sitcom, from its inception through today, but how our favorite sitcoms transformed, and continue to transform, America. Baume will be joined in conversation by Mary O'Hara, LGBTQ journalist and Powell’s PR & Communications Manager.

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Héctor Tobar

Friday, June 9 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

"Latino" is the most open-ended and loosely defined of the major race categories in the United States. Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of "Latino" (MCD) assembles Pulitzer Prize winner Héctor Tobar's personal experiences as the son of Guatemalan immigrants and the stories told to him by his Latinx students to offer a spirited rebuke to racist ideas about Latino people. Our Migrant Souls decodes the meaning of "Latino" as a racial and ethnic identity in the modern United States, and seeks to give voice to the angst and anger of young Latino people who have seen latinidad transformed into hateful tropes about "illegals" and have faced insults, harassment, and division based on white insecurities and economic exploitation. Investigating topics that include the US-Mexico border "wall," Frida Kahlo, urban segregation, gangs, queer Latino utopias, and the emergence of the cartel genre in TV and film, Tobar journeys across the country to expose something truer about the meaning of "Latino" in the 21st century.

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Kids’ Storytime

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

Join us every Saturday for kids' storytime. Today we're reading Nell Plants a Tree by Anne Wynter.

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Francesca Bell, Alyssa Graybeal, Andrea Hollander & Douglas Manuel

Sunday, June 11 @ 2pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Francesca Bell's second collection of poems, What Small Sound (Red Hen), interrogates what it means to be a mother in a country where there are five times as many guns as children; female in a country where a woman is raped every two minutes; and citizen of a world teeming with iniquities and peril. Alyssa Graybeal’s Floppy: Tales of a Genetic Freak of Nature at the End of the World (Red Hen) is one of the first books to explore the emotional landscape of living with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome from a patient’s perspective; a playful story of falling down, getting back up again, and realizing you should have gone to the hospital sooner. In the 40 poems of her newly reprinted first full-length book, House Without a Dreamer (Story Line), Andrea Hollander explores the complicated emotions that accompany both common and uncommon occurrences within ordinary lives, especially as the years pass. In readable, finely wrought, resonant, and memorable poems about the nature of longing and disappointment, desire and betrayal, pleasure and sorrow, Hollander’s The Other Life (Story Line) explores the dualities in life that every person experiences. Soundtracked with soul, disco, and funk hits from the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, the speaker of Testify returns in Douglas Manuel’s new poetry collection, Trouble Funk (Red Hen), to tell the story of how his parents met and fell in and out of love.

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Abraham Verghese

Monday, June 12 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

The Covenant of Water (Grove Press) is the long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, author of the major word-of-mouth bestseller Cutting for Stone. Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India's Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning — and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala's long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her 40-year old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl — and future matriarch, known as Big Ammachi — will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants. A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the difficulties undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today.

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Steve Turner in Conversation With Jay Martin

Tuesday, June 13 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In the late 80s and early 90s, Steve Turner and his friends — Seattle skate punks, hardcore kids, and assorted misfits — started forming bands in each other’s basements and accidentally created a unique sound that spread far beyond their once-sleepy city. Mud Ride (Chronicle Prism) offers an inside look at the tight-knit grunge scene, the musical influences and experiments that shaped the grunge sound, and the story of Turner's bands, Green River and Mudhoney, which went from underground flophouse shows to selling out stadiums with Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Including stories about the key moments, musicians, and albums from grunge's beginnings to its come-down from the highs of global success and stardom, this is the first account of the musical phenomenon that took over the world from someone who was there for it all. Written by Turner, lead guitarist of Mudhoney, a foundational grunge band that inspired musical icons from Kurt Cobain to Sonic Youth, Mud Ride features a foreword by Pearl Jam's Stone Gossard and never-before-seen photographs and grunge memorabilia throughout. Take a seat and ride through the messy and muddy grunge scene that grew from the basements of the Northwest and went on to circle the globe. Turner will be joined in conversation by grunge enthusiast and record collector Jay Martin.

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Marcy Cottrell Houle & Elizabeth Eckstrom

Tuesday, June 13 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

Authors Marcy Houle and Elizabeth Eckstrom have teamed up again following the success of their critically acclaimed book, The Gift of Caring, winner of the 2016 National Christopher Award. Their new book, The Gift of Aging: Growing Older with Purpose, Planning and Positivity (Cambridge University), blends frontline science with inspirational stories and insights from wise elders for aging with health, joy, and purpose. The book explains how our bodies and brains age, defining what can be expected with aging and what is unusual. It demonstrates ways we can significantly increase our chances for a positive aging experience into our 80s, 90s, and 100s. It offers key strategies for meeting the challenges of aging, informs us of issues of inclusion and equity, and advises on handling legal and financial affairs. The Gift of Aging illustrates how we can make the third act of our lives meaningful and fulfilling, ensuring we as elders can make a difference in our world.

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Grace E. Lavery in Conversation With Cliff Mak

Wednesday, June 14 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In Pleasure and Efficacy (Princeton), leading trans scholar and activist Grace E. Lavery investigates gender transition as it has been experienced and represented in the modern period. Considering examples that range from the novels of George Eliot to the psychoanalytic practice of Sigmund Freud to marriage manuals by Marie Stopes, Lavery explores the skepticism found in such works about whether it is truly possible to change one’s sex. This ambivalence, she argues, has contributed to both antitrans oppression and the civil rights claims with which trans people have confronted it. Lavery examines what she terms “trans pragmatism” — the ways that trans people resist medicalization and pathologization to achieve pleasure and freedom. Trans pragmatism, she writes, affirms that transition works, that it is possible, and that it happens. With Eliot and Freud as the guiding geniuses of the book, Lavery covers a vast range of modern culture — poetry, prose, criticism, philosophy, fiction, cinema, pop music, pornography, and memes. Since transition takes people out of one genre and deposits them in another, she suggests, it should be no surprise that a cultural history of gender transition will also provide, by accident, a history of genre transition. Considering the concept of technique and its associations with feminine craftiness, as opposed to masculine freedom, Lavery argues that techniques of giving and receiving pleasure are essential to the possibility of trans feminist thriving — even as they are suppressed by patriarchal and antitrans feminist philosophies. Contesting claims for the impossibility of transition, she offers a counter-history of tricks and techniques, passed on by women to women, that comprises a body of knowledge written in the margins of history. Lavery will be joined in conversation by Cliff Mak, assistant professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York.

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John Kaag & Jonathan van Belle

Thursday, June 15 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living (Princeton) invites readers to rethink how we work today by exploring an aspect of Henry David Thoreau that has often been overlooked: Thoreau the worker. John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle overturn the popular misconception of Thoreau as a navel-gazing recluse who was scornful of work and other mundanities. In fact, Thoreau worked hard — surveying land, running his family’s pencil-making business, writing, lecturing, and building his cabin at Walden Pond — and thought intensely about work in its many dimensions. And his ideas about work have much to teach us in an age of remote work and automation, when many people are reconsidering what kind of working lives they want to have. Through Thoreau, readers will discover a philosophy of work in the office, factory, lumber mill, and grocery store, and reflect on the rhythms of the workday, the joys and risks of resigning oneself to work, the dubious promises of labor-saving technology, and that most vital and eternal of philosophical questions, “How much do I get paid?” In ten chapters, including “Manual Work,” “Machine Work,” and “Meaningless Work,” this personal, urgent, practical, and compassionate book introduces readers to their new favorite coworker: Henry David Thoreau.

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Randall Sullivan

Thursday, June 15 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

Off the coast of Oregon, the Columbia River flows into the Pacific Ocean and forms the Columbia River Bar: a watery collision so turbulent and deadly that it’s nicknamed the Graveyard of the Pacific. Two thousand ships have been wrecked on the bar since the first European ship dared to try to cross it in the late 18th century. For decades, ships continued to make the bar crossing with great peril, first with native guides and later with opportunistic newcomers, as Europeans settled in Washington and Oregon, displacing the natives and transforming the river into the hub of a booming region. Since then, the commercial importance of the Columbia River has only grown, and despite the construction of jetties on either side, the bar remains treacherous, even today a site of shipwrecks and dramatic rescues as well as power struggles between small fishermen, powerful shipowners, local communities in Washington and Oregon, the Coast Guard, and the Columbia River Bar Pilots — a small group of highly skilled navigators who help guide ships through the mouth of the Columbia. When Randall Sullivan and a friend set out to cross the bar in a two-man kayak, they’re met with skepticism and concern. But on a clear day in July 2021, when the tides and weather seem right, they embark. As they plunge through the currents that have taken so many lives, Sullivan commemorates the brave sailors that made the crossing before him — including his own abusive father, a sailor himself who also once dared to cross the bar — and reflects on toxic masculinity, fatherhood, and what drives men to extremes. Rich with exhaustive research and propulsive narrative, Graveyard of the Pacific (Atlantic Monthly) follows historical shipwrecks through the moment-by-moment details that often determined whether sailors would live or die, exposing the ways in which boats, sailors, and navigation have changed over the decades. As he makes his way across the bar, floating above the wrecks and across the same currents that have taken so many lives, Sullivan faces the past, both in his own life and on the Columbia River Bar.

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Claire Fuller in Conversation With Kimberly King Parsons

Friday, June 16 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

From the award-winning author of Our Endless Numbered Days, Swimming Lessons, Bitter Orange, and Unsettled Ground comes a beautiful and searing novel of memory, love, survival — and octopuses. In the face of a pandemic, an unprepared world scrambles to escape the mysterious disease causing sensory damage, nerve loss, and, in most cases, death. Neffy, a disgraced and desperately indebted 27-year-old marine biologist, registers for an experimental vaccine trial in London — perhaps humanity’s last hope for a cure. Though isolated from the chaos outside, she and the other volunteers — Rachel, Leon, Yahiko, and Piper — cannot hide from the mistakes that led them there. As London descends into chaos outside the hospital windows, Neffy befriends Leon, who before the pandemic had been working on a controversial technology that allows users to revisit their memories. She withdraws into projections of her past — a childhood bisected by divorce, a recent love affair, her obsessive research with octopuses and the one mistake that ended her career. The lines between past, present, and future begin to blur, and Neffy is left with defining questions: who can she trust? Why can’t she forgive herself? How should she live, if she survives? Claire Fuller’s The Memory of Animals (Tin House) is an ambitious, deeply imagined work of survival and suspense, grief and hope, consequences and connectedness that asks what truly defines us — and the lengths we will go to rescue ourselves and those we love. Fuller will be joined in conversation by Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light.

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Kids’ Storytime

Saturday, June 17 @ 10:30am (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Join us every Saturday for kids' storytime. Today we're reading Twas the Night Before Pride by Joanna McClintick.

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Ken Jennings

Monday, June 19 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Ever wonder which circles of Dante’s Inferno have the nicest accommodations? Where’s the best place to grab a bite to eat in the ancient Egyptian underworld? How does one dress like a local in the heavenly palace of Hinduism’s Lord Vishnu, or avoid the flesh-eating river serpents in the Klingon afterlife? What hidden treasures can be found off the beaten path in Hades, Valhalla, or NBC’s The Good Place? Find answers to all those questions and more about the world(s) to come in this eternally entertaining book from Ken Jennings, legendary Jeopardy! champion and host. 100 Places to See After You Die (Scribner) is written in the style of iconic bestselling travel guides — but instead of recommending must-see destinations in Mexico, Thailand, or Rome, Jennings outlines journeys through the afterlife, as dreamed up over 5,000 years of human history by our greatest prophets, poets, mystics, artists, and TV showrunners. Jennings’s comprehensive index of 100 different afterlife destinations was meticulously researched from sources ranging from the Epic of Gilgamesh to modern-day pop songs, video games, and Simpsons episodes. Get ready for whatever post-mortal destiny awaits you, whether it’s an astral plane, a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape, or the baseball diamond from Field of Dreams. Fascinating, funny, and irreverent, this light-hearted memento mori will help you create your very own bucket list — for after you’ve kicked the bucket.

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S. A. Cosby

Monday, June 19 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus Crown returns home to Charon County, land of moonshine and corn bread, fistfights and honeysuckle. Seeing his hometown struggling with a bigoted police force inspires Titus to run for sheriff. He wins and becomes the first Black sheriff in the history of the county. Then, a year to the day after his election, a young Black man is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. Titus pledges to follow the truth wherever it leads. But no one expected he would unearth a serial killer who has been hiding in plain sight, haunting the dirt lanes and woodland clearings of Charon. Now Titus must pull off the impossible: stay true to his instincts, prevent outright panic, and investigate a shocking crime in a small town where everyone knows everyone yet secrets flourish — all while breaking up backroad bar fights and being forced to protect racist Confederate pride marchers. For a Black man wearing a police uniform in the American South, that’s no easy feat. But Charon is Titus’s home and his heart, and he won’t let the darkness overtake it. Even as it threatens to consume him. All the Sinners Bleed (Flatiron) is the new novel from S. A. Cosby — author of Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland — called, "one of the most muscular, distinctive, grab-you-by-both-ears voices in American crime fiction." (Washington Post).

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Jennifer Ackerman

Tuesday, June 20 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

For millennia, owls have captivated and intrigued us. Our fascination with these mysterious birds was first documented more than 30,000 years ago in the Chauvet Cave paintings in southern France. With their forward gaze and quiet flight, owls are often a symbol of wisdom, knowledge, and foresight. But what does an owl really know? And what do we really know about owls? Though our fascination goes back centuries, scientists have only recently begun to understand in deep detail the complex nature of these extraordinary birds. Some 260 species of owls exist today, and they reside on every continent except Antarctica, but they are far more difficult to find and study than other birds because they are cryptic, camouflaged, and mostly active in the dark of night. In What an Owl Knows (Penguin Press), Jennifer Ackerman, author of The Genius of Birds and The Bird Way, illuminates the rich biology and natural history of these birds and reveals remarkable new scientific discoveries about their brains and behavior. She joins scientists in the field and explores how researchers are using modern technology and tools to learn how owls communicate, hunt, court, mate, raise their young, and move about from season to season. Ackerman brings this research alive with her own personal field observations about owls and dives deep into why these birds beguile us. What an Owl Knows is an awe-inspiring exploration of owls across the globe and through human history, and a spellbinding account of their astonishing hunting skills, communication, and sensory prowess.

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Courtney Gould in Conversation With Aiden Thomas

Tuesday, June 20 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

Beck Birsching has been adrift since the death of her mother, a brilliant but troubled investigative reporter. She can’t stop herself from slipping into memories of happier days, longing for a time when things were more normal. So when a mysterious letter in her mother’s handwriting arrives in the mail with the words Come and find me, pointing to the small town at the center of her last investigation, Beck hopes that it may hold the answers. But when Beck and her sister Riley arrive in Backravel, Arizona, it’s clear that something’s off. There are no cars, no cemeteries, no churches. The town is a mix of dilapidated military structures and new, shiny buildings, all overseen by a gleaming treatment center high on a plateau. No one seems to remember when they got there, and when Beck digs deeper into the town’s enigmatic leader and his daughter, Avery, she begins to suspect that they know more than they’re letting on. As the sisters search for answers about their mother, Beck and Avery are increasingly drawn together, and their unexpected connection brings up emotions Beck has fought to keep buried. Beck is desperate to hold onto the way things used to be, but when she starts losing herself in Backravel — and its connection to her mother — she risks losing her way back out. In Where Echoes Die (Wednesday Books), Courtney Gould draws readers into a haunting desert town to explore grief, the weight of not letting go of the past, first love, and the bonds between sisters, mothers, and daughters. Gould will be joined in conversation by Aiden Thomas, author of The Sunbearer Trials.

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Dian Greenwood in Conversation With Rene Denfeld

Wednesday, June 21 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

A Las Vegas showgirl, a diner waitress, and a heartbroken alcoholic — three sisters — are called into an obligatory reunion in California’s Central Valley in the late 1990s as a prelude to their mother’s impending death. Inside Diego’s Diner on Highway 99, Lorraine, the eldest of the sisters, attempts to convert the truckers and regional farmers to her religious beliefs while managing the counters and booths. Becky, the youngest, lurches into this scene after a night’s drunken romp. Meanwhile, middle sister Julie is en route on a bus from Las Vegas, where she’s just ended a long career as a Riviera showgirl. Overshadowing the longstanding tensions between the three women is the unexplained disappearance of the sisters’ long-absent father from their lives. Julie is reluctant to return to River’s End, but she makes a valiant attempt to jump-start her life again once she gets there, even as she confronts the loss of the beauty she’s long used to mask her insecurities and failed relationships. Meanwhile, Becky struggles to stay sober and out of jail — and Lorraine throws herself into cheating her sisters out of their inheritance. In Dian Greenwood’s debut novel, About the Carleton Sisters (She Writes Press), a mother’s impending death forces her three alienated middle-aged daughters to finally face each other and the mystery of their father’s disappearance. Greenwood will be joined in conversation by Rene Denfeld, author of The Butterfly Girl.

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Marie Bostwick in Conversation With Cathy Lamb

Wednesday, June 21 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

From Marie Bostwick, author of The Restoration of Celia Fairchild, comes Esme Cahill Fails Spectacularly (William Morrow), a new novel about the meaning of family and the places we call home. Esme Cahill thinks she has failed spectacularly: fired from her New York City publishing job, divorced from her husband, and possessing little more than a broken-down car and a pile of unfinished manuscripts, she drives home to Asheville at the request of her late grandmother, Adele, who had begged her, just before she died, to return to the place she grew up. There she discovers the once-charming lakeside retreat run by her family is sliding toward financial ruin, so with the help of her grandfather, George; estranged mother, Robyn; and a travelling chef, Dawes (maker of the world’s best grilled cheese sandwich), they set to work. In the attic, Esme unearths a trove of museum-worthy art quilts, sewn by Adele. Piecing together the inspiration behind them, Esme discovers a forgotten chapter in her family history and her grandmother’s untold story, that of a gifted artist who never received her due. Esme Cahill Fails Spectacularly is an always-emotional, sometimes humorous, very human novel of what it means to be family — the ties that bind us together and the unintentional hurts that can rend us apart. And, along the way, Esme learns that failure can be the first step toward the life you’re meant to find. Bostwick will be joined in conversation by Cathy Lamb, author of All About Evie.

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Deb JJ Lee in Conversation With Molly Mendoza

Thursday, June 22 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Deborah (Jung-Jin) Lee knows she's different. Ever since her family emigrated from South Korea to the United States, she's felt her Otherness. And as the pressures of high school ramp up, friendships change or end and everything gets harder. Even home isn't a safe place, as fights with her mom escalate. Deb is caught in a limbo, with nowhere to go. But Deb is resilient. And during a trip to South Korea, she realizes something that changes her perspective on her family, her heritage, and herself. In Limbo (First Second) is Lee’s stunning debut graphic memoir — a girl's coming-of-age story and a coming-home story— featuring page after page of gorgeous, evocative art, perfect for Tillie Walden fans. It's a cross section of the Korean American diaspora and mental health, a moving and powerful read in the vein of Hey, Kiddo and The Best We Could Do. Lee will be joined in conversation by artist Molly Mendoza, author of Skip.

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Charles Soule in Conversation With Brian Michael Bendis

Thursday, June 22 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

A piece of impossible technology, and the search for its creators. A centuries-long quest to defeat death. A woman whose only goal is to bring joy to humanity, no matter the cost. The greatest treasure ever found. A ship whose voyage will last forever. This is The Endless Vessel (Harper Perennial). Combining the wonder of The Midnight Library, the inventiveness of Ready Player One, and the artistry of Cloud Atlas, the new novel by Charles Soule, author of The Oracle Year and Anyone, explores the way we’re all connected — and offers a true path to joy. Lily Barnes, a materials engineer living in Hong Kong a few years from now, stumbles across a device full of secrets that overturn her assumptions about the world. The machine seems to be addressing Lily directly, calling to her, asking her to follow a path to whatever lies at its end. Lily sets out to find the people who built it, leaving her life behind, traveling the world and across the seven seas. For Lily, and for the reader, the question is the same: how far would you go to be happy? From its opening heart-stopping scene in the present day at the Louvre in Paris, to a shocking and satisfying conclusion in a truly enchanted forest, Soule has channeled history, science, and drama to create a story for the ages — a story of hope and love and possibility. Soule will be joined in conversation by award-winning comics creator Brian Michael Bendis.

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Ottessa Moshfegh in Conversation With Sarah Marshall

Friday, June 23 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In a village buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself part of a power struggle that puts the community’s faith to a savage test in Lapvona (Penguin), a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh’s most exciting leap yet. Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother — his father told him she died in childbirth. One of Marek’s few consolations is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby. For some people, Ina’s ability to receive transmissions of sacred knowledge from the natural world is a godsend. For others, her home in the woods outside of the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place. Among the villagers is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people’s faith in the powers that be is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord’s family, new and occult forces arise to upset the old order. By year’s end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, and the natural world and the spirit world will prove very thin indeed. Moshfegh will be joined in conversation by writer, podcaster, and media critic Sarah Marshall.

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Kids’ Storytime

Saturday, June 24 @ 10:30am (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Join us every Saturday for kids' storytime. Today we're reading Hot Dog by Doug Salati.

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Oregon Poets Celebrate the Artwork of Kay Levine

Sunday, June 25 @ 2pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Kay Levine, Oregon poet Sherri Levine’s mother, began painting at a young age and studied art at the Arts Students League and Woodstock School of Art. Her mentor, Hongnian Zhang, described her as a “master colorist.” Kay Levine was also an educator, teaching art to children and literacy to adults, seniors, and prisoners in maximum-security prisons such as Sing Sing. A Joy to See (Just a Lark Books) is a tribute from a poet daughter to an artist mother. Sherri Levine asked twenty-seven prominent poets to commemorate her mother’s artwork by writing the ekphrastic poems in this new collection. Levine will be joined at the event by A Joy to See contributing poets Matthew Dickman, Paulann Petersen, Andrea Hollander, Lex Runciman, Ann Farley, Dale Champlin, Willa Schneberg, Fran Payne Adler, Leanne Grabel, Shawn Aveningo-Saunders, Emmett Wheatfall, Lois Rosen, Jennifer Dorner, Norma Edythe Heyser, Patti Palmer-Baker, Marc Janssen, and Penelope Scambly Schott.

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Derek Beres in Conversation With Michael Hull

Monday, June 26 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Derek Beres’s Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat (PublicAffairs), coauthored with Matthew Remski and Julian Walker, takes a deep dive into the troubling phenomenon of influencers who have curdled New Age spirituality and wellness with the politics of paranoia — peddling vaccine misinformation, tales of child trafficking, and wild conspiracy theories. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a disturbing social media trend emerged: a large number of yoga instructors and alt-health influencers were posting stories about a secretive global cabal bent on controlling the world's population with a genocidal vaccine. Instagram feeds that had been serving up green smoothie recipes and Mary Oliver poems became firehoses of Fox News links, memes from 4chan, and prophecies of global transformation. Since May 2020, Beres, Remski, and Walker have used their Conspirituality podcast to expose countless facets of the intersection of alt-health practitioners with far-right conspiracy trolls. Now this expansive and revelatory book unpacks the follies, frauds, cons, and cults that dominate the New Age and wellness spheres and betray the trust of people who seek genuine relief in this uncertain age. With analytical rigor and irreverent humor, Conspirituality offers an antidote to our times, helping readers recognize wellness grifts, engage with loved ones who've fallen under the influence, and counter lies and distortions with insight and empathy. Beres will be joined in conversation by Michael Hull, Director of HBO’s Betrayal at Attica.

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Chamber Music Northwest's Young Artist Institute Pop-up Performance

Tuesday, June 27 @ 12pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Now in its 53rd season, Chamber Music Northwest (CMNW) serves more than 50,000 people annually in Oregon and SW Washington with exceptional chamber music through over 100 events annually, including their flagship Summer Festival, year-round concerts, community activities, educational programs, broadcasts, and innovative collaborations with other arts groups. CMNW's Young Artist Institute (YAI), in its second year, is an intensive education program for sixteen talented string players from around the world, ages 14–17. Students from Chamber Music Northwest's Young Artist Institute will be performing short "pop-up" performances all around Portland today! They join us from 12–1 p.m. to perform a variety of music for solo violin, viola, and cello.

Emily Grosvenor in Conversation With Emilia Callero

Tuesday, June 27 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Award-winning magazine editor and certified Feng Shui consultant Emily Grosvenor invites us to a reality where our homes hold limitless opportunities to create meaning, shape behavior, and inspire action. Drawing on ancient wisdom and modern science and filled with examples from the author's groundbreaking research and work with clients, Find Yourself at Home (Chronicle Prism) is a philosophical and practical guide to creating a home environment that reflects your values, shapes your behavior, and supports you on your journey of self-discovery. Divided into chapters by aspiration — such as attraction, creativity, purpose, partnership, focus, and connection — and filled with gorgeous full-color illustrations, Find Yourself at Home presents a new way to collaborate with your living space, carry out your purpose in a changing world, and create the perfect home in which to thrive. Grosvenor will be joined in conversation by interior design professional Emilia Callero.

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Sara Marcus in Conversation With Sara Jaffe

Wednesday, June 28 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In her new book, Political Disappointment (Belknap Press), Sara Marcus — author of Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution — argues that the defining texts in 20th century American cultural history are records of political disappointment. Through insightful and often surprising readings of literature and sound, Marcus offers a new cultural history of the last century, in which creative minds observed the passing of moments of possibility, took stock of the losses sustained, and fostered intellectual revolutions and unexpected solidarities. Political Disappointment shows how, by confronting disappointment directly, writers and artists helped to produce new political meanings and possibilities. Marcus first analyzes works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers that expressed the anguish of the early Jim Crow era, during which white supremacy thwarted the rebuilding of the country as a multiracial democracy. In the ensuing decades, the Popular Front work songs and stories of Lead Belly and Tillie Olsen, the soundscapes of the civil rights and Black Power movements, the feminist poetry of Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, and the queer art of Marlon Riggs and David Wojnarowicz continued building the century-long archive of disappointment. Marcus shows how defeat time and again gave rise to novel modes of protest and new forms of collective practice, keeping alive the dream of a better world. Disappointment has proved to be a durable, perhaps even inevitable, feature of the democratic project, yet so too has the resistance it precipitates. Marcus's unique history of the 20th century reclaims the unrealized desire for liberation as a productive force in American literature and life. Marcus will be joined in conversation by Sara Jaffe, author of Dryland.

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David Gessner in Conversation With Derek Sheffield

Thursday, June 29 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

The world is burning and the seas are rising. How do we navigate this new age of extremes? In A Traveler's Guide to the End of the World (Torrey House), David Gessner — author of All the Wild That Remains and Leave It As It Is — takes readers on an eye-opening tour of climate hotspots from the Gulf of Mexico to the burning American West to New York City to the fragile Outer Banks, where homes are being swallowed by the seas. He does so with his usual sense of humor, compassion, and a willingness to talk to anyone, providing an informative and sobering yet convivial guide for the age of fire, heat, wind, and water. Gessner approaches scientists and thinkers with a father’s question: what will the world be like in 42 years? Gessner was 42 when his daughter, Hadley, was born. What will the world be like in 2064, when Hadley is his age now? What is the future of weather? The future of heat, storms, and fire? What exactly will our children be facing? A Traveler's Guide to the End of the World tells a story of climate crisis that will both entertain and shake people awake to the necessity of navigating this new age together. Gessner will be joined in conversation by poet Derek Sheffield, co-editor of Cascadia Field Guide.

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Paulann Petersen & Lex Runciman

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

Balancing curiosity, beauty, surprise, and the weight of mortality, Paulann Petersen’s My Kindred (Salmon Poetry)’s kinship embraces multitudes: fir, owl, manatee, and pollen; sun, sea, lily, and snake; the poet's parents, Paul and Grace Whitman; the Good Gray Poet Whitman. Each poem bears witness to concentricity — the poet inviting trees to live inside her, a tree expanding itself to accept her body. Some of the poet's kindred — the Biblical Eve, water's sister, a lake, the moon, everyday moths, and more — speak for themselves. What's mundane is never merely that. In this kinship, the commonplace carries a wild sentience, a mythic and sacred essence. Like the hummingbird, these poems pull — from our all too dark world — a thread of sweetness and bounty.

The poems in Lex Runciman's Unlooked For (Salmon Poetry) arise from the felt sense that experience — whatever it is — goes by too quickly, leaving little chance for real consideration or sufficient understanding. What did we just see, or hear? What happened? What do we make of it? What does it make of us? Yet amid such daily haste and distraction, we must make choices — thoughtful or spontaneous, conscious or mysterious, frivolous or life changing. How do we negotiate the moral and mortal complexities? How might we inquire and reflect? And crucially, how might we talk back? Ruciman’s poems embrace image and voice, loss and its consolations, the light and the dark. They range from Oregon to Ireland, and Velázquez to Virginia Woolf, from slugs to hissy possums to dogwoods and iris "like silks / draped all over themselves." Written in a time when public utterance has too often become coarsened, accusatory, selfish, or plainly false, the poems in Unlooked For work to establish and maintain “a margin of trust.”

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Luis Alberto Urrea

Monday, July 3 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In 1943, Irene Woodward abandons an abusive fiancé in New York to enlist with the Red Cross and head to Europe. She makes fast friends in training with Dorothy Dunford, a towering Midwesterner with a ferocious wit. Together they are part of an elite group of women, nicknamed Donut Dollies, who command military vehicles called Clubmobiles at the front line, providing camaraderie and a taste of home that may be the only solace before troops head into battle. After D-Day, these two intrepid friends join the Allied soldiers streaming into France. Their time in Europe will see them embroiled in danger, from the Battle of the Bulge to the liberation of Buchenwald. Through her friendship with Dorothy, and a love affair with a courageous American fighter pilot named Hans, Irene learns to trust again. Her most fervent hope, which becomes more precarious by the day, is for all three of them to survive the war intact. Taking as inspiration his mother’s own Red Cross service, Luis Alberto Urrea has delivered an overlooked story of women’s heroism in World War II. With its affecting and uplifting portrait of friendship and valor in harrowing circumstances, Good Night, Irene (Little, Brown) powerfully demonstrates yet again that Urrea’s “gifts as a storyteller are prodigious” (NPR).

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Satya Doyle Byock in Conversation With Evan P. Schneider

Wednesday, July 5 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

I’m stuck. What’s wrong with me? Is this all there is? Satya Doyle Byock hears these refrains regularly in her psychotherapy practice where she works with “Quarterlifers,” individuals between the ages of (roughly) 16 to 36. She understands their frustration. Some clients have done everything “right”: graduate, get a job, meet a partner. Yet they are unfulfilled and unclear on what to do next. Byock calls these Quarterlifers “Stability Types.” Others are uninterested in this prescribed path, but feel unmoored. She refers to them as “Meaning Types.” While society is quick to label the emotions and behavior of this age group as generational traits, Byock sees things differently. She believes these struggles are part of the developmental journey of Quarterlife, a distinct stage that every person goes through and which has been virtually ignored by popular culture and psychology. In Quarterlife (Random House), Byock utilizes personal storytelling, mythology, Jungian psychology, pop culture, literature, and client case studies to provide guideposts for this period of life. Quarterlife is a defining work that offers a compassionate roadmap toward finding understanding, happiness, and wholeness in adulthood. Byock will be joined in conversation by Evan P. Schneider, author of A Simple Machine, Like the Lever.

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Kara Goucher & Mary Pilon

Thursday, July 6 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

Kara Goucher grew up with Olympic dreams. She excelled at running from a young age and was offered a Nike sponsorship deal when she graduated from college. Then in 2004, she was invited to join a secretive, lavishly funded new team, dubbed the Nike Oregon Project. Coached by distance running legend Alberto Salazar, it seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime. Goucher was soon winning a World Championship medal, going to the Olympics, and standing on the podium at the New York and Boston marathons, just like her coach. But behind the scenes, Salazar was hiding dark secrets. He pushed the limits of anti-doping rules, and created what Goucher experienced as a culture of abuse, the extent of which she reveals in her book for the first time. Meanwhile, Nike stood by Salazar for years and proved itself capable of shockingly misogynistic corporate practices. Told with stunning honesty, The Longest Race (Gallery) — written with Mary Pilon — is an unforgettable story and a call to action. Goucher became a crusader for female athletes and a key witness helping to get Salazar banned from coaching at the Olympic level. Goucher’s memoir reveals how she broke through the fear of losing everything, bucked powerful forces to take control of her life and career, and reclaimed her love of running.

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Rachel Lynn Solomon in Conversation With Alison Cochrun

Monday, July 10 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

From Rachel Lynn Solomon, author of The Ex Talk, comes Business or Pleasure (Berkley), a steamy new romantic comedy. Chandler Cohen has never felt more like the ghost in "ghostwriter" until she attends a signing for a book she wrote — and the author doesn't even recognize her. The evening turns more promising when she meets a charming man at the bar and immediately connects with him. But when all their sexual tension culminates in a spectacularly awkward hookup, she decides this is one night better off forgotten. Unfortunately, that's easier said than done. Her next project is ghostwriting a memoir for Finn Walsh, a C-list actor best known for playing a lovable nerd on a cult classic werewolf show who now makes a living appearing at fan conventions across the country. Chandler knows him better from their one-night stand of hilarious mishaps. Chandler's determined to keep their partnership as professional as possible, but when she admits to Finn their night together wasn't as mind-blowing as he thought it was, he's distraught. He intrigues her enough that they strike a deal: when they're not working on his book, Chandler will school Finn in the art of satisfaction. As they grow closer both in and out of the bedroom, they must figure out which is more important, business or pleasure — or if there's a way for them to have both. Solomon will be joined in conversation by Alison Cochrun, author of Kiss Her Once for Me.

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Carson Winter in Conversation With Matt Blairstone

Tuesday, July 11 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

You know that office bromance: two of a kind, always taking their lunch together, always wearing the same sly grin. Only ever a hair away from a cold joke about how spreadsheets are a living hell; about taking a bullet if it means going home early on Friday. Sometimes in these fantasies, they're heroes being hauled out on a stretcher. Sometimes they're the ones pulling the trigger. Now, say these guys discover a loophole that makes some days less real than others — less permanent — and start to act out their violent fantasies without fear of reprisal. Why shouldn't they? Tomorrow, everything will go back to normal, with no one the wiser but them. They'll always remember what it felt like to act on their basest impulses. They'll know how it could feel to do it again. Maybe you don't know these guys. Maybe you don't want to. Carson Winter’s Soft Targets (Tenebrous Press) is a reality-bending novella about malignant malaise, the surrender to violence, and the addictive appeal of tragedy as entertainment. Winter will be joined in conversation by Matt Blairstone, Tenebrous Press founder and publisher.

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Gail Tsukiyama in Conversation With Whitney Otto

Wednesday, July 12 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

At the dawn of a new century, America is falling in love with silent movies, including young Wong Liu Tsong. The daughter of Chinese immigrants who own a laundry, Wong Liu and her older sister Lew Ying (Lulu) are taunted and bullied for their Chinese heritage. But while Lulu diligently obeys her parents and learns to speak Chinese, Wong Liu sneaks away to the local nickelodeons, buying a ticket with her lunch money and tips saved from laundry deliveries. By 11, Wong Liu is determined to become an actress and has already chosen a stage name: Anna May Wong. At 16, Anna May leaves high school to pursue her Hollywood dreams, defying her disapproving father and her Chinese traditional upbringing — a choice that will hold emotional and physical consequences. After a series of nothing parts, 19-year-old Anna May gets her big break — and her first taste of Hollywood fame — starring opposite Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad. Yet her beauty and talent isn’t enough to overcome the racism that relegates her to supporting roles as a helpless, exotic butterfly or a vicious, murderous dragon lady while Caucasian actresses in "yellowface" are given starring roles portraying Asian women. Though she suffers professionally and personally, Anna May fights to win lead roles, accept risqué parts, financially support her family, and keep her illicit love affairs hidden — even as she finds freedom and glittering stardom abroad, and receives glowing reviews across the globe. Powerful, poignant, and imbued with Gail Tsukiyama's warmth and empathy, The Brightest Star (Harpervia) reimagines the life of the first Asian American screen star whose legacy endures — a remarkable and inspiring woman who broke barriers and became a shining light in Hollywood history. Tsukiyama will be joined in conversation by Whitney Otto, author of How To Make an American Quilt.

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Patrick deWitt

Thursday, July 13 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books and small comforts in a mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon. One morning on his daily walk he encounters a confused elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior center that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he’s known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the center. Here, as a community of strange peers gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from his past, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed. Behind Bob Comet’s straight-man facade is the story of an unhappy child’s runaway adventure during the last days of the Second World War, of true love won and stolen away, of the purpose and pride found in the librarian’s vocation, and of the pleasures of a life lived to the side of the masses. Bob’s experiences are imbued with melancholy but also a bright, sustained comedy; he has a talent for locating bizarre and outsize players to welcome onto the stage of his life. With his inimitable verve, skewed humor, and compassion for the outcast, Patrick deWitt has written a wide-ranging and ambitious document of the introvert’s condition. The Librarianist (Ecco) celebrates the extraordinary in the so-called ordinary life, and depicts beautifully the turbulence that sometimes exists beneath a surface of serenity.

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David Neiwert in Conversation With Leah Sottile

Monday, July 17 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

The shocking January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was at once an end — the culmination of a long-building strain of violent American extremism — and a beginning: a declaration of war on democracy by a fundamentally antidemocratic far-right movement that, ironically, calls itself the "Patriot" movement. In The Age of Insurrection (Melville House), David Neiwert explains and explores the nature of the insurgent radical right and its relentless violence: how it was built over decades, how it was set aflame by Donald Trump and his cohorts, and how it will continue to attack American democracy for the foreseeable future. The Age of Insurrection lays out how these groups organize their terroristic violence and attacks on democratic institutions at every level — including local, state, and federal targets — and what their strategies and plans look like for the foreseeable future. It also details how communities have been negatively affected by these groups, and how some have responded effectively to the challenges they present. Neiwert will be joined in conversation by Leah Sottile, author of When the Moon Turns to Blood.

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M. E. O'Brien in Conversation With Che Gossett & Madeline Lane-McKinley

Wednesday, July 19 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

How do we take care of each other? Who raises us as children, is with us when we are ill, and provides a place to sleep when work is tight? We often rely on family for the care we all need. Yet even at their best, families cannot carry the impossible demands placed on them, and, for many, a family is a place of private horror, of coercion and personal domination. In Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (Pluto Press), M. E. O’Brien uncovers the long history of struggles to go beyond the private family. She traces the changing family politics of racial capitalism in the industrial cities of Europe and the slavery plantations and settler frontier of North America, through the rise and fall of the housewife family. From Marx to Black and queer insurrection to today’s mass protest movements, O’Brien finds revolutionary movements seeking better ways of loving, caring, and living. Family Abolition takes us into a speculative future of the commune, imagining how care could be organized in a free society. O’Brien will be joined in conversation by Che Gossett, Black non-binary femme writer and critical theorist; and Madeline Lane-McKinley, author of Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times.

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Rachel Harris

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

The use of entheogens, or psychedelics, is out of the closet today. LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, and other medicines once associated only with the counterculture are now being legally studied for their healing properties. But as Rachel Harris shows, the underground use and study of psychedelics by women dates back to the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece. In her new book, Swimming in the Sacred: Wisdom from the Psychedelic Underground (New World Library), Harris interviews the modern women elders carrying on this tradition to gather their hard-won wisdom of experience. Any reader interested in inspiration, healing, and enlightenment will find here a wonder-filled narrative packed with provocative and perhaps life-changing insight.

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Thom Hartmann

Monday, July 24 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In his powerful, sweeping history and analysis of American democracy, progressive radio host Thom Hartmann shows how democracy is the one form of governance most likely to produce peace and happiness among people. With the violent exception of the Civil War, American democracy resisted the pressure to disintegrate into factionalism for nearly two centuries, and now our very system of democratic elections is at stake. So how do we save our democracy? Hartmann's newest book, The Hidden History of American Democracy (Berrett-Koehler), offers a clear call to action and a set of solutions with road maps for individuals and communities to follow to create a safer, more just society and a more equitable and prosperous economy.

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Danielle Centoni & Kerry Newberry

Wednesday, July 26 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Over the past fifty years, Oregon has evolved into a top wine destination, distinguished by its ideal growing climate, offbeat sensibility, and innovative winemakers. Danielle Centoni and Kerry Newberry’s Oregon Wine + Food (Figure 1) celebrates this dynamic community with stories from forty of the state’s most influential wine professionals alongside eighty recipes showcasing the region’s bounty. With a focus on ingredients abundant in the Pacific Northwest and inspired wine pairings, this book will appeal to those who crave a taste of Oregon’s magnificent and varied terroir in their glass and on their plate.

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Cascadia Field Guide

Thursday, July 27 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Cascadia stretches from Southeast Alaska to Northern California and from the Pacific Ocean to the Continental Divide. Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry (Mountaineers Books) blends art and science to celebrate this diverse yet interconnected region through natural and cultural histories, poetry, and illustrations. Organized into thirteen bioregions, the guide includes entries for everything from cryptobiotic soil and the western thatching ant to the giant Pacific octopus and Sitka spruce, as well as the likes of common raven, hoary marmot, Idaho giant salamander, snowberry, and 120 more! Both well-established and new writers are included, representing a diverse spectrum of voices, with poems that range from comic to serious, colloquial to scientific, urban to off-the-grid, narrative to postmodern. Likewise, the artists span styles and mediums, using classic natural history drawing, form line design, graffiti, sketch, and more. Cascadia Field Guide co-editor Derek Sheffield will be joined by contributors Barbara Drake, David Oates, Joe Wilkins, Kim Stafford, Nancy Slavin, Paulann Petersen, and Travis London.

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Sara Dant in Conversation With Dan Flores

Monday, July 31 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Historical narratives often concentrate on wars and politics while omitting the central role and influence of the physical stage on which history is carried out. In Losing Eden (University of Nebraska Press), historian Sara Dant debunks the myth of the American West as “Eden” and instead embraces a more realistic and complex understanding of a region that has been inhabited and altered by people for tens of thousands of years. In her lively narrative, Dant discusses the key events and topics in the environmental history of the American West, from the Beringia migration, Columbian Exchange, and federal territorial acquisition to post-World War II expansion, resource exploitation, and current climate change issues. Losing Eden is structured around three important themes: balancing economic success and ecological destruction, creating and protecting public lands, and achieving sustainability. Cohesive and compelling, Losing Eden recognizes the central role of the natural world in the history of the American West and provides important analysis on the continually evolving relationship between the land and its inhabitants. Dant will be joined in conversation by Dan Flores, author of Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America.

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Lydia Kiesling in Conversation With Omar El Akkad

Tuesday, August 1 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

The year is 1998, the End of History. The Soviet Union is dissolved, the Cold War is over, and Bunny Glenn is an American teenager in Azerbaijan with her Foreign Service family. Through Bunny's eyes we watch global interests flock to the former Soviet Union during the rush for Caspian oil and pipeline access, hear rumbles of the expansion of the American security state and the buildup to the War on Terror. We follow Bunny from adolescence to middle age — from Azerbaijan to America — as the entwined idols of capitalism and ambition lead her to a career in the oil industry, and eventually back to the scene of her youth, where familiar figures reappear in an era of political and climate breakdown. Both geopolitical exploration and domestic coming-of-age novel, Lydia Kiesling’s new novel, Mobility (Crooked Media Reads), is a propulsive and challenging story about class, power, politics, and desire told through the life of one woman — her social milieu, her romances, her unarticulated wants. Mobility deftly explores American forms of complicity and inertia, moving between the local and the global, the personal and the political, and using fiction's power to illuminate the way a life is shaped by its context. Kiesling will be joined in conversation by Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise.

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John W. Reid

Wednesday, August 2 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Five stunningly large forests remain on Earth: the Taiga, extending from the Pacific Ocean across all of Russia and far-northern Europe; the North American boreal, ranging from Alaska’s Bering seacoast to Canada’s Atlantic shore; the Amazon, covering almost the entirety of South America’s bulge; the Congo, occupying parts of six nations in Africa’s wet equatorial middle; and the island forest of New Guinea, twice the size of California. These megaforests are vital to preserving global biodiversity, thousands of cultures, and a stable climate, as economist John W. Reid and celebrated biologist Thomas E. Lovejoy argue convincingly in Ever Green (W. W. Norton). Megaforests serve an essential role in decarbonizing the atmosphere — the boreal alone holds 1.8 trillion metric tons of carbon in its deep soils and peat layers, 190 years’ worth of global emissions at 2019 levels — and saving them is the most immediate and affordable large-scale solution to our planet’s most formidable ongoing crisis. Reid and Lovejoy offer practical solutions to address the biggest challenges these forests face, from vastly expanding protected areas, to supporting Indigenous forest stewards, to planning smarter road networks. In gorgeous prose that evokes the majesty of these ancient forests along with the people and animals who inhabit them, Reid and Lovejoy take us on an exhilarating global journey.

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Philip Fracassi in Conversation With KC Jones

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

St. Vincent's Orphanage for Boys. Turn of the century, in a remote valley in Pennsylvania. Here, under the watchful eyes of several priests, thirty boys work, learn, and worship. Peter Barlow, orphaned as a child by a gruesome murder, has made a new life here. As he approaches adulthood, he has friends, a future… a family. Then, late one stormy night, a group of men arrive at their door, one of whom is badly wounded, occult symbols carved into his flesh. His death releases an ancient evil that spreads like sickness, infecting St. Vincent's and the children within. Soon, boys begin acting differently, forming groups. Taking sides. Others turn up dead. Now Peter and those dear to him must choose sides of their own, each of them knowing their lives — and perhaps their eternal souls — are at risk. The Exorcist meets Lord of the Flies, by way of Midnight Mass, in Philip Fracassi’s new, brilliant coming-of-age tale, Boys in the Valley (Tor Nightfire). Fracassi will be joined in conversation by KC Jones, author of Black Tide.

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Anastacia-Reneé in Conversation With Jamila Osman

Tuesday, August 15 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Anastacia-Reneé’s Side Notes from the Archivist (Amistad Press) is a preservation of Black culture viewed through a feminist lens. The Archivist leads readers through poems that epitomize youthful renditions of a Black girl coming of age in Philadelphia’s pre-funk ’80s; episodic adventures of “the Black Girl” whose life is depicted through the white gaze; and selections of verse evincing affection for self and testimony to the magnificence within Black femme culture at-large. Every poem in Side Notes elevates and honestly illustrates the buoyancy of Blackness and the calamity of Black lives on earth. In her uniquely embracing and experimental style, Anastacia-Reneé documents these truths as celebrations of diverse subjects, from Solid Gold to halal hotdogs; as homages and reflections on iconic images, from Marsha P. Johnson to Aunt Jemima; and as critiques of systemic oppression forcing some to countdown their last heartbeat. From internet “Fame” to the toxicity of the white gaze, Side Notes from the Archivist cements Anastacia-Reneé's role as a leading light in the womanist movement — an artist whose work is in conversation with advocates of Black culture and thought such as Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, and Nikki Giovanni. Anastacia-Reneé will be joined in conversation by Jamila Osman, Somali writer, educator, and community organizer.

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Christopher Miller in Conversation With Debra Gwartney

Thursday, August 17 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

When President Putin ordered Russian troops to invade Ukraine, he unleashed a terror which struck at the very heart of Europe and broke the world order that had been in place since the fall of the Soviet Union. Financial Times reporter Christopher Miller has been embedded in Ukraine for thirteen years and is one of the few journalists who knows Ukraine inside out, who was at the frontline in Crimea, and who reported from bombed out Mariupol. Miller’s The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine (Bloomsbury) takes the reader from the coal-dusted, sunflower-covered steppe of the Donbas to the heart of the Euromaidan revolution camp in Kyiv; from the Black Sea shores of Crimea where Russian troops stealthily annexed Ukraine's peninsula to the bloody battlefields where warlords ruled with iron fists; to the destruction and terror wrought by Russian bombs in Bucha, Kharkiv, Mariupol, and beyond. The War Came to Us is the story of modern Ukraine and its transformation, as told through the lives of Ukrainians, their fears and struggles. It is Ukraine in all its glory: vast, weird, exhilarating, defiant, resilient, trying to escape the long shadow of its former imperial ruler while fighting to build a new future. Miller will be joined in conversation by Debra Gwartney, author of I Am a Stranger Here Myself.

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Kids' Storytime With Deborah Hopkinson

Saturday, August 19 @ 10:30am (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Deborah Hopkinson’s Cinderella and a Mouse Called Fred (Anne Schwartz Books) is a fresh, hilarious retelling of Cinderella — told by the mouse who will become Cinderella's coach horse — with a girl-power ending, illustrations by Caldecott Medalist Paul O. Zelinsky, and even an explanation of how fairy tale pumpkins got their name! If you thought you knew the fairy tale Cinderella, think again! Did you know that the fairy godmother was actually grouchy? Or that the rodent she transformed into the coach's horse was named Fred? Or that Cinderella hid from the prince when he came looking for her with that uncomfortable glass slipper?! A best-loved fairytale is given the ending it deserves in Hopkinson’s clever picture book that shows a heroine shape her own destiny… and find her fairytale princess.

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Ruth Madievsky in Conversation With Lydia Kiesling

Monday, August 21 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Rachel Kushner meets David Lynch in a fever dream of an LA novel about a young woman who commits a drunken act of violence just before her sister vanishes without a trace. On the night of her high school graduation, a young woman follows her older sister Debbie to Salvation, a Los Angeles bar patronized by energy healers, aspiring actors, and all-around misfits. After the two share a bag of unidentified pills, the evening turns into a haze of sensual and risky interactions — nothing unusual for two sisters bound in an incredibly toxic relationship. Our unnamed narrator has always been under the spell of the alluring and rebellious Debbie and, despite her own hesitations, she has always said yes to nights like these. That is, until Debbie disappears. Falling deeper into the life she cultivated with her sister, our narrator gets a job as an emergency room secretary where she steals pills to sell on the side. Cue Sasha, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union who arrives at the hospital claiming to be a psychic tasked with acting as the narrator’s spiritual guide. The nature of this relationship evolves and blurs, a kaleidoscope of friendship, sex, mysticism, and ambiguous power dynamics. With prose pulsing like a neon sign, Ruth Madievsky’s All-Night Pharmacy (Catapult) is an intoxicating portrait of a young woman consumed with unease over how a person should be. As she attempts sobriety and sexual embodiment, she must decide whether to search for her estranged sister, or allow her to remain a relic of the past. Madievsky will be joined in conversation by Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility.

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