Powell’s is excited to resume limited in-person event programming beginning in September at our downtown City of Books location (Burnside).
We will continue to offer virtual events featuring authors from around the world. We’re using Zoom Webinar as our virtual event platform (as it comes with enhanced security features). Missed an event? Watch past virtual events on our
YouTube channel.
Questions about how to attend our virtual events? Click here for our FAQ.
Please note: The below lineup includes both in-person and virtual events, so please read carefully to see if an event you'd like to attend is being held at the store or online. Masks and/or social distancing requirements for in-store events are subject to change.
Wednesday, August 4 @ 4pm (PT)
Nearly a century after his wrenching death, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) remains one of our most enigmatic writers. Believing he could do “more in dreams than Napoleon,” yet haunted by the specter of hereditary madness, Pessoa invented dozens of alter egos, or “heteronyms,” under whose names he wrote in Portuguese, English, and French. Unsurprisingly, this “most multifarious of writers” (Guardian) has long eluded a definitive biographer — but in renowned translator and Pessoa scholar Richard Zenith, he has met his match. Relatively unknown in his lifetime, Pessoa was all but destined for literary oblivion when the arc of his afterlife bent, suddenly and improbably, toward greatness, with the discovery of some 25,000 unpublished papers left in a large, wooden trunk. Drawing on this vast archive of sources as well as on unpublished family letters, and skillfully setting the poet’s life against the nationalist currents of 20th century European history, Zenith at last reveals the true depths of Pessoa’s teeming imagination and literary genius. In stunning, magisterial prose, Zenith contextualizes Pessoa’s posthumous literary achievements — especially his most renowned work, The Book of Disquiet. A modern literary masterpiece, Pessoa: A Biography (Liveright) simultaneously immortalizes the life of a literary maestro and confirms the enduring power of Pessoa’s work to speak prophetically to the disconnectedness of our modern world. Zenith will be joined in conversation by poet, editor, and translator Patricio Ferrari.
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Thursday, August 5 @ 5pm (PT)
Some students enter their freshman year of college knowing exactly what they want to do with their lives. Elliot McHugh is not one of those people. But picking a major is the last thing on Elliot's mind when she's too busy experiencing all that college has to offer — from dancing all night at off-campus parties, to testing her RA Rose's patience, to making new friends, to having the best sex one can have on a twin-sized dorm room bed. But she may not be ready for the fallout when reality hits. When the sex she's having isn't that great. When finals creep up and smack her right in the face. Or when her roommate's boyfriend turns out to be the biggest a-hole. Elliot may make epic mistakes, but if she's honest with herself (and with you, dear reader), she may just find the person she wants to be. And maybe even fall in love in the process… Well, maybe. Margot Wood’s Fresh (Amulet Books) is a hilarious and vulnerable coming-of-age story about the thrilling new experience — and missteps — of a girl's freshman year of college. Wood will be joined in conversation by Gayle Forman, author of If I Stay and We Are Inevitable.
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Wednesday, August 11 @ 5pm (PT)
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh has been hailed by Philip Gourevitch as "a masterful storyteller working from deep in the American grain." His new collection of stories — some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories — is set in a contemporary America full of the kind of emotionally bruised characters familiar to readers of Denis Johnson and George Saunders. These are people contending with internal struggles — a son’s fractured relationship with his father, the death of a mother, the loss of a job, drug addiction — even as they are battered by larger, often invisible, economic, political, and racial forces of American society. Searing, intimate, often slyly funny, and always marked by a deep imaginative sympathy, American Estrangement (W. W. Norton) is a testament to our addled times. It will cement Sayrafiezadeh’s reputation as one of the essential 21st-century American writers. Sayrafiezadeh will be joined in conversation by playwright David Adjmi, author of Lot Six and Marie Antoinette.
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Thursday, August 12 @ 5pm (PT)
Environmental catastrophe has driven four people inside the dark throat of a cave: Sky, a child coming of age; Tie, pregnant and grieving; Mark, a young man poised to assume primacy; and Teller, an elder, holder of stories. As the devastating heat of summer grows, so does the poison in Teller’s injured leg and the danger of Tie’s imminent labor, food and water dwindling while the future becomes increasingly dependent on the words Sky gleans from the dead, stories pieced together from recycled knowledge, fragmented histories, and half-buried creation myths. Thea Prieto’s From the Caves (Red Hen) presents the past, present, and future in tandem, reshaping ancient and modern ideas of death and motherhood, grief and hope, endings and beginnings. Prieto will be joined in conversation by Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks.
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Tuesday, August 17 @ 5pm (PT)
Superdoom (Tin House) brings together the best of Melissa Broder’s three cult out-of-print poetry collections — When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother, Meat Heart, and Scarecrone — as well as the best of her fourth collection, Last Sext. Embracing the sacred and the profane, often simultaneously, Broder, author of Milk Fed and The Pisces, gazes into the abyss and at the human body, with humor and heartbreak, lust and terror. Broder’s language is entirely her own, marked both by brutal strangeness and raw intimacy. At turns essayistic and surreal, bouncing between the grotesque and the transcendent, Superdoom is a must-have for longtime fans and the perfect introduction to one of our most brilliant and original poets. Broder will be joined in conversation by Katherine Morgan, bookseller and author of the debut chapbook, No Self-Respecting Woman.
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Wednesday, August 18 @ 5pm (PT)
The American West in the early 1960s appears to be a pastoral paradise: golden wheat fields, mist-filled canyons, frolicking animals. Aspiring novelist Aaron Holland Broussard has observed it from the open door of a boxcar, riding the rails for both inspiration and odd jobs. Jumping off in Denver, he finds work on a farm and meets Joanne McDuffy, an articulate and fierce college student and gifted painter. Their soul connection is immediate, but their romance is complicated by Joanne’s involvement with a shady professor who is mixed up with a drug-addled cult. When a sinister businessman and his son who wield their influence through vicious cruelty set their sights on Aaron, drawing him into an investigation of grotesque murders, it is clear that this idyllic landscape harbors tremendous power — and evil. Followed by a mysterious shrouded figure who might not be human, Aaron will have to face down all these foes to save the life of the woman he loves and his own. The latest installment in James Lee Burke’s masterful Holland family saga, Another Kind of Eden (Simon & Schuster) is both riveting and one of Burke’s most ambitious works to date. It dismantles the myths of both the 20th-century American West and the peace-and-love decade, excavating the beauty and idealism of the era to show the menace and chaos that lay simmering just beneath the surface. Burke will be joined in conversation by Charlaine Harris, author of the Sookie Stackhouse and Midnight, Texas fantasy/mystery series.
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Thursday, August 19 @ 5pm (PT)
Rafia Zakaria’s Against White Feminism (W. W. Norton) is a radically inclusive, intersectional, and transnational approach to the fight for women’s rights. Elite white women have branded feminism, promising an apolitical individual empowerment along with sexual liberation and satisfaction, LGBTQ inclusion, and racial solidarity. As Zakaria expertly argues, those promises have been proven empty and white feminists have leant on their racial privilege and sense of cultural superiority. Drawing on her own experiences as an American Muslim woman, as well as an attorney working on behalf of immigrant women, Zakaria champions a reconstruction of feminism that forges true solidarity by bringing Black and brown voices and goals to the fore. Ranging from the savior complex of British feminist imperialists to the condescension of the white feminist–led “development industrial complex” and the conflation of sexual liberation as the “sum total of empowerment,” Zakaria presents an eye-opening indictment of how whiteness has contributed to a feminist movement that solely serves the interests of upper middle-class white women. Zakaria will be joined in conversation by Jean Guerrero, op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times and author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda and Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir.
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Tuesday, August 24 @ 5pm (PT)
When Nick Flynn was seven years old, his mother set fire to their house. The event loomed large in his imagination for years, but it’s only after having a child of his own that he understands why. He returns with his young daughter to the landscape of his youth, reflecting on how his feral childhood has him still in its reins, and forms his memories into lyrical bedtime stories populated by the both sinister and wounded Mister Mann. With the spare lyricism and dark irony of his classic, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Flynn excavates the terrain of his traumatic upbringing and his mother’s suicide. His searing new memoir, This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (W. W. Norton), unravels the story of the fire that Flynn had to escape, and the ways in which, as an adult, he has carried that fire with him until it threatens to burn down his own house. Here Flynn confronts his failings with fierce candor, even as they threaten to tear his family apart. His marriage in crisis, Flynn seeks answers from his therapist, who tells him he has “the ethics of a drowning man.” This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire takes us on the journey of a man struggling to hold himself together in prose that is raw and moving, sharp-edged, and wry. Alternating literary analysis and philosophy with intimate memoir, Flynn probes his deepest ethical dilemmas. Flynn will be joined in conversation by Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood and Whip Smart.
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Wednesday, August 25 @ 5pm (PT)
California’s fire season gets hotter, longer, and more extreme every year — fire season is now year-round. Of the thousands of firefighters who battle California’s blazes every year, roughly 30 percent of the on-the-ground wildland crews are inmates earning a dollar an hour. Approximately 200 of those firefighters are women serving on all-female crews. In Breathing Fire (MCD), Jaime Lowe expands on her revelatory work for The New York Times Magazine. She has spent years getting to know dozens of women who have participated in the fire camp program and spoken to captains, family and friends, correctional officers, and camp commanders. The result is a rare, illuminating look at how the fire camps actually operate — a story that encompasses California’s underlying catastrophes of climate change, economic disparity, and historical injustice, but also draws on deeply personal histories, relationships, desires, frustrations, and the emotional and physical intensity of firefighting. Lowe’s reporting is a groundbreaking investigation of the prison system, and an intimate portrayal of the women of California’s Correctional Camps who put their lives on the line, while imprisoned, to save a state in peril. Lowe will be joined in conversation by Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.
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Tuesday, September 7 @ 5pm (PT)
Classically trained pianist and singer Natalie Curtis isolated herself for five years after a breakdown just before she was to debut with the New York Philharmonic. Guilt-ridden and songless, Natalie can't seem to recapture the joy music once brought her. In 1902, her brother invites her to join him in the West to search for healing. What she finds are songs she'd never before encountered — the haunting melodies, rhythms, and stories of Native Americans. But their music is under attack. The US government's Code of Offenses prohibits America's Indigenous people from singing, dancing, or speaking their own languages as the powers that be insist on assimilation. Natalie makes it her mission not only to document these songs before they disappear but to appeal to President Teddy Roosevelt himself, who is the only man with the power to repeal the unjust law. Will she succeed and step into a new song… and a new future? In her new novel, The Healing of Natalie Curtis (Fleming H. Revell), award-winning author Jane Kirkpatrick weaves yet another lyrical tale based on a true story that will keep readers captivated to the very end. Kirkpatrick will be joined in conversation by Craig Johnson, author of the Longmire mysteries, the basis for the hit Netflix original series, Longmire.
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Thursday, September 9 @ 5pm (PT)
In his new book, The Hidden History of American Healthcare (Berrett-Koehler), popular progressive radio host Thom Hartmann reveals how and why attempts to implement affordable universal healthcare in the United States have been thwarted and what we can do to finally make it a reality. For-profit health insurance is the largest con job ever perpetrated on the American people — one that has cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives since the 1940s. Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan's single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just 10 deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States. Hartmann offers a deep dive into the shameful history of American healthcare, showing how greed, racism, and oligarchic corruption led to the current "sickness for profit" system. Modern attempts to create versions of government healthcare have been hobbled at every turn, including Obamacare. There is a simple solution: Medicare for all. Hartmann outlines the extraordinary benefits this system would provide the American people and economy and the steps we need to take to make it a reality. It's time for America to join every industrialized country in the world and make health a right, not a privilege.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How do I attend a Powell’s virtual event?
You’ll be able to access our virtual event programming via your home computer, laptop, tablet, mobile phone, or other Internet-ready device. If you’re new to Zoom, please visit their Getting Started guide.
Are Powell’s virtual events free to attend?
As with our prior in-store programming, nearly all of our events are free to attend. On occasion, we will host a special event for which tickets or a book purchase are required for virtual admission — but details will be shared for those specific events separately.
How do I buy an event author’s new book?
Each event listing will include a link to purchase a copy of an author’s new book. A purchase link will be shared by us during the event itself, as well. Purchasing a copy of an author’s new book helps support both the author and Powell’s event programming.
Will I be able to get my book signed?
Unfortunately, we’re not able to offer signed editions or personalizations at this time. In some cases, signed bookplates will be available on a limited first come, first served basis.
How can I keep up with all of Powell’s upcoming virtual events?
Please sign up for our marketing emails using the field at the bottom of this page. All of our upcoming events will be listed above on our online calendar. Please also consider following us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
I’m having my problems with my Zoom account. Can you help me?
Zoom offers a troubleshooting guide which is helpful in solving whatever problems you may be experiencing with the platform. Zoom FAQs are available here.